I’m back from two days at Consensus 2016 in NYC, and reporting as promised into my investigation of the Five Big Questions.
1. Bitcoin technology: will the problems (versions, processing time, scalability) be resolved?
Yes. My belief that we are all writing this off too soon in favor of “all things blockchain” was reinforced. Glenn Hutchins of Silver Lake Partners drew a parallel between private blockchains and intranets in the early internet days: important for enterprises but not radical or transformative in and of itself. He headlined his talk “Blockchain good, Bitcoin better”. Balaji Srinivasan of 21 spoke persuasively about how Bitcoin is the mechanism which will “free API’s to be API’s” and interact with other machines (my paraphrasing…)
2. Big banks: will they join hands in a single (or several) new blockchain-based networks? Will there be a new SWIFT? Will it be SWIFT? One of the currently formed consortia? Someone new?
Hard to tell. David Rutter of R3 bragged about 46 large financial institutions, and Chris Larsen of Ripple talked about the opportunity, but I didn’t hear from SWIFT, and there are other players out there…
3. Central banks: will they issue digital versions of fiat? Other digital currency? Support Bitcoin?
Yes. Fabulous panel with David Andolfatto of the St. Louis Fed (I’ve been reading his blogs on “Fedcoin”, MIT Media Lab, others – the energy on the topic is strong and clearly central banks of all kinds and stripes are thinking about it… but perhaps the most fascinating thought is that we could go back 100 years to a pre-central bank world, with central banks, commercial banks and other players issuing their own currencies…
4. Private blockchains: how many are there going to be? Thousands? Millions? Just how different is a private blockchain from a plain old secure database?
Millions. See above re: intranet. Not that different…
5. Interledger – incredibly cool, but how will it play out?
Not clear at all, but multiple private blockchains (or non blockchain ledgers) may need to interconnect. Interledger was referred to but not in detail; other options (Chain, Hyperledger) were more visible but we’re still in theory-land here. I wish there had been more on this.
