We are lucky to live at a time when we may witness what could be the most transformational invention yet over the last hundreds of years. And we’re just scratching the surface.
I am not talking about the internet or the smart-phone.
BLOCKCHAIN will transform every fundamental aspect of our daily lives.
Stick with me. Sometimes it is easy to simply ignore something we don’t understand.
Yet, if it changes fundamentally the way we live, our rights, our dignities as human beings… isn’t it worth paying attention to?
It all started with money when bitcoin was created by Satoshi Nakamoto. Remember the 2008 financial global crisis? It was in response to that. How can we prevent systemic failure of the monetary system? Bitcoin was a rejection of the prevailing centralized banking system. As it turned out, money in the form of cryptocurrency is only one application of the blockchain.
(Even though that alone — disrupting the very notion of money like with bitcoin, would have tremendous ripple effects)… There’s energy, land, privacy, voting, identification, healthcare, etc. How our societies are structured and governed for the last few hundred years will change.
The blockchain is designed to eliminate systemic cheating and corruption.
It eliminates the need for middle persons, agencies or intermediaries.
IMAGINE…
You can transact without a bank and send your money across the world, anytime, anywhere, in an instant. No fees.
Trade directly without an exchange. No commissions.
Own land without the need for title companies. No processing fees.
Own back your data, track how it’s used and who uses it. Privacy violation — companies selling your data without your permission — would be a thing of the past.
… POWER back to us, common people
How liberating and empowering is that?
There are hardly any incentives for powerful institutions to support it. Banks would lose tremendous revenues. Governments would lose their authoritarian control. It will be more difficult to be corrupt. Large companies would lose billions of dollars profiting from our data for free.
Our land, our money, our data, our votes, our identities, our environment, our health, and so on becomes our own.
Why should we not have power over our own assets and rights?
This would be a bottom-up revolution. The adoption would have to come from the ground up.
If there’s a technology that turns the system upside down so we are no longer powerless in one, two or several aspects of our lives, would you still ignore it?
ONCE YOU KNOW BLOCKCHAIN, YOU MAY DISCOVER SOMETHING THAT COULD EMPOWER YOU IN WAYS YOU NEVER THOUGHT POSSIBLE.
NOTES:
There are many attempts to provide a simple definition of what seems like a complex concept. To me, blockchain is simply an incorruptible record-keeping system without the need for a centralised owner. And once you record it, it’s permanent. It is also time-stamped. There is no duplication, each record is unique. Now I leave to your imagination what are all the applications and implications of that in every aspect of our lives that involves record-keeping.
There are plenty of resources to find out more. Just search on YouTube or Google.
CAVEAT:
There’s a shadow side to any beacon of light. Those in the know can take advantage of the lack of knowledge or confusion. Big corporates are aggressively claiming patents of blockchain applications. There are companies who claim to provide blockchain but yet are not really immutable or decentralized. As someone put it “we are still in the diaper stage” of the technology.
