Welcome in the blockchain era!

Time, effort and Trust: three pillars for rebuilding good human relations through enabling technologies

Every time that mankind has taken revolutionary steps forward, it provided the solutions to bridge some gaps. Through science and technology, people envisioned ways to make our lives easier, relieving us of the work strain, allowing a better access to the information and knowledge and, in turn, understanding the world and living our life in a different way.

Let’s take Gutemberg, for instance. He invented the printing press in 1455 providing a solution to a major technological gap: the spread of knowledge. Since then, the world became smaller with a wider access to the culture. The power concentration era ended while the decentralization era arose. The knowledge started being re-distributed within the community and everybody could benefit from it, thus increasing the level of awareness and participation.

During the nineteenth century, another gap linked to the power was bridged. The steam engine transformed different facets of people life: from manufacturing to transportation up to the war. Everything changed quickly. Distances became shorter and the speed in production increased exponentially. This growth in productivity laid the basis for the assembly line and thus for the rise of the mass consumption society.

Finally, we have the current revolution, the one that we have experienced and that we are still living today: the internet. The network. The ways we communicate, exchange data, deal with the world of information, of tourism, of culture, of manufacturing. Everything has dramatically changed. Nevertheless the way we spread knowledge and value has not been revised. Nowadays, everybody (or nearly everybody — 69.5% of Italian family has an high-speed internet access and 12.5% of Italian companies sells their products online [ISTAT 2017]) has a nearly unlimited access to knowledge, takes part in the process of building basic concepts for the entire system, including the economic one: trust, reputation.

However, the question is how much did we re-distribute the value generated through these steps? The world is smaller due to the internet, who is governing this world? Did we take advantages of the full potential of the internet? The internet, as we have used it up to now, has it been a real change of paradigm or conversely it has been only a different way to balance the power within a system based on power concentration?

At this point, it is important to introduce a key concept — TRUST. If we want to really give value to this phase where people relations change (because it is worth remembering that people are the best part of the internet), we need to begin from trust. We have Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter and other social media that allow us to join forces and reach important achievements; we are always connected and we know where our children are, we can check the health conditions of our grandmother or we can see the best path to discover a territory, all of these are possible thanks to our georeferenced apps. How much of this power is under our control? How much the trust linked to every step is confirmed by our community and how much of this trust in ensured by an external fiduciary body? Do we really need another model to manage people relations different from the one based on few bodies that own the whole information power? Would it be better to rethink the ability to gather people and the value of the collective intelligence? If we think about democracies we realize that, in order to ensure their quintessence, it is paramount to apply resolutely two key concepts: the distribution and the separation of power. It is unthinkable to imagine a powerless society, anyway it is possible to conceive a set of links for the power to be recognized and managed in a different way from what we are used to.

Imagine disintermediating all the relations and exchanges of economic and reputational value your commercial and social activities build on. Imagine that there is no external fiduciary body to necessarily validate these transfers of value, or imagine a system of exchange where not a fiduciary body but the network, with its computational power, can guarantee all the transfers of value. Welcome in the Blockchain Era.