How The Blockchain Will Transform Everything From Banking To Government To Our Identities - 1 views
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The first generation of the Internet was a great tool for communicating, collaborating and connecting online, but it was not ideal for business. When you send and share information on the Internet, you’re not sending an original but a copy. That’s good for information — it means people have a printing press for information and that information becomes democratized — but if you want to send an asset, it’s a problem. If I send you $100 online, you need to be sure you have it and I don’t, and that I can’t spend the same $100 somewhere else. As a result, we need intermediaries to perform critical roles — to establish identity between two parties in a transaction, and to do all the settlement transaction logic, which includes record-keeping.
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With blockchain, for the first time, we have a new digital medium for value where anyone can access anything of value — stocks, bonds, money, digital property, titles, deeds — and even things like identity and votes can be moved, stored and managed securely and privately. Trust is not established though a third party but with clever code and mass consensus using a network. That’s got huge implications for intermediaries and businesses and society at large
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There’s an opportunity to disrupt how those organizations work. Intermediaries, though they do a good job, have a few problems — they’re centralized, which makes them vulnerable to attack or failure
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With blockchain, we can go from redistributing wealth to distributing value and opportunity value fairly a priori, from cradle to grave.
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creating a true sharing economy by replacing service aggregators like Uber with distributed applications on the blockchain
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build accountable governments through transparency, smart contracts and revitalized models of democracy.
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So there’s a strange phenomenon from the first generation of the Internet where the most important asset class that’s been created is data —and we don’t control it or own it.
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an opportunity to profoundly change the nature of the entire industry. The Starbucks transaction should be instant.
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so this is both an existential threat to the financial services industry and an historic opportunity.
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With blockchain, you could have a third entry time-stamped in a distributed ledger that could be acceptable to any relevant stakeholders from regulators to shareholders, giving you a perfect record of the truth and thus the financial health of an organization.
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Nobel-winning economist Ronald Coase argued that firms exist because transaction costs in an open market are greater than the cost of doing things inside the boundaries of the corporation.
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you can now synthesize trust on an open platform and people who’ve never met can trust each other to do certain things. So this results in a whole number of new business models
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It turns out the Internet of Everything needs a Ledger of Everything, because a lightbulb buying power from your neighbor’s solar panel definitely won’t use banks or the Visa network
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Right now, governments take tax revenue from corporations, individuals, licenses and so on. All of that can change. We can first of all have transparency in a radical sense because sunlight is the best disinfectant. Secondly, we can open up governments in a different sense of sharing data.
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governments can enable self-organization to occur in society where companies, civil society organizations, NGOs, academics, foundations, and government agencies and individual citizens ought to use this data to self-organize and create what we used to call services or forms of public value. The third one has to do with the relationship between citizens and their governments.
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Electronic voting won’t be delivered by traditional server technology because it won’t be trusted by citizens