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BlockShow Americas 2018 Day Two Kicks Off, Discusses Benefits of Crypto, Bitcoin ETF

Blockshow americas 2018 day two kicks off, discusses benefits of crypto, bitcoin etf

BlockShow Americas 2018 Day Two Kicks Off, Discusses Benefits of Crypto, Bitcoin ETF

Blockshow americas 2018 day two kicks off, discusses benefits of crypto, bitcoin etf

BlockShow Americas 2018 has started yesterday in Las Vegas, bringing together more than 1,500 attendees and 80 speakers in the crypto and blockchain industries to discuss widely debated topics on the new technology and its impact on the global community.

At the first day of the event on August 20, industry experts discussed major issues, including the new perspectives offered by the technologies and the question of interaction between major financial institutions and crypto, as well as the role of a proper regulatory approach to bring on the “blockchain future.”

Specifically, BlockShow speakers expressed their stance at a number of panels such as “Building Democracy on Blockchain,” “Wall Street vs Crypto,” “How Proper Regulatory Development Can Lead us to the Blockchain Future,” and others.

Today, August 21, BlockShow will gather major industry experts such as Dr. Nouriel Roubini, the CEO of Roubini Macro Associates who predicted the global financial crisis of 2008, Celsius founder Alex Mashinsky, and legal advisors Mike Miglio and Leslie Katz.

The second day of the event features closely studied topics in the industry such as the benefits of crypto, crypto regulations in the U.S., payment technologies, and crypto-based games, as well as one of the most recently discussed questions of a bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund (ETF). Today’s event will also feature the BlockShow Oscar awards ceremony, where startups are selected by an expert jury based on the originality of their projects.

The first day of BlockShow featured a panel about democracy and blockchain, where the panelists were largely in agreement about blockchain’s potential to transform the concept of democracy by enabling higher levels of accountability and engagement.

Dimitris Vassiliadis, director of product and business development at credit software company EXUS, claimed that blockchain is about “reinventing the model of democracy.” Vassiliadis, who is also a Tech Expert Evaluator at the EU Commission, stressed that the technology will not only allow for more accurate electing and voting, but will also propel more engagement and participation:

“[Blockchain] is not just the electing and the voting part, which is very fundamental in the entire thing, but it actually is also maintaining the engagement and the participation in the nature of the democracy, following the election results.”

Herb Stephens, Silicon Valley entrepreneur and co-founder and treasurer at the Democracy Earth Foundation, supported Vassiliadis’s stance, stating that blockchain is “actually moving to real democracy that is ruling by the hundred percent.”

However, Stephens also questioned the deployment of blockchain by centralized authorities, claiming that blockchain was not invented because someone “needed the trust of the third party.” Stephens argued that society is “not gonna build trust when it’s in a centralized authority,” claiming that “in the next ten years exchanges will go away, including crypto exchanges, including NYSE, NASDAQ and all the other exchanges.”

Also yesterday, BlockShow had seen a heated discussion on how the traditional financial space could potentially “merge” with crypto at the panel “Wall Street vs Crypto,” where field experts disputed over the current level of awareness of crypto at major financial institutions and crypto’s susceptibility to criminal activity, as well as the crucial role of crypto regulatory approaches.

Published at Tue, 21 Aug 2018 18:49:00 +0000

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Charlie Shrem: ‘It’s Not About The Technology Anymore, It’s About Power’

bitcoin entrepreneur Charlie Shrem shared his views on the scaling debate, stating that “it’s not about technology anymore, it’s about power.”


Shrem: ‘It’s About Power’

Charlie Shrem, bitcoin entrepreneur and co-founder of Intellysis, was present in today’s episode of the  Double Down show, dubbed “Does Block Size Matter?” with the usual hosts Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert.

Hard Fork Wars

During the show, Shrem expressed his thoughts regarding the current state of the scaling debate or as Herbert called it, “the Great Blocksize War of 2017.”

Shrem stated:

In reality, it’s not a technical argument anymore. Everyone on both sides of the table say that SegWit is the best technology that we have.

According to Shrem, the scaling debate is no longer about the most viable technology or solution that can be used to scale bitcoin. Instead, the scaling debate has become a power struggle between two development teams, Bitcoin Unlimited and Bitcoin Core.

“The other side of the debate, which is bitcoin Unlimited, they agree that SegWit is a great technology,” he continued. “But to them it’s not about technology anymore, it’s about power.”

Shrem went on to say:

They want to remove [bitcoin Core’s] ability to work on bitcoin and instead have a closed-membership small group of four to five developers, who they think are the best for the job, run bitcoin going forward.

A Test for bitcoin

However, there is a silver lining in this development, which Shrem considers it as an “extremely bullish situation for bitcoin.” The current block size “drama” is showcasing bitcoin’s ability to resist a malicious attack on the network.

He noted:

Here you have a group of bad actors who are trying to overtake the bitcoin network and essentially fork all of bitcoin and force all bitcoin users to be able to use their developers and their codebase and their everything and it’s not a group of miners that’s preventing this.

Shrem sees the current hash power signaling as a “glorified poll” when it comes to hard fork given that nodes are the ones that validate blocks and they can discard the ones from the hard-forked chain at will, meaning that miners don’t have nearly as much power as they think they do.

This can be observed the UASF proposal, which would bypass the miners completely and leave it up to the nodes to force SegWit into activation.

However, it may not come down to a UASF, as mining pools like F2Pool are beginning to move to SegWit driven by demand from individual users that contribute hashrate to the pool.

Champagne Problem

Not all is gloomy for bitcoin, however. Amidst all the tension and drama, one must also look at the bright side, which is the reason we’re having this heated debate at all: Bitcoin is growing at an exponential rate.

This is, as Shrem puts it, a “champagne problem,” one that gives us as much to celebrate as it gives us to fight about. 

Bitcoin 2016

“It’s a good problem to have. bitcoin has grown really quickly. We never expected this to happen so quickly, to be honest. We’re getting towards what they call a ‘champagne problem,’ how do you scale?” he said.

This means that not only is bitcoin working as intended, but there is also an urgent need for such a currency in the world. Now, it’s only a matter of making sure that bitcoin can become that currency and still maintain its decentralized and immutable characteristics.

Shrem concluded:

There has always been research and conversations on scaling over the past three years but, to be honest, we didn’t think we’d see this exponential growth in bitcoin and now it’s time to have that conversation.

Do you agree? Is the scaling debate actually about power and control? Share below!


Images courtesy of Shutterstock, alchetron.com, coin.dance

The post Charlie Shrem: ‘It’s Not About The Technology Anymore, It’s About Power’ appeared first on Bitcoinist.com.

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