The second day of the MIT Bitcoin Expo, hosted by the MIT Bitcoin Club this weekend in Cambridge, Massachusetts, took a step away from technical debates surrounding Bitcoin development and focused on applications in the financial sector and beyond. Speakers included representatives of R3, the digital ledger consortium of 42 banks, and Enigma, a blockchain-based technology that allows computing on encrypted data.
Sunday morning kicked off with opening words from Latanya Sweeney, who serves as Chief Technologist for the Federal Trade Commission as well as Director of the Data Privacy Lab at Harvard University. She began by reframing how our current economy is governed.
"We live in a technocracy, where every value is up for grabs." -@LatanyaSweeney
She went on to describe how racism has pervaded current technologies. For example, on Google, according to her recent paper , a black-identifying name was 25 percent more likely to get an ad suggestive of an arrest record. She stated that The Princeton Review , which offers standardized testing preparation for students, increased prices by 180 percent on average for people living in primarily Asian neighborhoods, and that Asian Airbnb hosts earn 20 percent less than Caucasion hosts when listing their homes. Latanya urged the community to keep these types of discrimination in mind when building new infrastructures using Bitcoin and other digital currencies.
Following a talk from Northwest Passage Ventures Founder and CEO Alex Tapscott about the “Blockchain Revolution,” Nasdaq’s Director of Global Software Development Alex Zinder took the stage to discuss the development of Nasdaq Linq, a blockchain-enabled platform for managing unregistered securities. Zinder walked the audience through the history of financial securities management and specific areas where Linq can streamline the process.
Zinder was followed by Kathleen Breitman, a Strategy Associate for R3 who fielded questions from the audience about the viability […]
