There's another legal aspect in all of this - and that is what happens with smart contracts - context 'contract' being legally binding... When it comes to regulatory compliance, this is going to be very interesting to see how various concerns are addressed - for the broader industry to consider. One book on topic here - as point of reference - https://www.amazon.com/Blockchain-Law-Rule-Primavera-Filippi/dp/0674976428
I recommend books my ConsenSys colleagues have contributed to!
Blockchain and the Law: The Rule of Code that Aaron Wright co-authored, Aaron is also one of the founders of our product OpenLaw: https://www.amazon.com/Blockchain-Law-Rule-Primavera-Filippi/dp/0674976428/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=aaron+wright&qid=1552073733&s=gateway&sr=8-2
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Michael W. from Infura contributed to Blockchain: A Practical Guide to Developing Business, Law, and Technology Solutions: https://www.amazon.com/Blockchain-Practical-Developing-Technology-Solutions-ebook/dp/B07987X1R7/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=Michael+wuehler&qid=1552073797&s=gateway&sr=8-1-fkmrnull
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ConsenSys Academy has a great book and materials as well:
https://consensys.net/academy/
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In terms of Twitter, some of my favorite people to follow are the following:
https://twitter.com/somemikesena
https://twitter.com/owocki u/owocki
https://twitter.com/melindagates
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Apart from what I've already mentioned in terms of countries, I think what the EU will do in blockchain and emerging technologies will be incredibly exciting. Of course watching a lot of the adoption in Asia is super fascinating as well.
I'm still interested in an inter-subjective conversation. Yes, of course it is about record keeping. Secure timestamps when running on reputation-based infrastructure are expensive, look at the increase in price-performance overall with distributed ledger technology, what Buckminster Fuller called "ephemeralization" in last century. The word journal is, literally, daily, and, in Swedish, "time-writing". That you see the world not as it is but as you are, that is why people tend to make false associations. The advances in "trust technology" have been exponential, like with any other technology, and are ongoing.
Now could be a good time to catch up with "consensus technology" as a new record-keeping infrastructure, here you have Forbes, 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/francescoppola/2016/04/03/ethereum-towards-a-new-bitsociety/, The Economist in 2015, https://www.economist.com/leaders/2015/10/31/the-trust-machine, Amazon in 2018, https://www.amazon.com/Blockchain-Law-Rule-Primavera-Filippi/dp/0674976428
The development of "consensus technology" goes back to the 1980s, the invention of hash-linking, as well as the 70s with the RSA public-private key cryptography (first hypothesized in the 1960s), and ECC in the 1990s. Ethereum has a market cap of 50 billion USD, the web 3.0 as a whole (still early days) around 1 trillion USD, 1/100th of the 100 trillion dollar estimate for the global economy.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/francescoppola/2016/04/03/ethereum-towards-a-new-bitsociety/
https://www.amazon.com/Blockchain-Law-Rule-Primavera-Filippi/dp/0674976428
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2015/10/31/the-trust-machine
As for "crazy person", just a statist belief, in the 13th century, you had people believing in "witches" and "heathens", a byproduct of centralised reputation systems as a way to produce a consensus trance. This century, that is getting a bit outdated.
Knowing that there was gene transfer between Gorilla, Pan and Homo at the time of the Pan-Homo split (see ps5, Li-Sucholeiki, 1999; Popadin, 2017), how could you possibly believe that incomplete lineage sorting (ILS) is more parsimonious?