The Blockchain’s Great Power Shift… to us. Welcome to our weird future — where we save our jobs, own our data, and shake up governments
- Muneeb Ali, of Blockstack, Greg McMullen, of IPDB Foundation, Trent McConaghy of BigchainDB and Fabian Vogelsteller of Ethereum discuss the biggest leap in tech since the world wide web.
- First, we’ll spend differently… and then governments will need to change.
- What would your revolutionary actions be if your privacy was guaranteed?
It’s clear the Blockchain can change a lot of things — but what will they be exactly, and how will it happen?
Every major societal shift has been coupled with an accompanying technological shift; from the Iron Age to the Industrial Revolution and beyond. Innovation is projected to proceed at an exponential rate, and our near future is probably somewhere in between “exciting”, “scary” and “bewildering.”
The blockchain is one technology that will be a fundamental part of this wider picture — but while its possibilities are enormous, they can be difficult to comprehend.
We asked four of the most forward-looking practitioners working with the blockchain to describe their versions of the future: and they describe a future of viable artistry, shaken governments, guaranteed anonymity — and how we might not even notice as the world changes beneath our feet…
TOA.life: The possibilities of the blockchain seem far-reaching and revolutionary — is it possible for the Blockchain to be “bigger than the internet?”
Greg McMullen, IPDB Foundation: It’s a silly question, but let’s take it seriously. Blockchain technology relies on networking technologies, so as big as blockchain tech gets, it will still be contained within the internet or other networks. That said, blockchain technology can open up a whole new range of possibilities for how we use the internet.
Trent McConaghy, Founder & CTO of BigchainDB: Blockchain technology will help usher in the next generation of the internet. Whereas the internet so far was about connecting people around information, blockchain technology connects around value.
Muneeb Ali, Co-founder, Blockstack: I think the answer is “yes”. The Internet was about bringing communications online, so it replaced letters with emails, DVDs with video streaming, and so on.
The blockchain is about bringing property online. And the class of applications that this enables seems larger than the class of applications than the Internet enabled.
Fabian Vogelsteller, creator of the Ethereum-Wallet and the Mist browser: I foresee it being the basic structure behind many business, economic and financial transactions. This way it will power IOT, banking and other value chains.
TM: For the public internet, this has two key ramifications: we regain control of our personal data (rather than it being locked in walled gardens), and creators can get directly compensated for their works (rather than taking a tiny slice of already-tiny ad revenue).
MA: Blockchains, for the first time, enable digital property to exist in a secure and verifiable way (without relying on any companies). Digital currency is just one type of property — usernames, user data, mortgages, software licenses, digital art, shares in a company, etc. can also be represented.
GM: As big as the internet is now, it’s not very old. It’s just getting started. So it’s not unreasonable to think that blockchain-enabled uses of the internet could eventually be bigger than the entire internet is today. But the internet as a whole will be vastly larger than it is today too.
FV: So at some point the blockchain will be “bigger” than the internet today, but also more hidden.
“There will be a complete economy of robots and devices hard to imagine today.”
TOA.life: How do you describe the blockchain to someone for the first time? Do most of us even need to know what the blockchain is?
TM: Blockchain technology is a new type of database, where control is shared. Facebook, Google, Amazon etc. all use “big data” databases to store your social data, search data, shopping data, and the like.
But Facebook and Google control their database, despite storing your stuff. Imagine if this data was instead all stored in an internet-scale shared database that no one owned or controlled; yet you could control your information within it. That’s a blockchain database.
FV: Blockchain is a self regulating network, where nodes will automatically find a consensus about the truth, without that any third party can influence that truth. This way it will power a lot of the processes which clearing-houses and manual labor do today.
GM: I describe it as a single spreadsheet the whole world can access, anyone can write to, and no one can change. But that’s evolving to become a single computer the whole world can use. Most people won’t have to know what it is or how it works. They can just use the applications and services that are built on top of it.
MA: I don’t think in the long run it’ll matter if people understand the blockchain. Most people don’t really know what exactly is the “Internet” or what is the “cloud”. They have some vague understanding and that’s fine for most purposes. I usually describe the blockchain as a “secure cloud” to non-tech audiences and as a “trust machine” to tech audiences that are just getting introduced to the concept.
FV: Do we need to know about it in detail? No. Do we need to have a rough understanding? Yes. Just like we drive a car a few times and we feel secure in it, we will need to use blockchain tech to understand it.
TOA.life: What drew you to your specific area of interest and what is the important role that it will play? What are you most excited by?
MA: There have been attempts at creating a clean-slate new architecture for the Internet that fixes a lot of issues with the 30 year old system that we use today. These efforts have not really been successful. I got convinced that blockchains can not only enable a new, secure Internet on a technical level but they can also provide the right incentives for developers, companies, and investors to actual deploy, maintain, and grow the network.
