Beyond the Bubble - Taylor Gerring

you Taylor developers developers developed it in the ond the bubble yeah so sounds good cool uh my name is Taylor Goering thank you I've been working with athyrium for a while now and I wanted to give a less technical talk you can see here I've tied a little it beyond the bubble and I wasn't sure exactly what I was going to present but in the end overcoming education and adoption challenges for the block chain industry sound so I get asked a lot what do i do it etherium right it's kind of like this what would you say you do here this is from the movie office space yeah so what do i do at etherium this is me in the very beginning at Miami when vitalik announced the project and since then I've worked on a couple components of the project at first I was working on the website then I helped on-the-go etherion project and then infrastructure and now I'm doing less technical work I'm doing kind of external relations and what is that really what's really taking technical topics breaking them down for the layperson and explaining them in a very simple way so this is kind of what I do athyrium blockchain platform come hear the gospel I go to meet ups public conferences like this one private symposiums and do some block chain education and training you can see here is there a pointer nope so on the bottom left here I just went to this in orlando a couple weeks ago and had the pleasure of speaking with the CIA FBI DEA Secret Service sec and a few others kind of nerve-racking being in the crypto industry and talking to these organizations but interesting nonetheless because I get to hear what they think about blockchain and I get to share what I think about blockchain with them why have I chosen to do this right I have the technical capability to program so why go down this route of less technical things well I want to answer questions about growth beyond our very small industry very very small trying to find the perfect elevator pitch and I'd like to help avoid the stagnation that plagued the Bitcoin meetup scene after two or three years I think the value transfer aspect has been discussed and the meetups kind of died down a little bit so I have good news well we've already started really pushing beyond our small little industry and I think we all know that fintech is rapidly developing block chain solutions and we have ongoing interests I get calls from people emails from people all the time and they want help with various projects and some of those projects are IOT some of those projects are energy medical related I think they're pretty much ready for adoption fintech has picked up the baton if you will and run with it and I think these other segments are about to grab the baton and continue the race and soon I really hope that we'll have governments and nonprofits on board there seems to be a lot of interest for voting applications and other things like that it's hard to really say Vitalik wrote a blog post about the long tail of block chains and we don't really know but it's starting so another aspect of this is mom and dad how do you explain to mom and dad what our block chains for they're not corporate enterprises that are looking for efficiency gains they're not fintech organizations look to transfer money faster they don't really care that much about IOT and having a light bulb that talks to your refrigerator so how can you get mom and dad on board with blockchain well there's a big problem generally people don't really care about technical innovation you know if you're not in the tech industry why would you care about blockchain my mom's a nurse she doesn't care about blockchain but if it's something that immediately improves their lives or makes their lives worse they're definitely going to pay attention to this and what I've come up with in terms of talking to my mom and getting her to understand block chain and why it's important to me and why I think I can make an impact on the world it kind of really boils down to the slide up here the internet still functions off 1970s technology you send an email it's in plain text you access a web page general eat some plain text and the results of this is actually is that our data is leaked by companies all the time because our data is stored on their servers our identities are stolen by hackers if you have shopped at home depot or Target or a variety of other organizations and you have a credit card stored online there's a good chance that that credit card was leaked to hackers and also we have this problem of our behavior being monetized by advertisers which isn't a problem in and of itself but if you're going to monetize my actions maybe I have like a cut of that too so it's kind of interesting we're still working with 40 year old technology lets say and yet the yet web is ubiquitous we all have smartphone supercomputers in our pocket that connect to a global information store and it's everywhere in fact if you were born after nineteen ninety five or so you've never lived in a world without internet which i think is really amazing I grew up in the 80s and I had computers without networks and that was really cool and I really don't understand how I was able to function back then because I'm so addicted to the internet now but yeah I have a young sister and she was born after 1995 and rather than her friend coming over to hang out they would FaceTime each other they just pop up the iPad and hang out like they were in person but over the internet so she has a vastly different understanding of the world and its connectivity than I do so we have an Internet age most of the world's getting connected and we still have these broken 1970s legacy technology why why are there no obvious solutions why haven't we fixed this yet we know it's a problem the good news is people are beginning to understand the need to have the same privacy and security guarantees online as with offline so one really good example of this is if you want to have a private conversation with your friend doing it on lines a little harder you can't step into a room off the side close the door and have a private discussion and I think we should change that as our lives become more and more connected it's going to become more and more necessary to have these kinds of conversations not because you have anything to hide but we need these digital versions of what we're used to in the physical world and on top of that with all the hacks and all the leaks even older generations are starting to see the need to have security and privacy by default we want our emails and messages encrypted we want our online transactions to be encrypted really there's no reason that most of our activity shouldn't be encrypted by default so let's start building these systems and really this is kind of where i boiled everything down so i gave a talk last year at defqon.1 in London and it was entitled etherium in the enterprise and I basically created a selling point for IT managers IT professionals say these are things that you can bring back to your organization and try to integrate blockchain or distributed technology into your organization and I think was a really nice way to kind of give that sell to people that weren't so interested in the ideological principles of blockchain but found the technology interesting nonetheless since then having had a lot of conversations about the properties of blockchain and and this technology peer-to-peer technology so forth I found that actually this idea of data under owner authority to be very powerful this was a phrase that I borrowed from nick szabo he wrote about it some time ago I boil this down though because it's a bit dense of a phrase and really it boils down to own your own data right we all use Dropbox and services like store our files but at the end of the day we don't really own that data we upload pictures to social media sites we don't own that data shouldn't I own that data it's my photo so far more than be your own Bank people are interested in own your own data and even my mom understands this which is a huge leap for her I think so yeah what can we do what does this have to do with blockchain right we ran athyrium devcon blockchain TED conference well part of what I'm trying to do is get outside this industry and move into other parts of the technology industry and explain to them how block chain can be used so for example next month I'll be heading to all things open in Raleigh North Carolina and there i'll be talking with two thousand free and open source software people that are interested in this kind of technology IOT and the like and I think it's going to be our job to help build a better web a better internet this is something that we've talked about in a theorem for a long time a vision of web three something more secure more distributed less failure so I think over the next couple years something people have asked me as well you know what's going to happen we've seen what's happened the last two what's going to happen the next to and really all our Lego blocks that we've been building are starting to come together and we're going to take those lego blocks and start building bigger and better things and in that process I really hope that we build a better web a better internet something that is similar to the app experience this is an experience that is proven people understand it and we're building it I'm sure you've all seen this image up here a few other times but it's a listing of DAPs I think this is a really great way to explain to people what's possible until it's ultimately a fabric of the internet and in the end if we do this all right people will have the ability to manage their digital lives and I think that having that kind of control over their digital life just as they do with their physical life will be something empowering to most people that they will start to appreciate the kind of work that we're doing now the effort the man-hours the years of times building this for what they thought was a questionable purpose but in the end we can actually give it a lot of meaning to them so that's it that's how we can push beyond the bubble thank you