TechCrunch blockchain panel With blockchain technology enjoying buzzword status in mainstream finance and technology circles, it is hardly surprising that TechCrunch Disrupt London, held earlier this week, hosted a panel to discuss the potential of bitcoin and the blockchain.
Led by TechCrunch editor and Freemit CEO John Biggs , the panel consisted of Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, Blockstream CEO Austin Hill and Steve Waterhouse, partner at the bitcoin investment firm and hedge fund Pantera Capital.
The discussion, which touched upon various areas of debate, was first sparked by Biggs’ questions about the possibility of separating bitcoin, the digital currency, from its underlying technology, the blockchain. Private vs public blockchains
Hill, whose firm develops technology on the bitcoin blockchain, was first to answer, noting how the question rests on whether financial institutions ought to build their own private blockchains, or if they should use public decentralised ledgers such as the bitcoin.
With this in mind, Hill commented on how previous attempts to create decentralized protocols had failed in the past.
"I was involved in the early 90s in a company that worked on this, we spent millions trying to build e-cash, and all of the previous systems … they all failed because of a central concept, central trusted parties," he said, adding: "You had a single issuing agency and when that database or that agency fell apart then all of a sudden the tokens that they had certified or given value to by signing disappeared along with it." Hill also paid tribute to what the bitcoin protocol and the R&D behind it had done for the development of specialized chips as a whole, noting how the the digital currency’s mining industry had propelled it "forward three or four years".
From a technical perspective, Hill explained how bitcoin served as a reward for participants in the […]
