Fresh Dutch Blockchain Conference
Gavin Wood edgy, e-ID expert Dave Birch humorous, Conny Dorrestijn realistic and McConaghy’s? Together, they are the blockchain team of the year! The conference itself, last Monday Jun 20 2106: alternately general techniques and specific applications of blockchain. A bit of code, lots of plans. The Dutch Blockchain Conference is getting more focused on private blockchains.
Gavin Wood flew into Amsterdam, The Netherlands on Monday morning June 20, 2016. He did not have the best weekend of his life: The DAO had been drained of US$ 60 million in Ether on Friday June 19th 2016. Wood is the second man of Ethereum, the crypto currency and distributed app platform on which the hailed DAO resides. The DAO was launched as a “smart contract” in May and collected US$ 150-200 million in crowd funding, 14% of the total amount of Ether. Gone in a blink of a recursive calling attack.
DAO dead
“The DAO is dead”, and Ethereum takes loss after loss compared to the US$ dollar as Gavin approaches Amsterdam on June 20. He makes changes (crosses t’s and dots his i’s) to his most important slides in the air: ‘What can we do, what should we do, what could we have done if we knew upfront?’ All titles of slides that have several to-the-point bullets. Wood goes over them again. He embodies Ethereum’s struggle to control the situation without controlling the situation. The DAO drain put a lot more at stake than just the money of ‘stupid investors’. The whole ideology of public blockchain is under siege: a permissionless, open, transparent, worldwide ledger that does not need a centralised middle man to validate transactions.
A few weeks ago, Gavin had deliberately signed up to challenge the lion’s den with a talk the Dutch Blockchain Conference, where a vast majority works for permissioned ledgers… How different life can be over a weekend.
What is Gavin’s role in the drama? “None” he stressed edgily. “No, I am NOT from the DAO, no I did not have DAO tokens, no I am not involved in the Ethereum Foundation nor Slock.it,… “
Totally aware of the backlash that the DAO drain can have on Ethereum now and in the future, Gavin Wood presents possible solutions cautiously but determined with their pros and cons, the precedents they might invoke and the effects they might have in the long run (full speech here).
During the round of questions, I felt sorry for Wood. He starts to look tired. Might not have slept on the flight. To his astonishment he has to endure the same type of questions as before his presentation! As if the visitors did not listen to his plea. Obviously he hangs his head low, his voice lowers in volume, and after the applaus he heads off for the interview (here).Dave Birch’s scrotum involved
Dave Birch is above all an expert in Digital Identity. He wrote the book ‘Identity is the New Money’ in 2014. After I read his book, I heard Birch speak at Consensus2016, a blockchain conference like #dbc16. He referred to a New York meeting (which took place at the beginning of May 2016) of blockchain experts because ‘within 10 minutes, every blockchain discussion boils down to e-Identity issues’. But I remember him involving his scrotum too:-). More about that in a minute.
Birch is an old school engineer and explains Digital Identity as an intermediate entity between many virtual identities and many real people we have today. He explains with some sarcasm towards Agile project management that is popular nowadays: “Well, I know you don’t do these things anymore, but when we had many-t0-many relationships in our system design back in those days, we would say to each other “This is not good, there is something in the middle that we haven’t thought of properly”. That thing in the middle, we call it Digital Identity. Think of it as a key-pair: public — private.”
In particular, he has a witty point of view on the use of blockchain for Identity management purposes. But he cunningly covers it up in questions. “We could put our passport on the blockchain, but why would we do that? It is much easier the take it out of your pocket, no?!” and “My digital identity consists of a public private key-pair. So when blockchain is involved, I still have to take care of the private key. Now I could have my private key tattooed as a QR code on my scrotum, largely private isn’t it, that would make the key not easily accessible and pretty private too, and no one will argue that it’s not mine.” But what is the pragmatic value?
“The only relevant application of blockchain for identity is virtual identities in combination with some sort of distributed application; do not use the word ‘smart contract’, because in fact they are not smart at all. ‘Contract’ is a stupid word for a distributed application,” Birch stresses.
Conny Dorrestijn, what a realistic woman
We heard quite a lot of investors talking on bitcoin & blockchain meetups lately. As a result of or otherwise because of the fact that heaps of Venture Capital are being spent on (sometimes vague) startups; 1 billion in total now.
Dorrestijn has her say in a forum discussion and hails the Dutch mentality under Venture Capitalists: “In startups, they want to see an experienced woman, age 18 years”. She thinks far ahead of most of her colleagues: “The first round of investment is no problem. The startups will get through this phase. But in the end the product is mature, the venture capital money burnt. In the meanwhile, the costs of a company have significantly grown (personnel, office, etc), and they do not know how to scale at that point in time.”
Conny’s recipe is “Analyse how to scale upfront, even though it is not relevant at that stage, but you will come out better prepared.”
The McConaghy’s
Masha McConaghy and Trent McConaghy (married couple) both took a turn to shine a light on their own spot in the blockchain landscape. For Masha, that is Ascribe and Trent is the friendly, fast, knowledgable, to-the-point expert behind BigchainDB.
BigchainDB is a scalable blockchain database. It uses its own consensus mechanism for validating records in the distributed database. Read the full whitepaper or watch the presentation of Trent during the conference.
Masha told me she is always a bit nervous for presentations. But she did so well. Have a look here. Ascribe is a way to the store proof of ownership (digital) artwork on a blockchain as a means to keep the market free from illegal copies.
Both presentations where a good reflection of the content of the Dutch Blockchain Conference: alternately general technique and specific application.
The Others
For the sake of brevity, I won’t mention more relevant and good speakers. See the list of speakers. We enjoyed it. The organisers could have allowed more time for some speakers with great real blockchain entrepreneurial stories to tell in comparison to the big or strategical ‘names’ that were granted air time. Most of the latter got stuck in general philosophies.
But it can’t be all ‘Hallelujah’, can it? I got confused by Neelie Kroes’ opening speech (good humour she has too!): she kept mentioning that this would be ‘the last Dutch Blockchain Conference ever’, most probably to build up some positive tension in her speech, but I missed her point completely why it would be the last conference. Overall her speech did not touch the subject Blockchain innovation enough. Maybe it was just me, but I didn’t get it.
It was certainly not me alone that was surprised to see Bas Eenhoorn, the National Commissioner for Digital Government, reading his speech aloud from a paper. Although this may be common practise in his circles, it would by far be better to connect with the audience. If you need to be careful with words, that’s OK, but maybe not read it aloud as if you see the full text for the first time? Could he better have saved the valuable time of hundreds of visitor by just mentioning the URL where we could have read what he had to say? I think so, and he could have taken it from there.
What I learned later is that Bas works hard for the sake of Blockchain. Keep up the good work and get the interaction going at presentations.
Take away
It was obvious this year already that you can not expect in-depth technical knowledge sharing at a conference like the Dutch Blockchain Conference; at least not plenary with at least half the room filled with “suits”. Another striking difference with other bitcoin / ethereum meetups is that this conference will move towards a focus on private blockchains (instead of public blockchains), maybe more like A Dutch variant of the annual Consensus-conference in the US.
One should not be surprised that the current concept of the Dutch Blockchain Conference will change too. It might be split up next year in market sections: fintech, notary, healthcare, charity, and so on. It would not be strange to have paralell sessions, etc. The emerging market of blockchain applications is ready for a conference like that. Maybe that is what Neelie meant when she repeated ‘this will be the last blockchain conference’.
Colophon:
‘Splashing lemon’ image thanks to: http://www.blirk.net/
