Bitcoin and Blockchains as Next App Platform SXSW BlockZombie Chris Mountford

You may be familiar with our series of interviews that take you inside Atlassian and show you how we make software. But the vision for Atlassian Tech TV has always been larger than that.

For something quite different, this episode I take you to South By SouthWest, a huge festival that takes place in Austin, Texas each year, with over 72,000 people attending. I was fortunate enough to be accepted to speak on a technology topic that is not only near to my heart, but also something I think is a pivotal piece of 21st century software infrastructure that I see as the next application platform for developers. I pitched this talk as an advanced topic for software developers, but as it happens there were also a lot of newbies who came to see what I had to say so I tried my best to make my material more accessible to a broader audience.

You might have heard of Bitcoin, and if you've read beyond the headlines you may also have heard of the blockchain. If you haven't read beyond the headlines and you're a software developer, you need to watch this. It's a long episode, as it covers a lot of material. So this time on Atlassian Tech TV, I present in its entirety, my talk on Bitcoin & Blockchains as the next app platform, recorded live at SXSW Interactive.

Talk Description:

Bitcoin and its blockchain are more than a currency and payment network. Bundled with peer-to-peer crypto toolchains and secure execution engines, blockchains enable novel distributed apps. Internet's missing piece of 25 years.

Never mind FinTech Startups, any app can use smart contracts, digital identity, content integrity, secure messaging and true ecommerce all with no trusted third-party.

Replacing trust with proof, our apps are more independent of mega-platform providers.

Crypto-era stacks monetize natively, scale without provisioning, uphold privacy, stop data corruption, secure execution and resist tampering.

Examples from: Ethereum, BitShares, MaidSafe, Counterparty.