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by
Don Tapscott
Online, we still can’t reliably establish one another’s identities or trust one another to transact and exchange money without validation from a third party like a bank or a government.
These same intermediaries collect our data and invade our privacy for commercial gain and national security. Even
Experien. Credit agencies.
This is the distributed trust network that
This protocol is the foundation of a growing number of global distributed ledgers called blockchains—of which the bitcoin blockchain is the largest. While
Every ten minutes, like the heartbeat of the bitcoin network, all the transactions conducted are verified, cleared, and stored in a block which is linked to the preceding block, thereby creating a chain. Each block must refer to the preceding block to be valid. This structure permanently time-stamps
World Wide Ledger of value—a
more than $1 billion of venture capital flooded into the emerging blockchain ecosystem, and the rate of investment is almost doubling annually.8 “We’re quite confident,” said Marc Andreessen in an interview with The Washington Post, “that when we’re sitting here in 20 years, we’ll be talking about [blockchain technology] the way we talk about the Internet today.”
Powerful technology companies have shifted much activity from the open, distributed, egalitarian, and empowering Web to closed online walled gardens or proprietary, read-only applications that among other things kill the conversation. Corporate forces have captured many of these wonderful peer-to-peer, democratic, and open technologies and are using them to extract an inordinate share of value. The upshot is that, if anything, economic power
If you accumulate data and the power that comes with it, you can further fortify your position by producing proprietary knowledge. This privilege trumps merit, regardless of its origin.
Those who say “privacy is dead—get over it” are wrong.22 Privacy is the foundation of free societies. “People have
“Whereas most technologies tend to automate workers on the periphery doing menial tasks, blockchains automate away the center. Instead of putting the taxi driver out of a job, blockchain puts Uber out of a job and lets the taxi drivers work with the customer directly.”27
Bastions of the old financial order such as banks go to great lengths to defend monopolies and often stymie disruptive innovation. The financial system also runs on outmoded technology and is governed by regulations dating back to the nineteenth century. It is rife with contradictions and uneven developments, making it sometimes slow, oftentimes insecure, and largely opaque to many stakeholders. Distributed ledger
Universal property rights could lay the groundwork for a new agenda of global justice, economic growth, prosperity, and peace. In this new paradigm, rights are protected, not
