I just spent four days at two of the most important conferences in the emerging blockchain/crypto-currency space.
One was Consensus. The other Token Summit.
I had about 100 conversations with people who are at the epicenter of the blockchain wave, including one of the approximately 35 people in the world who make up the Bitcoin Core team that’s responsible for the protocol’s upkeep.
It’s going to take a few weeks or months to totally get my head around all this, but here are a few important themes I observed:
Bitcoin hits escape velocity
There was a unspoken sense that this thing we call Bitcoin or “Decentralization” is pretty much going to happen in a big way.
While the events were going on, Bitcoin itself was having a remarkable run-up. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if part of the reason for the surge was that people on the fringe of the Bitcoin world before these events drank a ton of “Koolaid’ (either by being at the events or following them online) and decided they were feeling more confident about it.
Whatever the reason, there was a sense at the events that the scaling debate had pretty much resolved itself, and people were feeling like, “Okay, if Bitcoin is going to go to $1,000,000 as Wences Casares suggests, then I should get in there.”
As my friend Brandon Thomas said, we’ve hit “escape velocity.”
Ethereum still has questions to answer
Ethereum was also having a run-up during the events, and people are still bullish on it. I get the sense, though, that much of the enthusiasm around Ethereum is the fact that so many people are launching ICOs (initial coin offerings) on the platform in the hopes of making a ton of money quickly, and many of the projects they’re launching may not have a lot of potential.
So Ethereum gets props for the way it has such a bold vision, but at the same time, there are legitimate concerns about whether it can function securely and at scale. I had a long talk with Dr. Muneeb Ali from Blockstack about this. It made me wonder if Ethereum will ultimately be the dominant app platform or not.
Guess who’s investing
In this market of people putting their Ethereum tokens into ICOs for decentralized startups, the funding sources are not your typical suited-up investors. Sure, some VCs are in there now, but this is truly crowdsourced (except that, by owning a token, you are member of the network versus just entitled to a product or whatever as on Kickstarter).
Here’s what surprised me about that: Based on some rough, back-of-the-envelope calculations, there are nearly 1,500 computer science…