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Quick Impression on Waikit Lau’s Crypto and Blockchain forum and MIT

* Hosted by Coach Wei. Our own Waikit Lau is presenting the topic on blockchain, cryptocurrency and ICO. Me and Brian Subiranna were invited as guest panels at the Q&A forums. Brian is planning to create a class on blockchain at MIT.

* About the forum, Coach Wei has launched MIT-Tsinghua Summit since Dec 30 last year. So this is part of the talk in the series: https://www.linkedin.com/…/mit-tsinghua-innovation-summit-…/

* And Waikit, as you might know, he has been successful serial entrepreneur, angel and involved in several ICOs. He also co-admin the AIDL forum.

* In my view, Waikit gave a great presentation on the excitement of blockchain and cryptos. His ~50 min presentation have couple gists
– The rise of protocol coins such as ethereum.
– The potential business opportunity is comparable to development of HTTP. Waikit use the metaphor that blockchain can be seen as TCP/IP. Whereas application build on top of blockchain can be thought as HTTP.
– The current ambiguity of how ICO should be regulated. Or generally: should cryptos be seen as a commodity or a security?

* Gems from the Q&A session. The crowd has many sharp questions to the panels. Here is a summary:

Q. Are there any values of blockchain without cryptocurrency?
A. Generally yes from the panels. e.g. most chains can exist without the idea of mining. Mining probably makes more sense when parties within the network don’t trust each other.

Q. What is the current state of decentralized exchanges?
A. Panels: Still under development. There are a lot of things need to happen to motivate a large ones.

Q. Would quantum computing be a threat to blockchain?
A. Panels (Arthur): It could be, yet current quantum computing still several technical roadblocks to solve to make it usable for applications. e.g. create stabilized inputs for the QC. There are also counter technology such as quantum cryptography being developed. So we can’t quite say QC would just kill blockchain even if it is developed.

Q. Should a chain be controlled by one or multiple parties?
A. Yet another issue which is hard to predict. Looking at the development of Ethereum and Bitcoin, having a benevolent dictator seems to make the Ethereum community more unified. But the fact that Bitcoin’s community is segmented that now the buyers/users have more say, might motivate adoption of speed-up algorithm.

Q. Would speeding up mining speed up transaction?
A. Unlikely. What would likely to improve transaction speed are technology such as Lightning.

That’s what I have.  You can find the original thread at

https://www.facebook.com/groups/blockchainnation/

Arthur

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