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Video Highlights

Blockchain graphic design

Watch the highlights from Bitcoin Wednesday’s conference held in Circl, the sustainability pavilion at ABN Amro Bank’s headquarters on 5 December, 2018.  You can also take a look at this overview of the conference program.

All of the speakers from this conference appear in the highlight video.

“Capitalism is the biggest system ever invented but we need to try and make it better so that it works for planet and people in a way that we know. We don’t want to have all the excesses or the negative externalities.”

Marcello Palazzi, co-founder of the B-Corp Movement

“Atomic swaps are basically a way to exchange between Bitcoin and Ethereum or whatever and Grin and we can do this by using the cryptographic properties of these blockchains and we don’t need an intermediary party, and basically what makes it atomic is that either both sides of the trade go through or neither of them does.”

Jasper van der Maarel, Council Member of Grin

“How we look at centralization and decentralization is that you have a spectra: it is not binary or one or the other where you can have a little centralization and a lot of decentralization or the other way around. Probably the truth with most use cases is somewhere in the middle.”

Michael van den Berg, ABN Amro’s Blockchain Lab

“The token gets a stable value, a value in exactly this 1/20th of a kilowatt hour. Everybody in the village, in the community, knows he can go to the energy producer and give him the token or send him the token and he get this amount of energy. We call it an energy standard.”

Samater Liban, CEO of Africa SunTec

“These sorts of developments can connect you with the circular economy and might be the first phase in the development of broadening views in these sorts of currencies.”

Johan Wempe, Professor of Ethics and Sustainability, Vrije University of Amsterdam

“Most businesses and most profit comes from asymmetry of information — I know something more and I profit from it — so I can’t really think of a successful where everything is publicly visible because then anyone can become my direct competitor and this is not a system where capitalists would want to be part of.  Of course it’s a great cyberpunk vision of everything being visually transparent but there is a clear trade off between my privacy and transparency.”

Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias, creator of Calypso

Blockchain graphic design
Geoff Goodell, Researcher at University College London
Dr. Geoff Goodel

Geoff Goodellis a researcher at the Department of Computer Science at University College London and an authority on the interface between computer science, finance and public policy. His talk for Bitcoin Wednesday will cover the range of available options on the subject of financial privacy, from total surveillance as represented by traditional financial institutions to the use of cryptocurrencies and related privacy enhancing technologies.

Lyn Ulbricht, mother of Ross Ulbricht
Lyn Ulbricht

Lyn Ulbricht is the mother of Ross Ulbricht, the man sentenced to life in prison at the age of 36 for his involvement in Silk Road. The dark web marketplace has made an indelible impact on the industry.

JP Thieriot, CEO of Uphold
J.P. Thieriot

J.P. Thieriot is CEO of Uphold, a digital money platform that serves 1.7 million customers in more than 184 country and has processed almost $6 billion in transactions.

Ruben Merre, CEO of ngrave
Cold Hardware Wallets

Ruben Merreis co-founder and CEO of Ngrave, an end-to-end hardware wallet solution that tackles the what-ifs of managing digital assets and cryptocurrencies.

Patrick Dai, CEO of Qtum
Patrick Dai

Patrick Dai is CEO of Qtum. He will talk about how Qtum built a smart contract system on top of Bitcoin’s infrastructure.

Thomas Borrel, CPO of Polymath
Thomas Borrel

Thomas Borrel leads the Product Strategy, Product Management and Product Marketing teams across Polymath’s product portfolio. Prior to joining Polymath, Thomas was Director of Product Management at Extreme Networks where he led Extreme’s Software and Cloud offerings.

Micha Roon, CTO of EnergyWeb
Micha Roon

Micha Roon is the CTO of the Energy Web Foundation and the Share&Charge Foundation. He is an authority on energy grid decarbonization, electrical vehicle charging and the tokenization of renewable energy.