The Brookings Institution (Washington, DC) holds a panel on the future of disruptive technologies. CoinFox is following the discussion.

David Wessel, the head of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at Brookings exploring the distributed ledger technology, has convened leading industry experts to discuss the future of blockchain and other disruptive innovations.

BitPay, Coin Centre, Ripple, Digital Currency Group, R3 Consortium, Chamber of Digital Commerce top officers are taking part in the panel, along with the Federal Reserve System and Treasury veterans and representatives of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and Nasdaq.

In course of the discussion use cases for bitcoin and blockchain have been overviewed, with Digital Currency Group's Barry Silbert arguing that bitcoin shall be praised for being a store of value, “a rail” and digital notary, thanks to the blockchain technology underpinning it.

Bitcoin was twice compared to gold, though, according to the speakers, the “digital gold” proves to be more useful than actual gold in terms of buying a cup of coffee or a car in real time.

While discussing whether financial innovation comes from outside of the industry, the participants compared bitcoin and blockchain's current state to the early days of the Internet, calling the technology “bottom up innovation”, the future of which still being unpredictable. Forecasts for the upcoming year, though, include the raise of interest of the “giants” like Google towards blockchain and their likely embracement of the technology in the foreseeable future.

R3 Consortium's managing director Charley Cooper outlined the fact that the group was focused on blockchain use cases only, thus excluding bitcoin digital currency from its particular sphere of interest.

The founder and President of the Chamber of Digital Commerce Perianne Boring argued that, though the future of blockchain was quite unclear, the technology was likely to cover much more than financial sector only. She listed entertainment and healthcare as possible areas of application for blockchain.

A Ripple representative spoke about a non-blockchain protocol called Interledger, pointing to the fact that blockchain, however promising it might be, is not a panacea and not even necessary in many cases. In his view, it is important to find the ways to connect blockchain with other networks to establish a really inclusive ecosystem, and that is exactly what Interledger is aimed at.

The panel discussion is to be followed by a Q&A series.



Maria Rudina