FV: I was drawn by the idea that money can be in the hands of everybody again, without central authority. The most important role will probably be the brain of IoT and a computer based infrastructure. There will be a complete economy of robots and devices hard to imagine today.
GM: I’m really excited by the vision of a single computer for a the whole world. But in order for it to work we need it to work at the scale of the internet. We are building IPDB to provide that database — an internet scale big data database with assets and decentralized control.
TM: Scale will finally unlock the potential of blockchain technology that everyone’s been talking about. My interest is in bringing truly internet-scale blockchain databases to the world. This is what we’ve been building: BigchainDB as the software, IPDB as the public network, for everyone from startups to enterprises to build on top of.
TOA.life: One popular theory is that the blockchain in 2016 is like the Internet in 1996: on the cusp of affecting everyone’s life in a fundamental way. Do you agree — and how is this change going to take place?
TM: Yes, I agree. First, the infrastructure will get sufficiently powerful to support applications that affect millions. The killer apps for the public infrastructure will come next. In the near term they will be related to identity and intellectual property. Advances in identity will be around sovereign personal data (for social networks, reputation, medical records, and more); and identity assurance (for example, a refugee can show that he really is a medical doctor; or making it easier for “the unbanked” to get loans).
MA: I’d pick something like 1994 i.e., a time before Netscape the browser came out. With blockchains we’re still at a stage where the underlying tech is very raw and there is no easy way for users to use the technology and even developers to build things on top. On the flip side, some of the core infrastructure and tech has been developed and deployed (just like how ISPs were coming online and basic connectivity was getting established). We’ll likely see an increasing rate of growth in the eco-system.
FV: I’m mostly excited by the idea of a faster and more automated world, where you don’t need to sign up anymore, fill out forms, or wait days on a bank transfer. This is already possible today if you only deal with cryptocurrencies and services. Everything there is automated, fast and can be done over the internet. Manual labour is almost never necessary and the control and also responsibility is in most cases with the user.
“We will ask ourselves, ‘how did we use the internet before?!’”
TOA.life: Is the blockchain going to make a noticeable difference in our lives? Will our standard “tech experience” — apps, phones, online shopping, etc — remain the same?
TM: At first, not in a big way, because much of the change will be under the hood and it won’t be noticeable. But [it] is really a rewiring of the application’s social architecture, and that rewiring will unlock other larger changes in society. Blockchain technology can reshape control structures from a hierarchy where control is at the middle and top, to where control is by the humans in the leaf nodes and the rest of the structure has shrunk.
This will start in corporations… but then start to permeate governments too.
FV: Imagine a world in which you can simply log into any service without using a password, just your phone or some different hardware device. The service is the able to pull every piece of KYC (Know Your Customer) information without you ever filling in a form again.
Then you could also anonymously pay without revealing any information about yourself: read a news article online by paying 5 cents with one click. All this doesn’t seem big, but if it dominates the majority of the internet user experience, we will ask ourselves, “how did we use the internet before?!”
GM: We’ve only had smartphones for ten years and we won’t have them forever. We’re already talking about moving on to voice interfaces or augmented reality. Blockchain technology will power some of the most exciting applications these new devices have to offer.
We don’t know what form these new technologies will take but we can be pretty sure it won’t be in the app and phone model.
“The 2020s are going to be very weird.”
TOA.life: Finally, what is your vision of a fully-Blockchain-enabled world? In ten years’ time, how will our day-to-day lives have been affected?
MA: I think that blockchains will not only enable a more secure digitally connected world, but they’ll also break large monopolies. Blockchains enable open, neutral networks that are hard to monopolize. So a shift to “organic local stores,” compared to everyone going to a “Walmart”. Users owning their own data, instead of everyone depositing their data in a central service like Facebook.
TM: Advances in Intellectual Property will be around reducing friction in connecting creators and their audiences, for a variety of verticals from digital art to music to 3D design. We’ll also see blockchain reshaping other industries, which will have trickle-down effects to the customer; most notably financial, energy, supply chain, and government.
GM: We will see the revolutionary parts of blockchain technology coming into their own along with other new technologies — primarily augmented reality and artificial intelligence.
For example: property rights in virtual items like video game items, or the ability to show off those game items in a shared virtual environment, and the ability to sell your game loot to third parties. Things like freemyvunk.com mean that hunting for valuable relics in popular games could become a full-time job.
TM: Farther out, we’ll start to see SaaS-style businesses become fully autonomous, that is, to be “decentralized autonomous organizations” (DAOs), software agents that own themselves. Then, for even more efficiency, DAOs will get infused with AI to make AI DAOs, and that’s where things will get really interesting.
GM: And that’s just getting started. The 2020s are going to be very weird.
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