Ethereal Summit — a day under the banner of decentralization
It was an amazing day for me yesterday at ethereal summit in New York. This was the first event organized by Consensys and, in my opinion, it was a great success. The team around Joseph Lubin set themselves a high goal. To organize a conference that brings decentralization, blockchain and ethereum in particular to a broad audience.
The attention was great, the event sold out and the house was really full. As well as the agenda. 33 tracks, presentations and panel discussions in just one day at two stages. The agenda covered a wide range of applications. From business models in a decentralizing world to healthcare, sports, music, art and government to news about ethereum tools and developments. There was less technical but more cultural focus in most sessions - How could our world, how could the future of the internet looks like.
All the panelists and speakers were convinced that blockchain and decentralization is the future. Very inspiring was the talk of Luke Robert Mason who tried to help the audience to explain blockchain at a dinner party. A very cool British guy with a very cool slogan
“Ethereum allows us to build the web we wanted. Ethereum is the web we should want.”
He stated also that we should not use terms of web 2.0 to explain the future because this always links us to the old world. And web 2.0 is broken because it is the winning of convinience over privacy. He asks the audience to
“embrace, encourage and engineer different. embrace, encourage and engineer ethereum”
Lukes talk was a great opening for the following panels.
But there were also some controversial discussion. Especially for the enterprises — will ethereum be a gamechanger and will it have the ability to change the way traditional enterprises work or will it be used to improve traditional processes? This was a question in the following business model talk. Enterprises have to transform their processes for decentralization, not only transform their technology.
Also interesting was the discussion with Jeremy Millar and Rahilla Zafar about Dubai, City of the future. Dubai hast the goal to secure all of it’s documents on a blockchain by 2020. This goal is part of a general Smart Dubai strategy. Jeremy stated in his talk “transglobal services need transglobal protocols” and the ethereum worldcomputer is the best solution to reach the set targets.
And last but not least Joseph Lubin, founder of Consensys and co-founder of ethereum give us a brief history of decentralization and an look at an exciting future.
Many thanks again to the consensys team for organizing such and great event. All the work in less then 5 months. The chosen location was outstanding. Hopefully it was just the beginning of a series of events in this way.
So now I use the next two days to let the impressions work and looking forward to Consensus 2017 next week.
