Consensus 2017 Recap

Around 3000 people joined together in New York, Times Square, to attend Consensus 2017 which is the biggest event in the industry.

Among the attendees there were lots of corporate employees, founders of the great tech companies, a few traders, employees of the blockchain companies and venture capital.

This showed that enterprise is in full frontal attack mode. Maybe enterprise will be a lot quicker than people to get into block chain space.

Among the presenters, there was EOS, which I found the most promising tech. It looks really like Ethereum on Steroids.
Vitalik is thinking hard to solve those scalability issues. The reason is he started wrong. What he did was actually taking Bitcoin PoW consensus mechanism and adding a VM on it. Which is ground breaking for sure. But the design decisions was not enough it seems. Daniel and his team introduced EOS and they seem to be starting with the scalability, governance, efficiency of mining (not wasting electricity) in mind. So in a sense this can be Eth 2.0.

What could go wrong?

1. PoS systems have the problem of stake consolidation. Like a big evil corp can grab a big chunk of the stake EOS. With some community engagement and getting the votes they can pretty much shut down the platform and waste probably billions. But still they can hurt it if they want. But then another platform would be hard forked and continue operation for sure. The evil corp can end up losing millions.

2. Upvote mob. Can a bad mob of upvoter group take over everything? Like evil individuals upvoting each other and making the insiders more important.

3. A lot of the Steem's most liquid currency STEEM's appreciation depends on constant influx of buyers. Since people are paid in STEEM, if they want to convert that to BTC, there has to be matching buyers or price will decrease. If I want to sell SP, I end up with STEEM. So in order for SP to be valuable STEEM should be valuable in the future. But if there is not much 'believers' coming to steem, (i.e. less buyers than sellers) it will stop appreciation and SP will also be less valuable. By believers I mean corporations, brands, or individuals who want some future SP to control upvoting. If that group somehow don't believe in the future of Steem things can turn for SP holders. But I am not predicting that this will happen in the near future. Because I too like the platform and believe it has great future. So I don't know how EOS's currency system will be. I am just hopeful that it will be designed with 'future' in mind.

Other promising tech:
NEM - I talked to a few guys and gave them a hard time asking questions like are there bugs, and can you dump anytime. They are saying that there are no bugs. In order for them to dump the holdings, everybody in the 'foundation' (I don't remember how they call it) has to decide likewise. So yes NEM people was there. It was interesting to see the faces, because as you know there are not much team mentions on there website.

ICONOMI - Founders quickly explained what it is. Anybody can manage a portfolio on it. ICONOMI has jumpstarted 2 of the portfolios themselves. A portfolio example: 20 shares of GNOSIS + 10 shares of ARAGON etc.

NETKI - they seem to be solving the identity problem in a neat way

TOKEN - wechat for the world (specifically: sending and receiving money between app users)

RIPPLE - Banks are actively using this. They started burning XRP. Ripple announced to lock up holdings for a while. They focused on banks but their goal is to also include individuals.

NY is clearly the place to be for blockchain business. I don't know how much blockchain will hurt it at the end because of expected disruptions and power shifts, but right now it is doing good for NY.