SVET Rating Weekly News Update (Feb 16–23, 2020)

24 Feb 2020 by rate3

From the top stories of the week for todays' weekends review I've chosen "The Stanford Blockchain Conference 2020" hold in Arrillaga Alumni Center, Stanford University at Feb. 19-21, 2020. Sorry for being a bit Silicon Valley centric :)

I'd been there all three days and was happy to see so many familiar faces as well as to meet a few new onces. Big shout to @byron_gibson and his team for organizing and managing this great event!

My general impression is that, although, compare to 2017, 2018 the overall attendance is visible lower (please, correct me if I'm wrong and factual data is different) the quality we've got from this conference is much higher.

Might be, it's because we all (in DLT industry) have became settled in our own individual ways during past 2-3 years and not any more seeing so many "suits", media people as well as moon-boys/girls roaming around.

I can't, of course, claim that I've listen to even 50% of all presentations featured in the McCaw hall during all those days (BTW: please, find a link to a full list below. Thank You, Harmony!):

Link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1APEBGPxIfvQqqBAQ311KpJG19DU9R2XZ2nd5jSPFynw/edit#gid=0

I can be very subjective in selecting only three of those to emphasis but here they are:

- "The Libra Blockchain & Move: A Technical Introduction" presented by Ben Maurer from Facebook/Calibra;

- "Beyond 51% attacks" by Vitalik Buterin;

- "The Best Incentive is No Incentive" by David Schwartz, CTO of Ripple Inc.

Ben had not revealed to us anything new. Of course, not :) but the mere fact of him talking provided a hope (might be still illusory one, of course) that the game is not yet over for FB and its crypto-dreams :)

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhZUItnyQ0k&t=16140s

I can only applaud to Vitalik's firm (so far) stance on sharding design, which relies not on committees, potentially leading to censorship issues, but on data availability checks. (I wasn't been able to find the link to this one)

As to David's defenses of Ripple's "forced stakeholders", some of its arguments reminded me political rally rhetoric :) but I leave it to your own unbiased investigation.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP63dTY_7j0