How the blockchain is changing money and business - Don Tapscott | 2021 |

The technology that will likely have the biggest impact in the coming decades has arrived and it's not social media, it's not big data, it's not robotics, it's not even artificial intelligence, and you'll be surprised to learn that it's the underlying technology of digital currencies like bitcoin. It's now called

blockchain

, it's not the loudest word in the world, but I believe that this is now the next generation of the Internet and that it holds great promise for all companies, all societies and for all of you individually, as you know. in the past. For a few decades we've had the Internet of information and when I send you an email or a PowerPoint file or something like that, I don't actually send you the original, I send you a copy and that's great, it's democratized information, but when it comes to assets things like

money

financial assets like stocks and bonds loyalty points intellectual property music art a vote carbon credit and other assets sending you a copy is a very bad idea if I send you a hundred dollars it is very important that I do not have them yet

money

and that I can't send it to you, which is why cryptographers have called it the double spending problem for a long time, which is why today we are completely dependent on large intermediaries, intermediaries like banks, governments, large social media companies, credit card companies, etc. ., to establish We trust our economy and these intermediaries perform all the commercial and transaction logic of all types of commerce, from authentication, identification of people to clearing, settlement and record keeping and, in general, They do a pretty good job, but there are growing problems to begin with. centralized, that means they can be hacked and increasingly they are and jp morgan US federal government linkedin home depot and others found that the hard way they exclude billions of people from the global economy e.g. , people who don't have enough money to have a bank account slow things down, an email may take a second to go around the world, but money can take days or weeks to move through the banking system throughout the city and They take a big chunk of the action, between 10 and 20 percent, just to send money to another country they capture our data and that means we can't monetize it or use it to better manage our lives and our privacy is being undermined and the The biggest problem is that in general they have appropriated the generosity of digital.

We age asymmetrically and we have wealth creation, but we have growing social inequality. So what would happen if there was not only an Internet of information? What if there was an Internet of Value, a kind of vast distributed global ledger running on millions of computers and available to everyone and where all types of assets, from money to music, could be stored, moved, transacted? , exchanged and managed, all without powerful intermediaries, what if there was a native medium for value? Well in 2008 the financial industry collapsed and perhaps auspiciously an unknown or anonymous person named satoshi nakamoto created an article in which he developed a protocol for a digital cache that used an underlying cryptocurrency called bitcoin and this cryptocurrency allowed people to establish trusts and conduct transactions without a third party and the seemingly simple act set off a spark that ignited the world that has everyone excited. or terrified or interested in many places, now don't be confused with bitcoin, it's okay, bitcoin is an asset that goes up and down and that should be of interest to you if you are a speculator more generally, it is a cryptocurrency, it is not a currency controlled fiduciary. by a nation state and that is of greater interest, but the real pony here is the underlying technology which is called

blockchain

, so for the first time in human history people everywhere can trust each other and transact between peers and trust is not established by someone large institution, but through collaboration using cryptography and some clever code and because trust is native to technology, I call this the trust protocol.

Now you're probably wondering, how does this work? Fair enough assets, digital assets like money, music and everything else. between them are not stored in a central place, but are distributed in a global ledger using the highest level of cryptography and when a transaction is made, it is published globally on millions and millions of computers and all over the world there is a group of people called Miners, these are not young people, they are bitcoin miners and they have enormous computing power at their fingertips, 10 to 100 times bigger than all of Google around the world, and these miners do a lot of work and every 10 minutes is like the heartbeat of a network.

A block is created that has all the transactions from the previous 10 minutes and then the miners get to work trying to solve some difficult problems and compete and the first miner to discover the truth and validate the block is rewarded in digital currency in the event of the bitcoin blockchain with bitcoin and then this is the key part, that block is linked to the previous block in the previous block to create a chain of blocks and they all have a timestamp like with a digital wax seal, like this that if I wanted to go and hack a block and say pay you and you with the same money, I would have to hack that block plus all the previous blocks, the entire history of commerce on that blockchain, not just on a computer but on millions of computers simultaneously, all using the highest levels of encryption in light of the most powerful computing resource in the world which is looking at me hard to do and this is infinitely more secure than the computing systems we have today blockchain this is how it works, for what the bitcoin blockchain is just one there are many, the Ethereum blockchain was developed by a Canadian named Vitalik Butaran.

He is 19 years old and this blockchain has some extraordinary capabilities. One of them is that you can create smart contracts. It is what it seems, it is a self-executing contract. and the contract takes care of execution, management performance and payment, the contract also has a bank account in the sense of agreements between people and today on the ethereum blockchain there are projects underway to do everything from create a new replacement for the stock market. create a new model of democracy in which politicians are accountable to citizens, to understand the radical change this will bring, let's look at a financial services industry, you recognize this Rube Goldberg machine, it's a ridiculously complicated machine that does something really simple like crack An egg or closing a door reminds me of the financial services industry.

Honestly, I mean, you tap your card at the corner store and a stream of bits passes through a dozen companies, each with its own computer system, some of them are mainframes from the '70s. people in this room and three days later a deal happens with a blockchain financial industry, there would be no deal because the payment and the deal are the same activity, it's just a change in the ledger, so Wall Street and all around . the world the financial industry is in great turmoil so this is wondering if we can be replaced or how do we adopt this technology to be successful now why should you care well let me describe some applications prosperity the first era of internet which brought us internet of information wealth , but not shared prosperity, because social inequality is growing and this is at the heart of all the anger, extremism, protectionism, xenophobia and worse that we are seeing growing in the world today;

Brexit is the most recent case, so could we develop some new approaches to this inequality problem because the only approach today is to redistribute wealth, tax people and distribute it further. Could we predistribute wealth? Could we change the way wealth is created by first democratizing wealth creation by involving more people in the economy and to ensure they get fair compensation?