Mastering Ethereum

Last year in October 300 people including myself enjoyed an amazing talk by Andreas M. Antonopoulos at the Bitcoin Meetup Switzerland at Glockenhof in Zürich.

Before his main talk he publicly announced Mastering Ethereum, a book for blockchain developers (75% about smart contracts) co-authored by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Woods.

The print edition is supposed to be released in February 2018. You can also check out the current state of the book on Github. On the cover of the book will be bees, an analogy for a decentralized «organism».

Mastering Bitcoin (Github, O’Reilly) had ants on the cover. It was the first time O’Reilly put insects on a cover. The purpose of ants was the simple idea of a superorganism that has emergent intelligence from the collaboration of very simple nodes.

On his YouTube Andreas just published an interview by Stephan Nilsson, founder of Norway Bitcoin and Blockchain Association which took place at the Kasbah Hub on April 27, 2017 in Oslo, Norway. Here’s my favorite quote from the interview and after that the video itself.

The really interesting applications, those that are truly disruptive, truly out of the norm of what we do today on the Internet, that if you try to present them to an investor or regulator or a government agent they’re horrified, that’s a good test. If what you’re trying to do horrifies investors that’s probably about just disruptive enough to be a meaningful application. And if there’s smiles all around in a conservative board of investors – guess what – it’s not disruptive.

Questions and Topics

  • 0:49 – What are better ways to spread knowledge about Bitcoin and blockchain technology to young people (15-25 years old), especially in Nordic countries?
  • 4:09 – What would you say to technicians and programmers who say «this will never scale»? Will the propose solutions work?
  • 8:16 – The interest and marketing hype in «blockchain technology» has exploded. What are your thoughts on Hyper Ledger and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance? Is this disruptive innovation?
  • 14:21 – Ethereum is planning to switch over from proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake (PoS) algorithm. Is PoS secure, at scale?
  • 18:49 – What is your opinion about the role and risks of patents, patent strategies, and patent trolling in the blockchain ecosystem?
  • 23:22 – Should there be a separation between money and state? What role will blockchains play in a «perfect» economical / social order? What are the issues for democracy when government operations are decoupled from tax revenue?
  • 27:23 – Should countries create national cryptocurrencies?
  • 31:44 – What can the general population do to secure themselves in the event of an economic collapse? Is Bitcoin an exit / safe haven?
    Should investors diversify their investment portfolio?
  • 36:44 – Which centralised services in the financial sector should be decentralised? What will the impact be?
  • 40:20 – What is the role of drama and adversarial debate in the global, decentralised community?

Leave a comment

Deine E-Mail-Adresse wird nicht veröffentlicht. Erforderliche Felder sind mit * markiert

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.