Preceding this weekend’s Coin Congress in San Francisco, the inaugural Keynote 2015 took place Monday at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, focusing on practical applications of the blockchain as an easily implementable and scalable solution to a number of problems that extend far beyond digital payments.
With the help of an experienced and passionate audience who continued conversations past the end of any specific lecture, Keynote 2015 was able to effectively educate a wide variety of developers and innovators about the seemingly endless list of use cases for public ledgers.
Speakers included Marc van der Chijs, managing partner at CrossPacific Capital, Brennan Byre, CEO of Clef, and Pete Rizzo, U.S. editor at Coindesk. Partners included Blockchain, Netki, and Ledger, among others.
The same team that runs the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami every January managed Keynote 2015.
While the majority of lectures centered on online payment infrastructures, lectures led by Crowdfunder CEO Chance Barnett and FloQast co-founder and CEO Michael Whitmore focused on the blockchain applications for crowdfunding platforms and accounting software, respectively.
A few segments in particular drew muted criticism from the crowd. Silvio Tavares, CEO of The CardLinux Association, blamed credit card fraud on the Internet’s lack of security protocol rather than the credit cards themselves, saying, “Credit cards are secure. It’s the Internet that’s not secure.”
In addition, he attacked an often-cited belief that credit card fees are exorbitantly expensive for businesses, citing an article posted online on BloombergBusiness.
A panel of the Token executive team also drew criticism after concluding that Bitcoin isn’t ready to innovate the banking industry as key top-level individuals aren’t excited about either Bitcoin or the underlying blockchain technology.
It was almost fitting that Keynote 2015 was moved to the Millennium Biltmore Hotel, a 1923 Beaux Arts-inspired grand dame. With hand-painted frescoes and restored crown moldings, it seemed like the perfect venue to discuss a technology aimed to innovate archaic payment, accounting, security and database infrastructures. Because, after all, the real magic happens when you combine something old and something new.
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