New technologies large and small spark to life all the time. Some make a brief flash and fizzle out, and some burst into supernovas that change industries and regular consumers’ lives.

At the Block Chain Conference in San Francisco, Jeff Frick, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, had a chance to talk to some industry heavyweights about their own prognoses for blockchain.

One such guest was John Wolpert, global blockchain offering director at IBM, who said that, to him, it felt like something big had tumbled out on the industry from an unexpected source. “Would we have iTunes without Napster? Would we have Netflix without BitTorrent?” he said, implying that bitcoin’s creation has legs and could go on to become more than anyone guessed.

The Internet’s next evolution

“Whenever the Internet wants to evolve, we’ve been there helping,” Wolpert said of IBM, adding that the company is gung-ho to assist where needed and is not simply grabbing for proprietary rights.

And what Bitcoin had done with blockchain, and what others are doing with it in turn is “an evolution of the Internet,” he added. Instead of an Internet of computers pointing to other computers, we have computers that we can actually trust to do important things like transfer value securely.

Wolpert stated that, to him, it felt like the early days of Java and that this could be the year that blockchain commands the attention of enterprises.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of The Block Chain Conference.

Photo by SiliconANGLE