devcon 1 Devcon1, the Ethereum conference being held in the City of London all this week, was kicked off by its inventor and chief scientist Vitalik Buterin, who stated that scalability and privacy of the blockchain would be priorities going forward. These are vital issues for enterprise users such as banks and other corporates looking at blockchain technology, basically all the people sitting at the back of the room wearing suits. Ethereum’s vision is a more decentralised internet, a more secure and trustworthy environment. Bitcoin has provided a lightning rod for a new era of shared, unmediated value transfer that has the potential to affect practically anything connected to the web. Ethereum is working at the frontier of this process so understandably the discussions are quite technical. Buterin said: "Scalability is this idea of coming up with a blockchain that can scale much larger than existing chains essentially by processing transactions in parallel. And moving away from this paradigm where every single node on the network has to process every single transaction. "There are a number of different ways to do that and we will be hearing about quite of a lot of the different strategies from many people throughout this week. I think that is the single technical thing that’s right now holding blockchain technology back more than anything else." Privacy Buterin pointed out privacy is the another major factor which makes the blockchain unsatisfactory for at least some use cases. He said: "You know companies are all interested in blockchains, they love blockchains – it’s the new buzzword, it’s the future. "But wait … You are saying we have to publish every single one of our transactions to a public database that can be read by our competitors? The question is how can you have the benefits […]
