Token Fest 2018 — a personal gist

I knew about Bitcoin quite a while ago but got really interested in the Blockchain technology when the 2013/14 peak was there. I learned a lot about the theory behind it and got some hands-on experience via GPU-mining of altcoins. Around March 2014 I lost interest, mainly because I saw all the drawbacks and limitations of the technology as well as a giant mismatch between the nice democratic and decentralized theory and the actual ecosystem. I was only following little news. In September 2018 I got a free ticket for the Token Fest in Boston and thought this would be a nice opportunity to get an update of the current ecosystem and innovations in the community.

I could only attend the Friday morning sessions but still got a very nice impression about the development. So this post is mainly a personal view than a broad survey.

My first encounter at the Token Fest was a politician — he wants to make his party the biggest one in his state and wants to use Bitcoin as marketing. First I really thought he wants to change something and he has a deeper motivation behind but with every question I asked I got more the impression that he is not interested in the blockchain technology or Bitcoin but only in his political party and a possible positive effect by jumping on this hype. He was not motivated changing the financial system or anything in that direction — that was from all the ideas I remember from the earlier years extremely confusing for me.

The first session was a discussion between Alex Mashinsky and Travis Kling. They made some strong statements with a quite realistic perspective on the current state. They mentioned that there is a lot of noise in the ecosystem and it is hard to estimate what are the really big things out there. Alex Mashinsky said something like “from the Internet we got 5 big companies — so how much big companies should we expect from Bitcoin?”. Parts of the discussion also went in a more philosophical direction on democratizing money. Some of the companies want to make money, a lot of companies actually make money by adding taxes or fees to parts of the system. Few companies are really interested in contributing something to society — so a lot of the “killing fiat”-thoughts I really liked back in 2014 somehow disappeared in the noise and a lot of companies focus on profits. One statement about CEOs like “does the guy drive a Lamborghini or does he ride the T in the morning” of Alex Mashinsky was very discriminative for my perception of the current community.

The second panel discussion was between some big players like Hyperledger, IBM Blockchain, Accenture, BREAKER, Kaiser Permanente, Soluna, and GoChain. Somehow the strengthened the previous statements of a lot of noise in the system. My favorite direction to think on was a combination of blockchain and artificial intelligence — basically a public marketplace to provide both and build products on it. I really liked that Hyperledger which is part of the Linux Foundation seems to be quite a strong player in the field. It was not existing in 2014 and I got the impressions that this is one of the biggest changes since then. A lot of start-ups are just built on Hyperledger Fabric which seems to allow fast prototyping. The other big change is, that now there are big companies, including consulting companies involved — for me this was one main reason to sell in December 2017. Most of the panelists and also speakers where quite good speakers and sellers — sometimes I felt like in an Apple keynote (e.g. the Bitsy presentation of Jonathan Johnson). One thing I really did not like was that a lot of promoted projects where performed in developing countries. From the previous discussion, I’m not sure if the primary interest is really the wealth of the people living there or it is much more misused as a playground for blockchain technology or even worse making money out of those countries being poor.

I started to ask myself where we are in the hype cycle. Are we still going down from the peak of inflated expectations? Some of the speakers somehow gave me the feeling that the community already realized a lot of the issues and we might already be on the slope of enlightenment. From a speculation perspective, I would still say we are in the technology trigger phase — in December last year everybody heard about Bitcoin. I was convinced it was very much like the tulip mania — but the bubble did not really burst. One of the main reasons might have been how hard it is to actually sell Bitcoin. So everybody know heard about Bitcoin, but the Blockchain, Ethereum or Hyperledger are terms very few people had heard of — I would not be surprised if another even bigger bubble is out there

One of the products which made me think in that direction is Everipedia. It really felt like one of the first applications besides currency that can really profit from the blockchain. Combining knowledge as an asset with the blockchain technology is a nice idea. It was presented by Larry Sanger which was a co-founder of Wikipedia and sees Everipedia as his chance to finally make greaterwiki happen. This talk was actually the main reason I attended the Token Fest and I was not disappointed. One of the major issues with Wikipedia is, that it actually has very few contributors. He would like that everybody can contribute. Another issue is that there are not articles about everything — he wishes that everybody can have an article on his own person or whatever topic you are interested in. Everipedia basically means that knowledge is money. It comes with the IQ token — so by putting your knowledge on the platform, you earn IQ. Larry Sanger also would which that we put our Everipedia contributions into our job applications. Authors can add a profile, this meta-data can be used to see different views on a similar topic. It would, for example, be interesting to have multiple articles on “god” and select them by this metadata. An obvious benefit of Everipedia is that we cannot censor it — so here is a thought of democratization again — a thought I missed in a lot of other products. So how could I miss the opportunity to contribute to this idea by adding this article exclusively on Everipedia? It is not that straight forward yet — its far from beeing accessible to the broad audience! Besides this flaw and the bigger ideas, Everipedia also comes with WYSIWYG — Wikipedia is still missing it.

There were plenty of small companies showing their product. Some of them where coins — everyone had its small contribution added and sounded convincing. Knowing how much coins are out there makes them not so convincing anymore. Besides coins and trading companies there where a lot of hardware wallets. Those ideas spread in 2014 and finally the products are here — nicely fabricated and even classical token manufacturers jump into the game. Some of the products don’t really aim for people that want to have full control of their private key. I really liked that most both had a selling and a tech person — so most of them could answer all my questions.

One idea I really liked is the Celsius Network — it provides Banking on the Blockchain. It is a simple app to lend (up to 7% yearly interest rate, weekly paid out), borrow or short cryptos and fiat. I know there are plenty of them out there. But they promote it in a very nice way and state that their motivation is to bring 100M new people to the crypto world. Let’s see what the future will bring.