- Richard Branson, standing, left, in the beach house on Necker Island with, clockwise, Bitfury’s George Kikvadze, Personal Black Box’s Patrick Deegan, and ChangeTip’s Nick Sullivan.
- Michael J. Casey
Welcome to BitBeat, the latest in cryptocurrency news and analysis, written by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey.
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Crossing Our Desk:
- One half of BitBeat spent last week moderating discussions at the inaugural Blockchain Summit on Richard Branson’s Caribbean island, Necker Island.
It was perhaps inevitable that an exclusive event in a tropical idyll, where businessmen hobnob in the presence of one of the world’s richest men, would elicit allegations of elitism from some of quarters of the bitcoin community (as well as the occasional conspiracy theory.) But as the summit progressed, it became clear that the attendees had grander and, arguably, more altruistic aspirations than their critics imagined.
The group, which the summit web site described as comprising “the greatest minds in digital innovation,” explored multiple projects that would use the blockchain – the core ledger technology underlying bitcoin – to change the lives of billions of people. Whether these succeed remains to be seen, but the scope of the goals discussed was striking.
Venture capitalist and co-organizer Bill Tai says he’d used as his model the Stanford University Homebrew Computer Club, which helped make home computing a reality in the 1970s after engaging the likes of Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates and early Apple developer Steve Wosniak.
Mr. Tai, whose events company Mai Tai Global co-hosted the event along with bitcoin mining company BitFury, said he wanted the close-knit arrangement and relaxed environment of Necker Island to “create a way for people to let go and really collaborate.”
A decent amount of non-tech expertise was on hand, reflecting a view that to succeed with real-world implementations, blockchain-based innovations need people with understanding of political, social and cultural realities. Peruvian economist and anti-poverty crusader Hernando de Soto gave presentations on the challenges of titling property for the poor in developing countries, for example, and social media maven Oliver Luckett spoke of how viral content on social media tends to follow patterns found in biology.
“When accomplished people with diverse background can be placed in an unstructured environment where barriers are stripped away, the interaction that occurs allows the spontaneous and serendipitous mixing of ideas that can reformulate themselves into amazing action plans,” Mr. Tai said.
As Mr. de Soto explained how people’s property rights in mineral-rich parts of Peru get diluted into communal landholdings and then transferred without adequate compensation to multinational mining companies via a process that he described as an “artisanal blockchain,” attendees hatched plans to inscribe such individuals’ assets into the high-tech, digital-currency blockchain. The idea is that the indelible, public ledger would permanently legitimize these peoples’ personal claims and empower them with a provable deed, a form of legal collateral with which to raise money, take out insurance or, if the bid is high enough, sell their plot of land.
The concept fits within the “social impact” goals that Brian Forde told the group were key elements of MIT Media Lab’s new Digital Currency Initiative, of which Mr. Forde, a former White House adviser, is the director.
The same goes for a project described by entrepreneur John Edge, who spoke of his “ID 2020″ project, working with international child welfare agencies to create a global, blockchain-based record of digitized birth certificates that help protect children from human-traffickers. Enhancing his pitch: a live Skype video address on the last evening of the summit from actress Lucy Liu, who has directed documentaries on child prostitution to draw attention to the plight of unidentified children.
Tied to this digital ID idea and to a host of other applications for blockchain technology was the briefing from Patrick Deegan, the Chief Technology Officer of Personal Black Box, on the Open Mustard Seed protocol, a software program of which he is the chief architect and which aims to empower people to develop their own “self-sovereign” digital identities.
Meanwhile, consultant Paul Brody of Ernst Young spoke of his work at former employer IBM to develop a blockchain-based framework for automated devices and appliances to securely transact with each other in the “Internet of Things” of the future.
The summit got a glimpse of this interconnected “IoT” world from Bitfury, which demonstrated a light bulb containing a special chip designed to mine bitcoins.
Such a device could never compete with the super-fast specialized mining machines that firms like BitFury deploy in high-tech, climate-controlled data centers to process transactions and earn bitcoins in return. After all, the company this week rolled out new 28-namometer mining chips that Vice Chairman George Kikvadze says are three times more efficient than the prior generation and predicts these will give the company “significant market share” in this increasingly industrialized industry.
Still, making money isn’t the point of the light bulb. According to designer Niko Punin, BitFury created it to show what’s possible and use it as an intriguing way to promote the adoption of bitcoin. (Michael J. Casey)
Contacts: paul.vigna@wsj.com, @paulvigna / michael.casey@wsj.com, @mikejcasey