On August 24, members of the largest firms working on blockchain technology met with Don Tapscott at his Ontario summer compound for a three-day meeting to discuss the future of the blockchain.
Tapscott, who is well-known for co-authoring Blockchain Revolution, believes the get-together could be the start of a new distributed ledger advocacy organization.
At the private lake home meeting in Ontario, guests from major firms including IBM, JP Morgan and BitFury have been networking during the three-day event. The main discussion at Tapscott’s private meeting has revolved around the absence of “grown-up” governance, according to Bloomberg.
As legacy firms and financial institutions embrace the emerging technology by adopting blockchain protocols, Tapscott’s guests believe more standards are necessary. This belief stems from recent mishaps in the blockchain world, such as the attack on Ethereum’s DAO.
Tapscott tells Bloomberg that rather than representing their companies, individuals attending the private meeting are there on their own accord. “The goal is to try to come up with insights and concrete actions to [sic] moving forward,” he says.
Tapscott and his friends believe the meeting will produce new industry connections and advance discussions on how to best cultivate the blockchain industry.
Don Tapscott is a big believer in cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. The digital evangelist recently gave a TED talk called “How the Blockchain is Changing Money and Business,” in which he discusses the principles and applications of this emerging innovation. In the speech, Tapscott says that the advent of blockchain will transform how society interacts with money and business relations:
The technology likely to have the greatest impact on the next few decades has arrived. And it’s not social media. It’s not big data. It’s not robotics. It’s not even AI. You’ll be surprised to learn that it’s the underlying technology of digital currencies like Bitcoin. It’s called the blockchain.
Tapscott details how Bitcoin came to life through the open source code crafted by Satoshi Nakamoto. He says the era of the blockchain is the first time in history where people can trust each other and transact in a peer-to-peer manner.
“Trust,” Tapscott says, is native to the technology — he calls it the “trust protocol.”
The evangelist’s TED talk praises Bitcoin but puts special emphasis on the blockchain technology. “The real pony here,” Tapscott says, “is the underlying technology. It’s called blockchain.”