Money 20/20 Recap: Ethereum, Consumer Protection, Investment

On Monday afternoon at the Money20/20 Conference in Las Vegas, Ethereum lead developer Vitalik Buterin, and Don Tapscott, author of Blockchain Revolution, took center stage to speak to the groundbreaking potential of the Ethereum network.
Also read: Money 20/20: Cybersecurity Panel Praises Information Sharing to Reduce Cybercriminal Risks
Buterin started off by going over his history within the Bitcoin space, going back to when he first learned about the technology in 2011, and then his involvement in various ‘Bitcoin 2.0′ projects starting in 2013 and onward.
Bitcoin as a network is optimized to append the text-based list of who-has-what, Buterin said, not run complex applications on a distributed blockchain network. To answer this problem, he began creating the Ethereum network, where each node doubles as a virtual machine and can run applications on the native scripting language and cryptocurrency, called Ether.
Don Tapscott, Author of Blockchain Revolution, framed the narrative early. ‘The internet is entering a second era,’ he said. ‘We’ve seen the internet of information for many days, and now we are seeing the internet of value.’ As the internet evolves, traditional infrastructural technology in the financial sector needs updating to lower reconciliation and overhead costs.

This post was published at Bitcoinist on 2016/10/25.