Erik Feyen, Lead Financial Sector Economist, FCI and Michael Casey, author and senior advisor at MIT Media Lab's Digital Currency Initiative presented The Truth Machine: Blockchain and the Future of Everything on Nov 5. View Feyen's presentation slides from the discussion.

A walk through the 7,000 history of record-keeping and its role in helping societies overcome trust challenges to build civilization. That history shows that underneath all the distractions of price bubbles and hype, lies a powerful idea in the blockchain community: that the "shared truths" upon which people and businesses develop relationships and conduct commerce can now be determined by a decentralized consensus rather than the say-so of a centralized ledger-keeper. This offers big opportunities to significantly lower society's "cost of trust," opportunities that are rarely discussed and insufficiently recognized in all the debates over blockchain's value. It also means that the power of independent software can now, for the first time, be seamlessly applied to the way in which society measures, records and exchanges value, opening up a host of potential uses in which transacting entities can overcome trust barriers to jointly improve their management of resources.