Ethereum’s Joseph Lubin: Blockchain will catch on in major way

The global economy will be 10 times larger within the next 20 years and blockchain will play a key role when it fully ramifies, according to Ethereum Co-Founder Joseph Lubin.

Speaking this week at the SXSW conference, he said: “There aren’t a lot of ‘normal people’ using these systems right now. But then there weren’t a lot of ‘normal people’ firing around emails in 1983. As we and others build tokenization into our company, and we are experimenting with something called ‘mesh coin’ and offer tools to enable others, small startups or similarly minded entities, we think it’s going to catch on.”

He added: “In Bitcoin and currently in Ethereum, you need to have specialised hardware, burn lots of electricity, waste lots of computation, to basically keep everybody in sync. With Ethereum 2.0, in 18 months, we’ll have a blockchain system much more powerful and scalable that uses orders of magnitude less energy.”

Also this week, Lubin claimed that Ethereum can revolutionise the music business. “I think artists in the music industry on average capture about 11 or 12% of the value in the industry and those big record companies are sucking up 70 or so per cent,” he said.

“We can replace those record companies with smart contracts on the Ethereum platform.”