DISCUSSION: Tone Vase, Head Research BraveNewCoin; Jae Kwon, CEO/Founder Tendermint; Scott Bambacigno, VP Worldwide Sales AlphaPoint; Aldo Carrascoso, Founder/COO AlignCommerce; Wale Ayeni, Principal Orange Investments
Tone Vase, Head Research BraveNewCoin says there is no difference between the Blockchain & Bitcoin. Because there is only one Blockchain & that is the Bitcoin Blockchain. It basically created a valuable message transfer across the world & does it really, really well. A permisionless way to send value in the digital age. Its current use stems from the difficulties in using the current financial system. Blockchain is a proof of work system for Bitcoin.
Jae Kwon, CEO/Founder Tendermint says Bitcoin is a decentralized ledger that is secure despite attacks from within. Its a Byzantine fault tolerant distributed application & its the first of its kind. Byzantine means ‘arbitrary malicious actors’. Bitcoin showed the first distributed ledger, can run into wild & its still running today despite people trying to attack it. Blockchain is an umbrella term that refers to Bitcoin as well as non BFT distritubted ledgers.
Scott Bambacigno, VP Worldwide Sales AlphaPoint says you can really see a geographic division. On the West Coast you see pure Bitcoin companies that are looking to disintermediate, disrupt & create new revenues. On the East Coast you see people who are less interested in BitCoin as a token or currency or digital bearer asset. What they’re interested in is back office efficiencies & they believe with a shared distributed ledger that they will be able to create efficiencies that aren’t there currently today. What we see today is siloed databases that need to be reconciled or are prone to human error. What has happened in the past is you’ve had databases trying to act like messaging systems & messaging systems trying to act like databases & neither works very well.
Aldo Carrascoso, Founder/COO AlignCommerce says that Bitcoin & BlockChain in the Public setting are like Yin & Yang. They are linked & codependent. AlignCommerce is trying to pioneer compuchains, a way for public & private blockchains to speak with each other. Align uses the BlockChain as a settlement rail for payments.
Wale Ayeni, Principal Orange Investments invested in Chain.com. At the time there was a lot of hype so they spent a year understanding the space & understanding the technology. They saw all the deals around BitCoin & Blockchain that happened in Silicon Valley last year. Blockchain is like any other new technology, it starts with hype. Then after the hype people start building the protocol & infrastructure & they get investments. Investors now are looking for startups that are building user cases that are big & global. The technology is fairly well known. What is missing is a really large global user case that has traction.
