Crypto AM shines its Spotlight on CoinGeek Live
The Bitcoin network and blockchain which underpin it represent a transformative technological leap. However, beyond its best-known use case as a peer-to-peer system of electronic cash, Bitcoin and the full power of its data protocol remain a mystery to most.
Bitcoin introduced blockchain technology into the public consciousness. But the world’s vision of Bitcoin has been limited due to a lack of understanding about the Bitcoin network’s vast range of potential use cases beyond just payments. Instead of people looking forward to the next wave of Bitcoin blockchain innovation powered by data on-chain – like smart contracts, tokenizing real world assets, identity management services, and a universal transaction ledger – the conversation about Bitcoin often starts and ends with its trading price.
The much bigger vision for Bitcoin has failed to come to fruition mostly because the Bitcoin network (under the BTC ticker symbol) has not scaled to handle the data and transaction capacity needed for more advanced applications. With Bitcoin’s capabilities restricted, blockchain believers built more than a hundred alternative platforms, while speculators launched thousands of digital currencies, most of which lack any raison d’être. The price we pay for this is opportunity cost: instead of coalescing around the genius of the original blockchain’s design, development has splintered into too many ledger platforms and competing coins to yield focused growth.
Time and resource that could have been dedicated to innovating have been wasted on flawed attempts at replicating.
Today in 2020, we should all be operating on a single blockchain which scales to support large amounts of diverse payment and data transactions, powering an array of interoperable applications across the Bitcoin network. But instead, we have countless competing blockchains causing confusion for businesses looking to build applications, while impeding interoperability.
We have allowed the great benefits of having one immutable ledger, one universal source of truth, to be chipped away by a litany of competing ledgers, each bringing with them their own distinct (and often irreconcilable) rules, protocols and ecosystems, which would-be business users and developers are forced to choose between. This has delayed the wider adoption of blockchain technology and digital currency.
Remember that at its core, a blockchain is simply a distributed data ledger – a chronological record of transactions stored with timestamps, permanently and transparently. Those transactions can be financial payments, which is what people associate with Bitcoin.
But the blockchain can record any type of data transaction. An agreement between two people is a transaction. A social media post is a transaction. Each step in your Internet browsing history is a transaction. Virtually every interaction in modern digital life can be distilled down to transactions that can be recorded, and monetized, on the Bitcoin blockchain.
And when all those events are tracked on a single ledger, the blockchain enables many advantages:
• It can power a single digital currency for the world, rather than over 5,000 cryptocurrencies, while still providing the base ledger for tokenizing all forms of real-world assets.
• It can serve as a universal source of truth, which breaks down data silos within industries and enables real-time access to more accurate information about products, assets or transactions moving across commerce and geographies.
• It allows consumers and businesses to store, access and monetise their data from a single commonly accessible ledger.
• It enhances verifiability and honesty of transactions, with companies, consumers, auditors, and even government regulators all able to view commercial activity from the same public ledger.
But in a world of too many competing chains, too many sources of transaction history, we move further and further away from leveraging these advantages of a unified blockchain.
Imagine if the Internet had broken into many competing “nets,” rather than one global network. What if instead of a common foundational Internet protocol suite used to power the World Wide Web, we had hundreds of competing protocols from different companies, dividing data communications into silos before the world-connecting potential of the Internet was truly realised? The information awakening and economic value unlocked by the Internet likely would have been hindered, leaving the world a very different place today.
Luckily, a single global Internet did emerge to unify businesses and consumers across the world. The same should happen for blockchain; we should consolidate our collective efforts around a single protocol and blockchain for the world.
CoinGeek Live (30th Sept – 2nd Oct 2020)
Over three days, thought leaders and visionaries, innovators and influencers, academics and politicians, will all give their take on how we build a brighter future with the blockchain.
Through a series of keynote addresses, panel discussions and fireside chats, the three-day event will evaluate the advantages of a single massively scalable blockchain, and explore steps needed to better realise blockchain’s true potential. Speakers for CoinGeek Live include leaders from diverse sectors, each with a unique perspective on blockchain and digital currency:
George Gilder – Economist and Best-Selling Author (Life After Google; The Scandal of Money)
Thomas Lee – Managing Partner & Head of Research, Fundstrat Global Advisors and one of Wall Street’s leading strategists
Pēteris Zilgalvis – Head of Unit, Digital Innovation and Blockchain, European Commission
Thomas Moser – Alternate Member of the Governing Board, Swiss National Bank
Bradley Rotter – Co-founder, Entanglement Research Institute and prominent investor
CoinGeek Live will also turn the spotlight on the businesses and developers bringing the One World, One Chain vision to life in the Bitcoin SV ecosystem. Bitcoin SV is the only blockchain massively scaling to provide the data and transaction capacity that can fulfil the vision of one chain for the world. That’s why real world businesses across many industries – whether in healthcare with EHR Data, gaming technology with BitBoss, supply chain management with UNISOT or regtech with a company actually named “company” – are pioneering vanguard applications leveraging the Bitcoin SV blockchain, and they’ll be discussing just how they do it at the conference.
The next wave of innovation will also be on full display, with the winner of the 3rd Bitcoin SV Hackathon to be determined at the conference. Three finalists – Kyrt, RepZip, and STOTASK – will each present their project on the first day of the conference, with blockchain-based voting in effect for attendees to cast an “audience vote” that helps determine winners for the USD$100,000 prize pool.
For those of you who have attended a CoinGeek Conference in the past, while many of the trademark features you’ll be accustomed to will remain, this edition of the conference is set to look a little different. With the global COVID-19 pandemic prohibiting in-person events, the conference will take place entirely online, broadcast live from a pair of Transatlantic broadcast-calibre studios: The Manhattan Center in New York City and Kennington Studios in London.
We invite you to join us for CoinGeek Live, September 30 – October 2. Register for free coingeekconference.com.
Jimmy Nguyen is Founding President of Bitcoin Association, the global industry organisation that works to advance business with the Bitcoin SV blockchain. A well-known advocate for Bitcoin, Jimmy was previously the CEO of nChain – the global leader in research and development of enterprise-grade blockchain solutions. Jimmy also had a 21-year career as an intellectual property and digital technology lawyer, and was a partner at three major U.S. law firms.