This material was prepared in partnership with Status.im.

Some of the minds within the Ethereum community have surmised that people would be captured by the disruptive potential of the Vitalik Buterin-led network without knowing it.

These are based on the presumption that several new projects are being developed on the Ethereum platform and they have the potential to make it reach the mass market sooner than most users could ever imagine.

In the series of interviews, shot entirely at Devcon 2, Ethereum’s annual developer conference in China last September which attracted 700 attendees from all over the world, had several speakers including the founder of ConsenSys, Joseph Lubin and Aron Fischer of Swarm and Colony.

Payment channels

Dr. Aron Fischer talks about the ease of use. He says the concept will help get people to switch from a particular platform such as Facebook or Google easily rather than some political reasons. He explains Swarm and Colony and gives examples of how each project can and will be used.

On the implications of Ethereum on society, he says:

"You are not going to get people to leave Facebook by explaining to them that they should not use it. It is so convenient and they will stick with what is convenient. It has to be about ease of use. I think there will be services that are just better. Things we can not do right now. People will end up using Ethereum without knowing it.”

“Like right now, you can video chat anyone all over the world. But trying to send that person 25 cents becomes very difficult, expensive and slow. Not only can you do this thing with Ethereum, when you have Ethereum and Swarm, you can use the exact same communication link to send the payment and the video. Imagine what you could do when you have the possibility where you can send video one way and payment the other and it is on the exact same payment channel.”

Here’s Aron Fischer’s presentation:

A world computer

For Lubin, one of the founders of the Ethereum project, it is the core value proposition of Ethereum that strikes him as the factor that captivates the world about the project.

As a representation of a non-reputable something you can’t say ‘I didn’t say that’ - and it is being uncensorable as a shared source of truth. He believes that the Ethereum project will represent the first general-purpose world computer. It will capture minds by offering trustful computing and transparency that enable users to access data gaining access to business logic that affects the data ensuring trust that no minority actor can improperly affect the data or the system.

Lubin says:

“Shared sources of truth and transparency...these are infrastructures that we can all interoperate on whether we are software developers building stuff to be easily interoperable with other things or people who are establishing their own sub-sovereign identity using that as an access point to lots of different tones of applications perhaps like a decentralized Facebook, that’s going to put all the power into the periphery in the hands of the people. It’s going to decentralize a lot of our systems. Yes, I think that’s good for our society.”

Though he does not believe that it is clear that the philosophical benefits of Ethereum have to be communicated to the end users according to questions he has received in the past, it is essential for developers who will use it to develop several life-changing applications.

Lubin says:

“My feeling is this is just the next Internet. This is World Wide Web version three. We are going to be delivering applications that look like Web pages or Web applications or that look like mobile applications. They will just have this different kind of database in the backend that is a much more trustworthy database that enables easy interoperation amongst lots of other things.”

Here’s Joseph Lubin’s presentation: