Consensus 2018 Day 1 — There and Back again, a Journal of observations…

The conversations had at booths from what I noticed were generally skewed toward bitcoin maximalism. If you follow Jimmy Song and Tone Vays, that mentally was seemingly prevalent everywhere. People had genuine, albeit funny concerns to us flying internet money around from shitcoin to shitcoin, regarding the basic trust of their assets on exchanges, the probability of that project running off with their money even on Binance, and regulation shutting down the shitcoin they were being pitched. It’s one thing to wade through all of the offerings, but to not blatantly see a few use cases out of fear they threaten the status quo industries they work in made it tough not to want to engage with people at booths about their overabundance of skepticism. There was definitely less of a ‘shut up and take my money’ attitude. Lots of wall street types, with visible concern for regulation.

Amber Baldet — head of the blockchain program at JPMorgan summed it up best by announcing she left JPMorgan at the Quorum private Enterprise blockchain program she headed to start her own open, privately funded project called Clovyr. AMBer told a crowd of skeptical cucks that you will get left behind. Clovyr aims to make a range of simple to complex blockchain components readily available capable of seamless integration from one central market place. Basically plugins, all supported by different blockchain projects for plug and play use in existing systems. With her background, there is a good chance it allows for businesses to bypass talking to multiple projects and speeding up the pilot to production phase of project integration, ultimately blockchain adoption around the world. She’s important and respected because it signals a high profile adoption of the public blockchain space.

Ironically this panel was followed up with a debate between Jimmy Song vs Joseph Lubin, where Song called everything, including Amber’s project a shitcoin to a roaring applause. That about summed up attendee sentiment, and I think bitcoin maximalism is on the rise after shitcoins really violated the generation of investors who entered the market post 2018. There were sons and daughters visibly with parents, guiding them on what’s what. You got the sense of moneyed people walking all over, asking questions, verbalizing their overall skepticism of the space stumbling upon a new found spark after the panels — the seeing is believing aspect of the conference may fuel larger than usual pamp on BTC in my opinion.

The issue of custody and safekeeping of assets was a hot topic. We’re still not there for seamless integration of anything and it takes learning of some degree to participate. I spoke to Jordan Earls, one of the lead devs of Qtum who also had a panel on device management. He brought up great points, we are far off from having blockchain products and private keys seamlessly working in the background every time we do something routine with our use of existing technologies. The current system is too complex and It’s going to take adoption by the Facebooks of the world to create hybrid decentralized systems so those not in blockchain or crypto benefit, and only then will the realities of being invested as part of the 1% involved with the space around the world will translate into financial gains beyond anything we’ve seen. Ledger is working on some revolutionary shit toward that. Reinforcing the just how early we are narrative. We’re simply just getting more adoption by people in crypto for more blockchain only limited uses, and hardly anything that works today needs to be decentralized because the pain of not having blockchain is not enough of a financial loss yet to demand it — until, it just does.

I look forward to sharing my thoughts on day 2 as I trek 30 blocks back to the conference from my humble hotel room. Walking and gazing at the New York skyline, I can’t help but think of just how early on the ground floor we are in this space of innovation, cheers.

Ring of Zek