Day Two of Token Fest 3/16/18
As of day 2 at Token Fest in San Francisco, I think the organizers of the event have to feel pretty good about how it’s all gone. They’ve logged over 2,000 visitors on the first day, the speaking gigs have been great, people are networking up a storm and in general there’s been a good vibe around the Palace of Fine Arts, located just next to the Golden Gate bridge.
I ended up getting into a handful of conversations yesterday after tweeting about Brad Sherman being in the pocket of a mobile payments company. Go figure, you wouldn’t expect anyone at a blockchain conference to feel differently that I did, and maybe you would be hard pressed to find among a group of thousands of crypto-enthusiasts a good faith conversation about crypto being a “crock” and solely a tool for money laundering and funding of terrorism. That said, it’s an even less good faith argument against crypto coming from someone who is being paid to do so. However, we were all pretty pleasantly surprised when the actual report from the Congressional Joint Economic Committee started going around. There’s actually some pretty positive language about how legislation must be crafted to create a safe environment for cryptocurrency to exist and play a role in the economy. Go figure Brad, it’s not just for drug dealers anymore apparently. Glad your colleagues find your opinions as paper thin as the rest of us here do.
In other Government news, the high cost of mining cryptocurrency has caused a New York neighborhood to ban the practice entirely. I’m interested to learn how they plan on enforcing that. If I’m running several servers in my home or office in Plattsburgh, but it isn’t for mining crypto, is that ok? How do they check? Are there going to be small town New York Sheriffs coming into homes to look at the server racks and make sure these aren’t them troublesome Bitcoin miners? Hmmm…
I guess we’re developing a theme here, focusing on Government themed crypto links. Here’s one that’s actually good news: Bitfury and their parternships with Exonum and Emercoin are partnering with Coca Cola and the U.S. State Departmetn to combat forced labor. I don’t have any summarizing or snark to add here. This is great. One of the largest companies in the world at large, let alone the blockchain world (Bitfury, two other high level and high end projects (Exonum and Emercoin), a Fortune 500 company and the U.S. Government are collaborating on a project for social good. This is great, great news and I encourage everyone to bang it here to read about this initiative yourselves.
