Next Revolution

'These nerds are more powerful than standing armies'

Ethereum symbol white designed by Szabaduzso

Ethereum: a peaceful and silent revolution is on the way

In the past six months, blue-chip companies from BP to JP Morgan and Microsoft have endorsed ether, a rival to the best-known cryptocurrency bitcoin, and it has exploded in value by 4,400%. 

A 37-year-old former Microsoft research scientist called Gavin Wood wrote “100% of the code” for the currency, according to Brock Pierce, an early investor in both Ethereum, the computing platform behind ether, and bitcoin. 

Wood now runs a company called Parity Technologies, which has created a browser for the Ethereum network. 

in “British coder revealed as brains behind bitcoin rival”
Gavin Wood ‘wrote the code’ for ether — whose value has soared 4,400% this year
Danny Fortson in San Francisco
June 25 2017, 12:01am,
The Sunday Times

24th November 2014, Berlin. Ethereum ÐΞVcon-0 - Gavin: Welcome! Our mission: ÐApps. In this first video from the ÐΞVCON 0 series, Dr. Gavin Wood introduces the ΞTHÐΞV team and our mission: ÐApps, decentralized applications.

Vitalik Buterin explains Ethereum [in 3 minutes], 2014




Texas Bitcoin Conference in Austin, Texas, 2014. Vitalik Buterin explains what Ethereum is.


Keiser Report: New Crypto Phenomenon Ethereum (E569), 2014

DEVCON ONE: “Ethereum for Dummies” - Dr. Gavin Wood Ethereum Developer Conference. November 9th-13th, 2015 - Gibson Hall, London.




Vitalik Buterin - The Mastermind Behind Ethereum. Interview by Valerian Bennett. YouTube, 05/06/2017.

THE UNCANNY MIND THAT BUILT ETHEREUM
VITALIK BUTERIN INVENTED THE WORLD’S HOTTEST NEW CRYPTOCURRENCY AND INSPIRED A MOVEMENT — BEFORE HE’D TURNED 20. 

I remember waking up the first morning of the conference. I had fallen asleep the night before while most everyone was still awake, bedding down with a couch pillow in some back hallway of the house, earplugs in, hoodie cinched. When I walked into the living room I found it empty of people, but blinking and whirring with technology. Extension cords snaked across the floor, looping around empty beer bottles and the legs of a whiteboard that was tagged with equations and diagrams. I tried and failed to find an outlet for my phone. 

Buterin was the only person awake. He was sitting outside in a deck chair, working intensely. I didn’t bother him, and he didn’t say hello. But, I remember the impression he made on me at the time. This skeletal, 19-year-old boy, who was all limbs and joints, was hovering above his laptop like a preying mantis, delivering it nimble, lethal blows at an incredible speed. 

in Morgenpeck, Wired, 06.13.16

Today at Disrupt SF 2017 Vitalik Buterin sat down with AngelList founder Naval Ravikant to talk Ethereum. Because, well, Vitalik created Ethereum. Up front, Ravikant asked him to explain Ethereum and this is what he said. 

“You basically need to have some system that keeps track of how much money you have at any given time, how much money you have the right to spend,” Buterin said. “You can very easily do it with centralized servers, but if you want to do it in a decentralized manner, it’s actually a very hard problem.” 

- Posted Sep 18, 2017, by Matt Burns (@mjburnsy)

Vitalik Buterin - The Advantages of Decentralization - EventHorizon 2017

From 14 to 15 February EventHorizon 2017 brought together 550 international first movers and thought leaders from the energy as well as the Blockchain sector in the Hofburg Vienna – and imperial conference and event centre, where for over 700 years, both past and modern history have been written within its walls – to discuss and develop the energy solutions for the future. 

Please find more detailed information on our event website: www.eventhorizon2017.com

Discuss (Dec 10,2017) Vitalik Buterin - Lays Out Ethereum 2.0 Roadmap In Taiwan 

Atualizado em 31/12/2017 20:32 WET

Por uma democracia de confiança

A revolução digital só agora começou

As bolhas das dívidas soberanas e o mercado especulativo de derivados financeiros são a coisa mais extraordinária que o Capitalismo conheceu em toda a sua história, exceção feita, talvez, das duas grandes guerras mundiais que permitiram a sua expansão exponencial.

