How Blockchains Work and Why the Internet will Never be the Same (Panel)

When a market grows several thousand percent in a single year, it’s bound to attract a bit of attention. When this type of growth happens off of an already multi-billion dollar base, an absolute frenzy might be a better description. So it’s no surprise that the investing world lost its collective shit over Bitcoin and other crypto-assets in 2017.

This growth notwithstanding, it’s easy to get caught up in the speculative trading mania and assume it’s the only thing that matters when it comes to crypto. In doing so, however, one would be overlooking the generationally important innovation that blockchains represent and the disruptive implications they pose to the way the modern Internet and software are architected.

We gathered a panel of the smartest builders and investors we know on the subject to dig into the key issues at this year’s Upfront Summit. We covered:

• How do blockchains enable decentralization, and why should we care?
• Is governance possible in a blockchain environment and what are the implications?
• Are decentralized apps ready for prime time and what critical building blocks do we still need?
• Can blockchains really scale to global adoption and what tradeoffs will be required to do so?

This topic can be dense and esoteric, no doubt. But if you care at all about where technology is headed or you want to make more informed speculative investments in this area, a deeper understanding of how blockchains work is really essential.

You’d be hard pressed to find a better group than Nick Tomaino (1Confirmation), Garry Tan (Initialized Capital), and Preethi Kasireddy (Schelling) to tackle this topic. In fact, I was honored to share the stage with them as moderator. But rather than tell you, I urge you to watch the conversation below yourself.