Every day I see more analogies between the early years of the Internet and the evolution of the blockchain. In 1994, when the web came along, websites were the novelty, and up until about 1998, we kept lists of Global 2000 companies with or without websites. It took about three years before most companies were on-board. Then, many of these early sites were criticized for being just glorified brochures or information sheets, and we looked to Amazon as one of the few companies that actually conducted business on the Internet.
Fast forward to 2015. The blockchain is the new website. Yes, blockchains are geeky, (and the challenge is to take out that geekiness), but fairly soon, every company will have a blockchain, or be on a blockchain, or several ones, just as organizations are involved in many websites today. Why is the blockchain like a website, and what’s the novelty that blockchains bring to companies, individuals, society and governance?
Let’s remember the key mini-revolutions that the Internet (and websites) brought us since 1994: personal communication, self-publishing, e-commerce and the social Web. Each of these four phases was defined by the functions they disrupted: the post-office, print media, supply chains/physical stores, and the real world. Now we are entering the blockchain promise phase, demarcated by the key theme of decentralization of trust, or unleashing the flow of value without intermediaries.
The blockchain is custom-made for decentralizing trust and exchanging assets without central intermediaries. With the decentralization of trust, we will be able to exchange anything we own, and challenge existing trusted authorities and custodians that typically held the keys to accessing our assets, or verifying their authenticity.
We can think of the cryptocurrency known as Bitcoin as the training ground for what blockchains can enable, because Bitcoin is the most widely used blockchain application, […]
