Our Shared Vision of the Future
It’s time to start being honest with ourselves. Blockchains are confusing, and kind of scary. They’re not easy to understand. People use words like “trustless” and “consensus” and “incentive structure” when describing them. Like what does that even mean?
Well, society is evolving. Right now, we’re going through a rebirth of trust and values.
We started out trusting each other using facial expressions, body language, and eventually spoken language. Trust was based on social reputation.
As technology continued to grow, trust became “institutionalized” through the rise of centralized entities, like Facebook, Google, or the Federal Reserve. This was the natural evolution.
This new global, institutionalized trust model allowed strangers all over the world to communicate, share knowledge, participate in markets, and do business. That is, so long as we trusted the institutions in the middle to properly handle our data and money.
Things are good until they aren’t. But the shift is happening. I can sense it. Can you?
Public blockchain systems, beginning with Bitcoin, use our common interest — money — to incentivize immutability and finality of cryptographically-pure data.
That’s at the core of what’s happening. This a beautiful base on which to build new trust models. In fact, the builders among us are doing just that: hard at work designing, prototyping, and creating new businesses and industries based on a provably better way to participate in self-sovereign digital activities.
And with these new systems, the world is figuring out what it means to continue participating in a global digital economy like we’re used to, but without that traditional centralized institutional elephant in the room that we’re currently begrudgingly using to power our digital lives and businesses.
Like all good movements, this one happens from the bottom -> up. These new systems have been important since their ideas began to form over a decade ago. But they only truly matter once integrating with them is the norm. When the fabric of secured blockchain systems underpin our digital activities, considering the alternative will be ludicrous.
It’s time for us, as individuals, as businesses, as a community, as a species, to demand better for ourselves. We’re entrenched in our current ways, but don’t have to stay here. Let’s walk down this path together.