O que agora parece estar em causa, por efeito da exaustão dos recursos à superfície da crosta terrestre, a começar pelo fim da energia barata, é mesmo o fim do crescimento. A procura agregada mundial deixou de crescer a um ritmo capaz de repor o capital gasto na busca de matérias primas como o petróleo, o carvão e o gás natural, minérios de ferro, terras aráveis, água potável, etc., e ainda no cumprimento das obrigações contraídas perante os clientes dos bancos, companhias de seguros e da segurança social. Mais, a taxa de crescimento demográfico mundial atingiu o seu máximo em 1964. Ora sem demografia não há crescimento de nenhuma espécie, salvo o das bolhas especulativas que proliferam. Resta-nos, pois, regressar ao crescimento zero (na realidade, entre 0 e 1%) que foi a regra desde o princípio da humanidade até meados do século 19. Esta é a próxima revolução global, que porventura já começou!

Dois sinais: o colapso do sistema financeiro assente em bancos e bancos centrais, mais os seus sistemas de certificação, parece estar definitivamente em curso. Prova disso é a fuga cada vez mais visível da riquza mundial para as chamadas cripto-moedas. Outro sinal são os movimentos sociais que exigem, com cada vez mais veemência e conhecimento, uma DEMOCRACIA DE CONFIANÇA, assente em protocolos de transparência, registo e cooperação eletrónica à escala global. Por um lado, a economia global veio para ficar, por outro, exige-se para todos o chamado Rendimento Básico Incondicional e um sistema de trocas e de pagamentos livre da corrupção e especulação político-financeiras.

Blockchains for social good could revolutionize democracy and politics at large. I think Distributed Ledger Technology with Democracy Maps can be a paradigm shift to present populism plaguing most democracies around the world, and force bureaucratic authoritarian regimes to adapt to individual freedom and real democracy.
This EU initiative is more than welcome. Let’s work on this beautiful challenge!

António Cerveira Pinto in Second City

Blockchains for Social Good 

This prize [€5 million] aims to develop solutions to social innovation challenges using distribute ledger technology. 

The challenge to solve 

The challenge is to develop scalable, efficient and high-impact decentralised solutions to social innovation challenges leveraging Distributed Ledger Technology (DLTs), such as the one used in blockchains. 

DLT in its public, open and permissionless forms is widely considered as a ground-breaking digital technology supporting decentralised methods for consensus reaching as well as sharing, storing and securing transactions and other data with fewer to no central intermediaries 

In the wake of the widespread public attention for Bitcoin, several financial applications based on blockchains are already under development. 

However, the potential of DLTs to generate positive social change by decentralising and disintermediating processes related to local or global sustainability challenges is still largely untapped. 

in “Blockchains for social good”. IEIC Horizon Prize

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Distributed Ledger Technology 

Algorithms that enable the creation of distributed ledgers are powerful, disruptive innovations that could transform the delivery of public and private services and enhance productivity through a wide range of applications. 

Ledgers have been at the heart of commerce since ancient times and are used to record many things, most commonly assets such as money and property. They have moved from being recorded on clay tablets to papyrus, vellum and paper. However, in all this time the only notable innovation has been computerisation, which initially was simply a transfer from paper to bytes. Now, for the first time algorithms enable the collaborative creation of digital distributed ledgers with properties and capabilities that go far beyond traditional paper-based ledgers. 

A distributed ledger is essentially an asset database that can be shared across a network of multiple sites, geographies or institutions. All participants within a network can have their own identical copy of the ledger. Any changes to the ledger are reflected in all copies in minutes, or in some cases, seconds. The assets can be financial, legal, physical or electronic. The security and accuracy of the assets stored in the ledger are maintained cryptographically through the use of ‘keys’ and signatures to control who can do what within the shared ledger. Entries can also be updated by one, some or all of the participants, according to rules agreed by the network. 

Underlying this technology is the ‘block chain’, which was invented to create the peer-to-peer digital cash Bitcoin in 2008. Block chain algorithms enable Bitcoin transactions to be aggregated in ‘blocks’ and these are added to a ‘chain’ of existing blocks using a cryptographic signature. The Bitcoin ledger is constructed in a distributed and ‘permissionless’ fashion, so that anyone can add a block of transactions if they can solve a new cryptographic puzzle to add each new block. The incentive for doing this is that there is currently a reward in the form of twenty five Bitcoins awarded to the solver of the puzzle for each ‘block’. Anyone with access to the internet and the computing power to solve the cryptographic puzzles can add to the ledger and they are known as ‘Bitcoin miners’. The mining analogy is apt because the process of mining Bitcoin is energy intensive as it requires very large computing power. It has been estimated that the energy requirements to run Bitcoin are in excess of 1GW and may be comparable to the electricity usage of Ireland.  

in “Distributed Ledger Technology: beyond block chain. A Report by the UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser”.

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Democracy Maps by António Cerveira Pinto on Scribd