Japan Blockchain Conference 2019 highlights

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Now on its second year, the Japan Blockchain Conference continued to open the doors of Japan for investors and organizations from around the globe venturing into the crypto and the blockchain space.

Held in Yokohama and supported by the Ministry of Economy, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Industry and Economic Affairs Bureau, this two-day event showcased latest developments and insights within the ecosystem from top companies and thought leaders in the country and the rest of the world.

One of the key topics this year is the use case of blockchain for various industries and enterprises. Rakuten, Japan’s e-commerce giant and one of the world’s top internet companies, has shared their company’s initiatives with blockchain.

Naojiro Hisada, Rakuten Inc. executive officer, spoke about the developments happening in their company including the Rakuten Blockchain Lab. This project aims to provide platform services for cryptocurrency, key custody and enterprise blockchain. Two of these projects are the Rakuten Energy Trading System (RETS) for data carbon offset trading and R-Star, a coin rewards system that the company rolled out internally. Hisada was mum about Rakuten accepting Bitcoin Core (BTC) payments this year after their acquisition of Everyone’s Bitcoin crypto exchange in 2018. He expects an announcement will be made in April.

Jimmy Nguyen, Bitcoin Association Founding President, spoke about the latest developments in Bitcoin SV. The one and only true Bitcoin has now opened up a whole new world of uses and is set to become the world’s data network and storage carrier after a single, no-hard-fork-needed change within the Bitcoin blockchain protocol was made recently. Nguyen updated the audience about the lifting of the data size limit of OP_Return, the functionality that allows embedding data into the blockchain. This simple yet impactful update now enables a single transaction within Bitcoin SV blockchain to hold 100KB of arbitrary data, and will be much higher in the future. This means that there is a full world of opportunities of what enterprises can do with Bitcoin SV.

When people hear about blockchain, a lot immediately thinks of crypto or even payment methods. However, there is more to blockchain than that. This event has opened conversations about data in blockchain. Some thought leaders from the crypto space—Dr. Craig Steven Wright and Alexander Shuglin—shared their views on data, creating content, monetizing and protecting these through the use of the blockchain.

According to Shulgin, “This decentralized ledger will allow the move of a lot of content.” He added, “Content, especially entertainment and media content will generate so much traffic around this.” He add these useful data will then be mined and be used by future sectors like smarts cities and industrial internet of things.

Wright has shared his views on the internet. He believes that the whole concept of data needs to be free is the biggest problem on the internet. With Bitcoin SV, content creators such as publishers and artists can monetize their data. He added that data wants to be valued, explaining, “When it’s valued, it becomes information and information is critical.”

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBb9FSxfyVs