A special selection of highlights from Forkast News Bitcoin and Beyond summit in this episode of The Daily Forkast November 10.
Transcript
Welcome to a special edition of The Daily Forkast November 10, 2021. I’m Angie Lau, Editor-in-chief of Forkast.News, covering all things blockchain.
Well, Forkast.News, along with AAX, is incredibly proud to present the Bitcoin and Beyond Virtual Summit with some of the biggest thought leaders and newsmakers in blockchain, speaking.
They included Don Tapscott, SBF – that’s Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX and Alex Mashinsky of Celsius, just to name a few. And here are just some of the highlights.
Don Tapscott:
“Our privacy is being undermined. People say, well, Don, you know, privacy is dead. Get over it. I think that’s foolish. Privacy is the foundation of freedom, and we need to get our identities back and own them, not just to have access, but own them so so that we can manage them responsibly for our own benefit. And without that, I don’t think you get prosperity.”
Peter MacCormack:
“Ultimately, Bitcoin is decentralized, and the process of learning about it within El Salvador has become decentralized, it’s peer-to-peer. One person tells another person about Bitcoin. They explain how it works. They explain how they get it. They explain how to store it. And that, to me, surprised me as well how quickly people have learned about it.”
Lord Fusitu’a:
“Bitcoin adoption will be propelled by the emerging markets, and the reason for that is you’ve got about four billion people, two billion of whom are unbanked. So because of that numerical volume, I believe, as I said, it will drive Bitcoin adoption over the next decade. And therefore, to your question, more emerging markets will follow El Salvador’s lead. Panama, Uruguay, Brazil already have matters in the works.”
Alex Hoeptner:
“And if there’s really then one of the larger emerging markets countries adopting it like India, for example, or at least going getting close to that one, that will have a tremendous domino effect. So I think this can be really on the brink of something exploding.”
Nischal Shetty:
“So it doesn’t matter whether you have an array of startups in your country or not, you could still tap into the entire financial power that software developers around the world are building for you. So why constrain yourself to only your geographic boundaries and why not tap into this global powerhouse, which is Bitcoin. And I think that is what is going to motivate a lot of nations around the world.”
Anita Posch:
“Africa and Latin and Central America are the regions where Bitcoin is needed the most. So for these people, it’s a need. They need it and they understand immediately how it can help. You know, Bitcoin has many use cases, but helping people to gain more freedom, like, to empower their human rights and free themselves from corruption and these kinds of things that’s really life changing and very important.”
Amanda Fabiano:
“We’re going in full beast mode and then that will turn into optimisations mode, where miners will learn to do different things to optimize not only their operation but their treasury management, and we’ll see more more products be built around mining.”
Samson Mow:
“The bigger picture is really often missed because Bitcoin mining is a small, small percentage of energy consumption worldwide, like a fraction of a percent, right? If we are dirty, then everything is very dirty, right? It doesn’t really matter if Bitcoin is 40% renewable, or 50 or 60 or 70. What about the other piece of the pie? I think that is what people fail to look at.”
George Kaloudis:
“Where I think we are now is, especially as Bitcoin has risen up as a mainstream narrative, around the same time as ESG mandates are coming raining down on investors. We see more publicly now efforts from Bitcoin miners to explicitly chase down more renewable energy mixes. So I think we’re on the precipice of moving from an unintentionally green industry to a very intentional industry.”
Zee Zheng:
“What I believe is when the certain blockchain or the whole crypto economy gets big enough, it makes a lot of sense to spend a couple of millions to launch a couple like backup nodes in space just in case all the power networks shut down. Because we have this isolated backup that can synchronize everything back again, right? So I think, again, it’s all about economics. If the number checks out and then we can totally do it and then we are very much preparing for that.”
Brittany Laughlin:
“We hope to work and support a user ended internet, and I think Bitcoin is the biggest enabler of that. People own their value. It’s portable. Like you said, they don’t have to worry about which country they’re living in, in order to access it. So I think, the power of Bitcoin and ownership go hand in hand.”
Sam Bankman Fried:
“If we only build things people don’t care about or want, then that’s not going to do anyone any good. What I think about is what is it that people want? What is there a need for? And then how can we build that? Rather than saying; Hey, I found this random product on the ground, I hope someone wants it.”
Perianne Boring:
“There’s still a number of people who really sit in influential seats for policy making for crypto that could not articulate just the key features and functions of this technology. And if you don’t have an understanding of a technical level of Bitcoin, of blockchains, you’re not going to be able to make informed policies.”
Alanna Roazzi-Lafloret:
“The one way to learn about crypto is to actually do it, to get involved, to touch and feel and learn how to trade. Learn about NFTs, mint an NFT, explore cryptovoxels and decentralands and all the things in between. Because we if you don’t understand how things work, it’s very difficult to discern between the real and the the fantasy, if you will.”
Raoul Pal:
“Actually, the value is provable and it’s just Metcalfe’s Law, and because there’s more people on the network of Bitcoin, it has a higher value. But the real value of these things is proven out in the network effects. And once you get your head around that, it’s much clearer and you worry less about thinking about what is the inherent value, because what you’re doing is you’re getting 150 million crypto users around the world that are actually voting in real time. They’re telling you where they see the value accrue.”
Alex Mashinsky:
“Bitcoin is probably 10 times safer than Ethereum because the difficulty to crack a much older blockchain is logarithmic, it’s not linear. So for a lot of users, a lot of institutional users, when they look at the safety of the asset and the maturity of the blockchain, they view Bitcoin as a much safer, not a little bit safer, but a much safer asset. And for them, Ethereum is more venturing into a higher risk asset.”
Erik Vorhees:
“There are still tons of scams out there, and most of these projects are destined to fail. But this is how this is how startup entrepreneurship works, right? Like, we should expect that most blockchains will fail. We should expect that most coins will end up at zero. And still there will be several that change the world, and so I embrace that now.
Jamie Khurshid:
“We are now at last seeing individuals and firms with a more positive response. But I think we’re going to go one step further. I think, you know, I want to bring them at the moment. They’re standing at the door. I want to bring them all the way down into this DeFi space, and, you know, as soon as they get that comfort and understand the risks and are happy with that, that’s the ultimate goal.”
Alex Tapscott:
“The key insight here is that if Bitcoin enabled people to move value peer-to-peer using this native token called the Bitcoin, then DeFi enables peer-to-peer models for basically every single thing that the financial services industry does.”
And that’s it for this special edition of The Daily Forkast. For much more of our coverage of the Bitcoin and Beyond Virtual Summit, visit Forkast.News. I’m Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau. Until the next time.