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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Don Tapscott
Read between
May 12 - June 12, 2018
Implications for the Blockchain Economy: The first era of the Internet missed all this. Now we have a platform where people and even things have proper financial incentives to collaborate effectively and create just about anything.
4. Security Principle: Safety measures are embedded in the network with no single point of
failure, and they provide not only confidentiality, but also authenticity and nonrepudiation to all activity.
Problem to Be Solved: Hacking, identity theft, fraud, cyberbullying, phishing, spam, malware, ransomware—all of these undermine the security of the individual in society.
Breakthrough: Satoshi required participants to use public key infrastructure (PKI) for establishing a secure platform. PKI is an advanced form of “asymmetric” cryptography, where users get two keys that don’t perform the same function: one is for encryption and one for decryption.
Digital currency isn’t stored in a file per se. It’s represented by transactions indicated by a cryptographic hash. Users hold the cryptokeys to their own money and transact directly with one another. With this security comes the responsibility of keeping one’s private keys private.
Implications for the Blockchain Economy: In the digital age, technological security is obviously the precondition to security of a person in society. Today bits can pass through our firewalls and wallets.
5. Privacy Principle: People should control their own data. Period.
Problem to Be Solved: Privacy is a basic human right and the foundation of free societies. In the last twenty years of the Internet, central databases in both public and private sectors have accumulated all sorts of confidential information about individuals and institutions, sometimes without their knowledge.
cyberclones of them by fracking the digital world for their data.
Breakthrough: Satoshi installed no identity requirement for the network layer itself, meaning that no one had to provide a name, e-mail address, or any other personal data in order to download and use the bitcoin software.
participants can choose to maintain a degree of personal anonymity in the sense that they needn’t attach any other details to their identity or store those details in a central database.
data is increasingly a toxic asset inside of corporations.”
Implications for the Blockchain Economy: To be sure, the blockchain provides opportunities to stop the stampede to a surveillance society. Now think about the problem of corporate big data for each of us.
Unless we shift to the new paradigm, it’s not science fiction to foresee hundreds of millions of avatars humming away in tomorrow’s data centers. With blockchain technology, you could own your personal avatars as you do in the Second Life virtual world, but with real-world implications.
6. Rights Preserved Principle: Ownership rights are transparent and enforceable.
Problem to Be Solved: The first era of the digital economy was about finding ways to exercise these rights more efficiently. The Internet became a medium for new forms of art, news, and entertainment, for establishing copyright of poems, songs, stories, photographs, and audio and video recordings.
In this great burst of efficiency, legitimate rights got trampled, the rights not only
to privacy and security but also free speech, reputation, and equal participation.
free. Breakthrough: The proof of work required to mint coins also time-stamps transactions, so that only the first spend of a coin would clear and settle. Combined with PKI, the blockchain not only prevents a double spend but also confirms ownership of every coin in circulation, and each transaction is immutable and irrevocable.
stealing their consent is not sustainable.”
smart contract provides a means for assigning usage rights to another party, as a composer might assign a completed song to a music publisher.
smart contract also provides a means for owners of assets to pool their resources and create a corporation on the blockchain, where the articles of incorporation are coded into the contract, clearly spelling out and enforcing the rights of those owners.
Implications for the Blockchain Economy: As an economic design principle, enforcing rights must start with clarifying rights. In the field of management science, the holacracy movement is an interesting, if not controversial, example of how members of organizations are defining the work that needs to be done and then assigning rights and the responsibility to do this work as part of a whole.
7. Inclusion Principle: The economy works best when it works for everyone.
distributed capitalism,
Problem to Be Solved: The first era of the Internet created many won...
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Breakthrough: Satoshi designed the system to work on top of the Internet stack (TCP/IP), but it could run without the Internet if necessary. Satoshi imagined that
the typical person would be interacting with the blockchain through what he called “simplified payment verification” (SPV) mode that can work on cell phones to mobilize the blockchain.
Implications for the Blockchain Economy: Later in the book, we tackle the issue of the prosperity paradox—how the first era of the Internet benefited many, but overall prosperity in the Western world for most people is no longer improving. The foundation for prosperity is inclusion, and blockchains can help. Let’s be clear that inclusion has multiple dimensions. It means an end to social, economic, and racial hegemony, an end to discrimination based on health, gender, sexual identification, or sexual preference. It means ending barriers to access because of where a person lives, whether a
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Rube Goldberg contraption of uneven developments and bizarre contradictions. First, the machine hasn’t had an upgrade in a while.
large multinationals like Apple or GE that have to maintain hundreds of bank accounts in local currencies around the world just to facilitate their operations.2
“The advent of technology essentially took paper-based processes and turned them into semiautomated, semielectronic processes but the logic was still paper based,” said Vikram Pandit, former CEO of Citigroup.
Regulators are still trying to manage this machine with rules devised for the industrial age. In New York State, money transmission laws date back to the Civil War when the primary means of moving money around was horse and buggy.
Erik Voorhees, an early bitcoin pioneer and outspoken critic of the banking system, told us, “It is faster to mail an anvil to China than it is to send money through the banking system to China. That’s crazy! Money is already digital, it’s not like they’re shipping pallets of cash when you do a wire!”
productivity paradox, laying new technologies over existing infrastructure is “not unusual during historical transitions from one technological paradigm to the next.”
days of Franken-finance are numbered as blockchain technology promises to make the next decade one of great upheaval and dislocation but also immense opportunity for those who seize it.
antiquated,
exclusive,
centralized,
monopol...
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Blockchain promises to solve th...
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six key reasons why blockchain technology will bring about profound changes to this industry,
Attestation: For the first time in history, two parties who neither know nor trust each other can transact and do business.
Cost: On the blockchain, the network both clears and settles peer-to-peer value transfers, and it does so continually so that its ledger is always up to date.
Speed: Today, remittances take three to seven days to settle.
bitcoin network takes an average of ten minutes to clear and settle all transactions conducted during that period.
Risk Management: Blockchain technology promises to mitigate several forms of financial risk.
settlement risk,
counterparty risk,
