Early blockchain pioneer Dan Larimer shares a lot of great insights in this interview I hadn’t heard before here. But in short, he sees a continued wild ride ahead.
Dan Larimer — Blocksburg Summit
Block.one Chief Technology Officer Dan Larimer discusses the future of blockchain and how it is evolving at the 2019 Blocksburg Summit.
What’s the future of Blockchain?
Brendan from Block.one sat down with CNBC’s Brian Sullivan to discuss some of the big questions businesses are asking today. What impact is Blockchain having on enterprise? Why governments are primed for Blockchain? What can we learn from the 90’s technology bubble and more.
Charles Hoskinson on Dan Larimer and EOS
Charles Hoskinson, CEO of Input Output HK and creator of the Cardano blockchain protocol, had a passionate response when asked about his Twitter fights with Dan Larimer during a recent Tokyo FinTech Meetup. This is only a short excerpt of almost two hours of opening comments and Q&A, which you can find in full length on our YouTube channel.
Block One Keynote: Intro to Voice Social Media Platform
Brendan Blumer, CEO of Block One, which started 2-1/2 years ago, introduces Dan Larimer, CTO, who outlines the past and introduces “Voice,” their new social media platform.
A year ago they released the EOSIO open source protocol, which Larimer describes as the “fastest, most scalable and most active blockchain software in the world.”
Balaji Srinvasan and Tim Wagner from Coinbase announce that EOS is now available to trade on their platform and that visitors can earn EOS by completing some lessons on EOSIO.
Wagner also notes that Coinbase is the only major crypto exchange that has not been breached.
Larimer announced EOSIO 2 with a “WebAssembly engine designed for blockchain,” which is 12x faster than what it was a year ago when launched.
He also announced WebAuthn to support blockchain private key safety, which was elaborated by Guido Appenzeller, of Yubico. He describes their hardware key as vastly more secure than any passwords.
Blumer comes back to note that “Social media has not been a good friend to us.” He further states, “Our content. Our data. Our attention. These are all extraordinarily valuable things. But right now it’s the companies, not the users, that reaps the reward. By design, they run by auctioning our information to advertisers, pocketing the profit, and flooding our feeds with hidden agendas dictated by the highest bidder.”
He states they are building a transparent social media platform on EOS where what’s good for the platform is good for people, too, with built-in accountability.
They call it VOICE.
Larimer returns to introduce the Voice token. It rewards users via contention creation and discovery. The rewards are then used to magnify your voice on their platform.
The platform authenticates real people as users, eliminating bot armies and anonymous controls.
The authentication of all users on the platform also establishes an EOS-based blockchain identity that can be integrated into other applications in the future.
Why Blockchain: Daniel Larimer at Virginia Tech
Daniel Larimer created the cryptocurrency platform BitShares in 2014, was co-founder of the blockchain social platform Steemit in 2016, and is CTO of Block.one, a private company that was the original developer of EOS in 2017.
In this presentation, Larimer describes EOSIO as designed to make blockchain development easier. He states it’s now one of the largest blockchain companies. Further, he states that it’s the fastest, general-purpose blockchain, with lots of users and no transaction fees.
Following are some additional notes from his talk.
When people think of blockchain they think of tokens, proof of work and wasting energy. That’s not necessary.
If you have a database, it should be on a blockchain. It can be a private blockchain.
Blockchain will give you security, auditability and accountability of the system compared to a non-blockchain database.
With blockchain you can manage your own security and as a company you can mitigate legal issues since every action can be audited. A blockchain is not modified; it’s append only. The data is not on one server. It’s only one of many on a network that all verify the data. No one can change it.
Blockchain helps businesses automate compliance with regulators.
Blockchain is faster. It eliminates human points of contact that have been implemented to reduce fraud.
Blockchain is a better infrastructure for designing software.
Blockchain will become required as a best practice. It will be ubiquitous and invisible.
Dan Larimer Explains EOS
Dan Larimer, CTO of EOS, discusses his latest blockchain in this video, which is edited from a number of presentations.
Larimer is noted for creating two earlier, and still popular decentralized blockchains:
- Bitshares
- Steem.
From those projects he conceived what he considers to be a better platform, which has led to his current development of EOS.
Philosophically, he was inspired by free markets, Austrian economics and Ron Paul. As a result he wanted to create systems that would provide freedom and are nonviolent.
Larimer’s life mission in to “Find free market solutions for securing life, liberty and property.”
Hence, we need money that is not controlled by a central authority.
He recognized the vulnerability of crypto exchanges, which could be shut down by governments, cutting the flow of digital currencies.
From that he created Bitshares (BTS) a Decentralized Asset Exchange. But that wasn’t up to the task of handling the required scalability.
He created Steem, a blockchain social media platform that rewards users for creating content. Transactions on Steem are free. But it moved away from a core principle of true decentralization.
Larimer is no longer involved with Bitshares or Steem and both of those platforms are doing well.
However, from his perspective, the industry has much to learn and with his past experience and ongoing learning he is building EOS for the purpose of establishing future applications on top of it with the intention that anyone, including himself, could develop on it.
EOS enables developers to build decentralized applications in a general purpose way, which are compatible with sustainable growth.
EOS is an open source platform that anyone can use to develop high-performance, decentralized, blockchain smart contracts.
What is EOS? (And EOS.IO?)
EOS is a cryptocurrency that powers the EOS.IO blockchain. Calling itself “The most powerful infrastructure for decentralized applications,” EOS.IO is a decentralized system that enables the development, hosting, and execution of commercial-scale decentralized applications (dapp) on its platform.
A dapp built on the EOS.IO platform does not require micropayments by end users to send messages and perform tasks. This is left up to the individual dapp developers to determine how transactions fees (which are extremely low) will be paid. This means companies are free to come up with their own monetization strategies and offer their users service for free or otherwise.
The EOSIO platform was developed by the private company Block.one and released as open-source software on June 1, 2018.
Here is how CEO, Brendan Blumer and CTO Daniel Larimer at Block.one describe it:
https://youtu.be/eRAxrqaqGEQ
An interesting point made by Blumer is “The idea of EOS is that if you’re able to build a basic website you should be able to build/launch a decentralized business.”
Furthermore, it’s also become the #1 (most active) blockchain on Blocktivity.info