En Route to DevCon
It's my first time to China and I'm so excited about this trip. I'm here in Lounge 41 at Amsterdam having just flown from Dublin. I can see all the Dreamliners, 747s and A380s going past - it's awesome. I still feel great wonderment from flying. In my case, it's a KLM 747 - it may be my last time to experience this beautiful aircraft as it reaches its end of life. I purposely avoided the A380 to experience the 747.
But my focus of this trip is not on the journey. It's DevCon and the chance to meet some of the brightest minds in the world who are coming together to accelerate the next wave of the internet: the internet of value. I've been a bit of a Bitcoin hobbyist for about three or four years now - I ran my own node, dabbled in a bit of mining, bought a few things, went to a few meetups, etc. But I felt things were stagnating and began to look outside the dominant Bitcoin space and saw what else was going on. I became interested in Ripple - it was fast and lightweight, had verified addresses and was schmoozying up with big corporates, banks and governments. But I don't think the innovation capacity is there and I don't think there's a will to create a closed system like Ripple which in my view, constrains the usefullness of public ledger/blockchain technology.
So what can we expect from DevCon? Who knows! But if I get to see Vitalik and Gavin Wood and a few others, I'll be a very happy man. I have two or three projects in the works at the moment and am looking towards the ether.camp hack. I hope that DevCon can give me even more energy and enthusiasm and that I can meet amazing people with cool ideas and dreams for the future.
West going to East. Yes, it's a sunrise...
Nice airport lounge at Amsterdam
I'm looking forward to Vitalik's work on scalability, seeing all the Dapp demos and seeing what corporations/banks/government agencies are doing with Ethereum. But most of all, I'm looking forward to immersing myself in all this for a few days and bring away new ideas, renewed optimism and even more motivation.
The future for Ethereum looks pretty healthy. There have been a number of prunings in recent months (notably "the" DAO incident and the emergence of a "classic" fork). While there has been short-term pain for many ETH participants, the rose bush is looking a lot healthier as we await the first flowers to appear.
In a few months, we could be talking about "Finneys" the way we talk about "Ethers" now, but let's not get too "moony" just yet. The tempered enthusiasm of the Ethereum community is impressive and the intelligent folks over on /r/Ethereum are quick to nip such crazy moon posts in the bud and direct such users elsewhere.
Just got off the incredible 430km/hr Maglev train from the airport. It was driven by a very nice looking young lady which was a pleasant surprise! Will head down to the Hyatt as soon as I can and hope to meet as many Ethereum people as I can during my short few days in Shanghai.