My name’s Carolyn, and I work with ConsenSys Systems, which is a company that’s building applications on the Ethereum blockchain. I got into Blockchain technology, and Ethereum specifically, through, i guess like a non-traditional route. I’m not a developer, I’m not a technical person. When I learned about Ethereum through some friends of mine, actually in Boston, at the MIT Media lab, some people who were doing research on it, I was introduced to it from almost a philosophical perspective. What really appealed to me about it was the massive potential that the technology has for shifting humanity forward in a lot of different, social, economic, political realms, and really sort of, being a piece of technology that will help to actualize the organic movement of human systems and human relationships, from localized and requiring trust in institutions, to global and networked with increasing complexity.
My background is in the social sciences, so learning about some of the more technical aspects of Ethereum was kind of daunting and took me a while to get into it and learn all of the terminology, like what’s a hash and a Merkle tree. All that stuff is really foreign, and being in this industry and not coming from a technical background, it can be kind of funny and frustrating to kind of hear all that technical terminology to describe it all the time. Because really, I think what the technology is in its essence, can be described in ways that kind of don’t go into all the cryptography and the math. And it’s something that I think that you could reach a lot of people in a lot of different audiences, if there were more people in this space who understood it in a more holistic and historical perspective.
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