Is Bitcoin in fact the biggest disruptive technology since the Internet itself?
Is Bitcoin's real innovation its ‘Blockchain' technology which is being used to build a completely new way of interacting online?
Will Bitcoin provide the basis for the next generation of apps?
Speakers:
Jon Matonis- Executive Director, The Bitcoin Foundation
Stephan Tual- Chief Communications Officer, Ethereum
Niki Wiles- Community Relations, Counterparty
Preston Byrne- Adam Smith Institute (ASI) fellow and associate at Norton Rose Fulbright
Chair: Richard Boase- Cybersalon/UK Digital Currency Association
Advocates argue that Bitcoin has the capacity to address not simply money issuance but other crucial questions of trust, financial privacy, transparency and freedom of expression.
Critics claim that Bitcoin's inherent anonymity encourages money laundering, gambling and drug dealing. They also point to its wild volatility as evidence that it functions as a poor store of value that will make economic activity ultimately less productive.
At this Cybersalon we will be asking what have we learnt from Bitcoin and where is it heading:
1. What is 'Blockchain' technology and what are new applications are using it?
2. Is Bitcoin likely to form the basis of the new Internet of Money and Trust?
3. What is Bitcoin teaching us about global consensus, decentralisation and open source technologies?
So if currency is simply the first application for this Blockchain technology, what else is in the pipeline? Initiatives such as Ethereum, Coloured Coins, Mastercoin, Counterparty and Namecoin suggest decentralised stock, bond and equities markets, asset and property registration, notary services, DNS lookup system and more.
IF YOU'D LIKE TO PAY WITH BITCOIN, PLEASE VISIT cybersalon.org/bitcoinheading/
Bitcoin Background
Bitcoin (which is now known as a “Crypto currency” or Hidden Currency) has fluctuated from $0.0001 to US $1,200 in the span of 5 years. Advocates cite its capacity to be a truly global, digital currency- to lower remittance and cross border transfer costs particularly with regards to developing economies and its power to remove politics from the money supply. Its main attraction, they claim, is that all other banking and monetary systems are ‘pre-internet’ technologies but Bitcoin offers us the potential to build an entirely new system of global financial consensus, even acting as a global reserve currency.
Bitcoin 2.0
The value of the Bitcoin platform is that it can be used for other means than as a currency: for instance to transfer goods directly from person to person around the planet securely without third party verification. The way Bitcoin does this is through what is known as a peer to peer network, with these transactions being verified automatically by thousands of so called ‘Miners'. Bitcoin is not a company, and whilst Miners might act like employees, it was designed as an open standard protocol similar to http (web pages) or smtp (email), allowing anyone who wishes to to build companies, services and software to interact with it, and because Bitcoin functions a little bit like TCP/IP, owning a Bitcoin is akin to owning real-estate on the new internet, similar in some ways to owning name brand dot coms in the ‘90s.
what do you think this??
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