FT Alphaville attended Tomorrow’s Transactions 18th annual forum this week where all facets of blockchain and distributed-ledger systems were explored.From The Spectator:
The most interesting ideas (at least to us) were those presented by Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum and Preston Byrne of Eris Industries. Both are focused on moving blockchain beyond bitcoin and towards useful real-world applications....MORE
'Ethical hackers' in Fulham think they have a way to make your online life truly private, secure and anonymous. The world will be very different if they succeed
The internet has changed its character dramatically several times over its short life. It started in the late 1960s as a military project, morphed into an academic network in the 1980s and was transformed into a vehicle for commerce in the 1990s, before being invaded by social media in the 2000s. Now it’s on the verge of a change that puts all the others in the shade.Belated HT: NextBank's Petervan's Delicacy's
An alternative way of organising the internet is being built as we speak: an internet where no one is in control, where the government can’t find you or shut you down, where big tech companies aren’t able to learn everything about you. A decentralised net that is both private and impossible to censor.
This revolution is being plotted in snazzy offices just off Fulham High Street in south-west London — not what I was expecting, since you associate hackers with hoodies, basements and graffiti. But the Ethereum project isn’t a typical hackers’ collective: it received around $12 million of crowd-funded support when it was founded a couple of years ago, by a 20-year-old Russian-Canadian programming wizard called Vitalik Buterin. That’s been enough to hire 40 of the smartest geeks you’ll ever meet, and house them in comfort in Amsterdam, Berlin and London.
‘Welcome to Web 3.0,’ says Vinay Gupta, a hacker-cum-poverty-activist who’s part of the Ethereum team, as I arrive. Web 1.0 was all static websites. Web 2.0 was interactive social media platforms like Facebook. This third iteration is about encrypted peer-to-peer networks. It sounds dry, but Ethereum — which is launching part of its software this spring — has London’s tech crowd purring. Last year it won the World Technology Award for IT software. IBM has already used it to build a washing machine that orders its own soap.
But these people aren’t in it for the money. Ethereum is an open-source project which is available to everyone, and its employees will slink off when the project is complete. They’re doing it because they want to transform the internet — and, by extension, society.
In practical terms Ethereum does two things. First, it’s what Vinay calls ‘deep infrastructure’. It’s building a new web out of the spare power and hard-drive space of millions of connected computers that its owners put on the network. What they say of the brain is true of your computer — you only ever use a small amount of it. Ethereum links all that spare power and space and allows
people to build apps, websites and software that other users can access. Because it runs with strong encryption and the network is ‘distributed’ across all those individual computers, it’s more or less impossible for anyone to censor or control what’s on it.
Second, it allows people to create immutable, public transaction records. (Bear with me on this: it’s very important.) The problem with digital records is that they can be copied and so are not really owned by anyone. Borrowing the idea from the digital currency bitcoin, Ethereum uses something called a ‘block chain’ to record information on a public database in a chronological way that prevents copying, tampering, fraud or deletion. It’s a new anonymous, decentralised, uncensored internet, and a new way of controlling and storing information. This is why the tech crowd are excited....MORE
