On Wed, August 15, 2018, at the Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018 in Toronto, Canada, Larry King moderated a panel discussion titled “Mass Influence and Adoption of Blockchain Technology,” with Charles Hoskinson, Justin Wu, Al Burgio, and Matthew Roszak.
The following time markers index the respective discussion points.
5:00 – Hoskinson described blockchain as a continuation of the internet. Citing the ability of the internet to move information easily and economically as a precedent and blockchain furthering that by moving money readily and economically via decentralization.
7:30 – Burgio touched upon loyalty rewards as a way to facilitate blockchain growth, describing the rewards as a way to bring the masses to cryptocurrency instead of bringing cryptocurrency to the masses.
9:45 – Wu highlighted green mining technology as a way to solve the heavy energy usage of current crypto mining.
10:45 – Hoskinson said blockchain will gradually evolve into society. The earliest adoption will likely occur via the 3 billion people who don’t have access to banking, hence they will likely represent the fastest growth.
12:27 – Roszak discussed adoption obstacles such as software needing to get better and the opposing narrative of speculators vs technology adoption, in addition to the negative influence of criminal users. However, he noted it’s all being resolved. Furthermore, he noted that open, permissionless systems always win.
17:00 – Burgio said that the user experience needs to become less clunky for faster adoption. He also compared blockchain adoption to that of the internet, and stated that blockchain has the advantage of the internet already existing and therefor allowing innovation to advance at an unprecedented pace. He further said mass adoption is just a matter of time.
19:15 Wu cited skill sets as one of the biggest obstacles to adoption since we’re all still learning this together. He said the real use of blockchain will be invisible to users and that we’re still in the infrastructure phase.
21:50 – Hoskinson noted that even if blockchain didn’t achieve mass consumer adoption, just the government and enterprise adoption will be huge.
24:55 – Roszak said the international access to a new money system will be life changing for those that don’t have it.
27:20 – Burgio stated that more engineering will speed adoption, which requires more capital and that blockchain is helping to solve that problem since more capital is being invested.
28:30 – Wu said there’s lots of people around the world working together to make this work, stating that blockchain development is a collaborative economy. He considers blockchain gaming will be a big use case.
30:15 – Hoskinson said we’re building a bunch of capabilities that will change society but it’s not clear yet how. But one core factor is trying to do things without middlemen.
32:30 – Roszak opined that adoption will take 5-10 years to really take off and mentioned as an example that one of current core revenue centers of credit services will become free. He also described the speculative narrative as overshadowing the work being done to build out systems.
35:38 – Burgio described that technology adoption begins with first movers and then willing followers and then unwilling followers.
38:24 – Hoskinson says that at this early phase we haven’t made blockchain terminology human in a way that people can relate to it.