The Decentralized World as I See it.

Published in

Coinmonks

6 min readMay 3, 2018

Please note this is an opinion piece.

Every now and then you find inspiration from the mundane. Today I sit in my car on the way home from a long day of work followed by a Solidity study session with my friend at a local brewery in Boston. Heavy traffic, which plagues many of the major cities built too long ago for too few, also infects the city of Boston. This gives people plenty of time to be alone with their own thoughts. Well today my thoughts drifted to the other cars around me. I have a question for you, reader…

How can you prove to me you own your car?

Sure, you can provide me with the title or the loan information. This data is presumably kept on a database so if I dispute the information it can be verified. In doing so you are also accepting that whoever owns that database is a truthful source, and also that the data can be breached and modified by malicious hackers who find security vulnerabilities, calling into question every record on that database. I am hopeful that these systems are well maintained and guarded, but I have come to realize these systems are archaic. They are the modern seal from the crown.

I have some bad news. We own items, but we don’t own the data that represents these items. We have freely given these rights away as technology companies have grown larger and as governments around the world own more data about their people than ever before. It is time for this to end. The solutions are being built.

Blockchains, smart contracts, and the world computer

In the near future, owning your car will also be owning your car’s data on multiple worldwide databases called blockchains.

How can a blockchain ensure ownership?

By a unique key owned by you. This key is a long array of character’s and numbers that would be nearly impossible for someone to crack. It is commonly known that you can receive and send bitcoin, ether, and other coins with these keys, but what is less commonly known is that your key can also be the owner of smart contracts which live on a blockchain.

What does a smart contract contain? Here’s a simple example that is by all means not everything you would find on a car’s smart contract.

Smart Contract Car
Address: 0xfkdsovjiofi432ffyy5y5fda (Address of the smart contract)
Owner: 0xf8349fj2304g3438204312 (A public key that represents your private key)
Other Info: Vin, Year, Make, Model, Previous Repairs, TitleOwner, License Plate
Actions that the owner can take:
Transfer Ownership to new key

With the right key, you can now prove you own the car that this smart contract represents. Governments or companies can now utilize the data, but it is you alone who can claim ownership of it. It’s possible that this contract could also contain various modifications that third parties could take, but only you could transfer ownership of it. A repair shop could have the keys to a smart contract that represents a car shop. That repair shop could have the rights to add a previous repair to this contract.

And this was the thought that set off the firestorm as I sit in traffic. When a car can be a contract, anything can be a contract. Companies could create contracts for items they sell that you will have provable ownership of. Samsung, for example, could sell you Galaxy s10 contracts before the phone even comes out and you could use that contract to pick one up at the store. One day, there will even be contracts that represent you. One that a government can use to levy taxes and give voting rights to, that a school can use to ensure you’re a student, that a family can use to keep records. Anything that is currently done on centralized databases to represent ownership or relationships of items in the real world, will be represented on these blockchains as smart contracts. You will finally own the digital presence of the physical assets you already own. It will be the world computer.

many objects connected together by arrays of 1’s and 0's

Beyond the physical, people can create applications with these smart contracts to cut out most of the middleman companies that have grown so large due to the currently centralized world. Uber, Facebook, and Ebay can all be replaced with smart contracts, reducing prices people pay for services and increasing data ownership. Even the stock market will turn into 24 hour trading on a blockchain in the near future, as shares of companies become tokenized assets on the blockchain.

Ethereum, Ether, and Gas

Currently the most promising contender for the backbone of this decentralized future is Ethereum. Ethereum is the most widely used and developed upon blockchain that supports smart contracts. Ethereum distributes tokens called Ether. Any action taken to change something on the blockchain costs ether in the form of gas. In my opinion, if Ethereum manages to be the main blockchain of the future, then people who already hold Ether will see massive returns, as companies begin to realize that these tokens are essentially the digital oil of the future and begin to buy reserves, and we are already seeing hundreds of large companies taking interest in the technology. These tokens would run the entire economy and probably have a cap of around 120 million tokens or less, making them rare and valuable. If Ethereum wins the crypto-race, it will become the new standard to hold fiat currencies to. It will be the underlying valuable asset on which the entire world economy is based.

What happens next?

That’s up to you. There are many contenders to ethereum’s development throne. NEO, EOS, and Cardano to name a few. I encourage you to do your own research.

For developers, I encourage you to learn solidity and smart contract development, as companies will be starved for smart contract developers in the coming years. There is already high demand for these developers, and I only envision that the demand will grow. #BUIDL the decentralized future.

For non-devs, do more research on smart contracts and blockchains, consider investing in projects that look promising and contributing to the space by becoming knowledgable and sharing that information with your friends.

For now there are still a lot of hurdles to a fully fledged world computer, such as scaling these blockchains, but it would behoove you to educate yourself about these technologies earlier than later. Before you know it, it will encompass everything you do.