Anarchists give way to Tory parliamentarians; free lunch gives way to "self-organized lunch."how can one not make further enquiries?
From FT Alphaville:
Crypto conferences ain't what they used to be
This week, in the grand surroundings of the Methodist Central Hall in London's Westminster, a conference was convened with a rather noble title: "Blockchain and the Future of Humanity: Economy. Environment. Ethics."...MUCH MORE
The proximity of the Crypto Challenge Forum to the Houses of Parliament's corridors of power didn't seem purely incidental. Among the speakers at the conference were not one but two Tory parliamentarians, who took to the stage to espouse the glory of the distributed ledger.
We've written about the Conservative party's love affair with all things blockchain and crypto before -- so much, in fact, that we last week began a series on the subject. Readers might remember one of the conference speakers, Eddie Hughes, MP for North Walsall, who in the summer was pushing for a "blockchain for Bloxwich" -- one of the towns in his constituency -- because "blockchain for Walsall North wouldn’t have the same ring to it". More on him later.
Another of the conference speakers was Lord Chris Holmes of Richmond, a nine-time Paralympic medal-winner and now lifetime Tory peer. He put out a paper last year on the use of distributed ledger technology "for public good", in which he talked about blockchain as a "game-changer" (he released an update to the report this week).
Monday's speech was in a similar vein, with the technology pitched as a central part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution -- "4IR" -- and the presentation delivered with plenty of enthusiasm as well as a few good jokes. The problem -- as so often in the world of blockchain -- was trying to make sense of any of it. Lord Holmes told the audience:
Reasons to be cheerful - we know everything we need to know to make a success of blockchain, of AI, of all of the elements of 4IR. We know everything we need to know because we know economics, politics, psychology, social theory, behavioural theory, on and on and on. We know all of it, we just have to optimise it, and to understand that these things aren’t to be afraid of.Yeah! When did everyone stop optimising stuff? He continued:...
