A panel moderated by blockchain expert Sam Yilmaz COO of Bloccelerate last week at COSM debated whether cryptocurrency could be a national currency. It’s a risk but then many current currencies are.

From Wyatt Robinson — Principal Corporate Counsel, Microsoft:

The whole premise behind blockchain as I understand it from my view as a former financial services attorney, is really to promote efficiency free up capital allow more money to be out there for end users to have in their pockets. And so when we think about what should we put on chain, what activities should be going on chain at the end of the day, think about the stakeholders, the users who are involved in that transaction or are reaping the reported benefits of that transaction and making a calculation from a business strategy perspective, what can we do that’s really better on change versus actually what can we do on change just for the sake of doing it.

Mathematician and philosopher William Dembski replied,

“I get the sense that with the hype around blockchain, that it’s just become this universal hammer that we’re gonna just hammer everything on. I mean the idea of a ledger goes back to Babylonian cuneiform written on tablets that were clay and that were burned in ovens. And once you’ve done that, you’ve got something that’s pretty untamable. So when you’ve got those chicken scratchings, you’re not gonna be able to do a lot to them. So the idea of an untamperable ledger, I think it’s good and I think there’s a lot you can do with it. And especially with all the computational power we have these days, you can probably do a lot with it. I come at this also as somebody who thinks about technological evolution because I work in biological evolution and then that becomes an analogy in technological evolution.

“People who think about this tend to divide it into three types. There’s revolutionary change, there’s an incremental change in generational change. So when Alexander Graham Bell invents the phone, that’s the first time where you have communication of voices at a distance. That’s revolution. When you go from a landline that has a dial phone, I remember when that changed in the sixties or seventies to punch phone, that’s an incremental change. It doesn’t really change a whole lot. When you went from landline to cell phone, that was a big change. And then when you got apple on top of that that you call that a revo, a generational change, you can repurpose things. There’s a lot of interesting stuff that can come out of it. But I’m still waiting really to see the real interesting things come out of blockchain. What is the actual record of achievement? And I’m in some ways still waiting for it. I think we’ve probably got an immature of technology with it right now.

Gregory Meredith, president of Rchain Cooperative commented “Just think about it for a minute, right? It’s like it’s already difficult for nodes to catch up to data on chains that are used by a few millions of people. Imagine if suddenly all of the US was using the Ethereum blockchain, every single person in a household on a regular basis was using Ethereum, we’re talking several hundred orders of magnitude increase in the data and that if that keeps accruing, then only those parties with massive resources would ever be able to run nodes forcing centralization. So at a certain point, if you want to actually have scalable technology, you have to begin to forget data, which means you have to have real finalization protocols.”

And John Devadoss, Board Member and Cofounder of Interwork: “in the last six, seven years there is significant progress in terms of understanding economic models, economic architectures, obviously identity, but also user experience, which has been a big hurdle in terms of crypto at large. How do you make it easier, simpler, and certainly safer for people, for regular people to be able to use it. But also Bill’s point I think is critical, which is there is this balancing act obviously much like this AI stuff out there. To believe somehow that control goes away I think is ridiculous. These are tools and so ensuring that the accountability, the responsibility still lives within us as human beings I believe is an area, Sam, where there is still much, much more clarity required. ”

The discussion continues. We can count on that.