for abusing its “God’s View” knowledge of passengers’ rides? How about a totally decentralized solution, such as the Tel Aviv–based, blockchain-powered ride-sharing application Commuterz? In that case no one owns the platform, which like Bitcoin is just based on an open-source software protocol that anyone can download. There’s no Commuterz, Inc. taking 25 percent. Instead, users own and trade a native digital currency system that incentivizes them to share rides to reduce traffic congestion and lower the cost of transportation for all.
The broad idea is that by deferring the management of trust to a decentralized network guided by a common protocol instead of relying upon a trusted intermediary, and by introducing new, digital forms of money, tokens, and assets, we can change the very nature of social organization. We can encourage new approaches to collaboration and cooperation that weren’t possible before, transforming a wide array of industries and organizational settings. Indeed, the breadth of blockchain’s potential is captured in the breadth of the ideas under consideration. Here is sampling of possible use cases, and it is by no means an exhaustive list:
Inviolable property registries, which people can use to prove that they own their houses, cars, or other assets;
Real-time, direct, bank-to-bank settlement of securities exchanges, which could unlock trillions of dollars in an interbank market that currently passes such transactions through dozens of specialized institutions in a process that takes two to seven days;
Self-sovereign identities, which don’t depend on a government or a company to assert a person’s ID;
Decentralized computing, which supplants the corporate business of cloud computing and Web hosting with the hard drives and processing power of ordinary users’ computers;
Decentralized Internet of Things transactions, where devices can securely talk and transact with each other without the friction of an intermediary, making possible big advances in transportation and decentralized energy grids;
Blockchain-based supply chains, in which suppliers use a common data platform to share information about their business processes to greatly improve accountability, efficiency, and financing with the common purpose of producing a particular good;
Decentralized media and content, which would empower musicians and artists—and, in theory, anyone who posts information of value to the Net—to take charge of their digital content, knowing they can track and manage the use of this “digital asset.”
Blockchain technology could help achieve what some commentators are calling the promise of “Internet 3.0,” a re-architecting of the Net to assert the core objective of decentralization that inspired many of the early online pioneers who built the Internet 1.0. It turned out that simply giving networks of computers a way to share data directly wasn’t enough to prevent large corporate entities from taking control of the information economy. Silicon Valley’s anti-establishment coders hadn’t reckoned with the challenge of trust and how society traditionally turns to centralized institutions to deal with that. That failure was clear in the subsequent Internet 2.0 phase, which unlocked the power of social networks but also allowed first-mover companies to turn network effects into entrenched monopoly power. These included social media giants like Facebook and Twitter and e-marketplace success stories of the “sharing economy” such as Uber and Airbnb. Blockchain technologies, as well as other ideas contained in this Internet 3.0 phase, aim to do away with these intermediaries altogether, letting people forge their own bonds of trust to build social networks and business arrangements on their own terms.
The promise lies not just in disrupting the behemoths of the Internet, however. Lots of large, twentieth-century, for-profit companies believe this technology can help them unlock value and pursue new money-making ventures, too. Some see big opportunities, others a major threat. Either way, many incumbent businesses now feel compelled to at least experiment with and explore the development of this technology to see where it goes.
In finance, the very industry that Bitcoin was designed to make redundant, bankers are waking up to the possibility that blockchain-related technologies could replace the cumbersome processes by which securities and money are transferred, cleared, and settled between banks. Using a reliable, distributed ledger that a consortium of banks can update simultaneously in real time could reduce back-office costs and unshackle large amounts of new capital for investment. That’s great news for investment banks such as Goldman Sachs, but not so great for custodial banks like State Street or clearinghouses like the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, whose business model is based on handling those back-office functions. Still, the institutions on both sides of that disruption story all feel compelled to engage in research and development in this field.
R3 CEV, a New York–based technology developer, for one, raised $107 million from more than a hundred of the world’s biggest financial institutions and tech companies to develop a proprietary distributed ledger technology. Inspired by blockchains but eschewing that label, R3’s Corda platform is built to comply with banks’ business and regulatory models while streamlining trillions of dollars in daily interbank securities transfers.
The non-finance corporate world is also getting engaged. Hyperledger is a distributed ledger/blockchain-design consortium looking to develop standardized, open-source versions of the technology for businesses to use in areas such as supply-chain management. Coordinated by the Linux Foundation, it brings together the likes of IBM, Cisco, Intel, and Digital Asset Holdings, a digital ledger startup led by former J.P. Morgan powerhouse Blythe Masters.
One mark of the business world’s enthusiasm is seen in the trajectory of media company CoinDesk’s Consensus conference, the marquee annual event for businesses interested in blockchain technology. It went from a turnout of 600 at the inaugural conference in 2015 to 1,500 attendees in 2016 to 2,800 in 2017 with a further 10,500 registered viewers of an online livecast. The attendees in 2017 came from ninety-six countries, and a cross-section of more than ninety sponsors and exhibitors was broad enough to include consulting firm Deloitte, the research arm of Toyota, the Australian government’s trade office, and Cryptonomos, a startup marketplace for digital tokens.
But lest you think this technology has been entirely consumed by corporate suits and international development staffers, the months during which we worked on this book also coincided with a get-rich-quick mania that dwarfed even the 2013 surge in Bitcoin’s price. This gold rush, spawned by a new blockchain-based crowdfunding tool for startups that’s known as the ICO—initial coin offering—had all the hallmarks of the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. Much like two decades earlier, the boom was characterized by both a risky, speculative furor and a sense that underneath the money madness lay a transformative new technology and new business paradigm.
The startups behind this ICO trend are touting a host of new decentralized applications that could disrupt everything from online advertising to medical research. Integral to those services are special tokens that are pre-sold to the public as a way to both raise money and build a network of users—kind of like Kickstarter, but in which contributors have the potential to make quick money in secondary trading markets. At the time of writing, the highest amount raised by one of these pre-sale ICOs was $257 million by Protocol Labs, which sold a token called Filecoin that’s designed to incentivize people to provide hard-drive space for a new decentralized Web. While it’s quite possible that many ICOs will fall afoul of securities regulations and that a bursting of this bubble will burn innocent investors, there’s something refreshingly democratic about this boom. Hordes of retail investors are entering into early stage investment rounds typically reserved for venture capitalists and other professionals.
Not to be outdone, Bitcoin, the granddaddy of the cryptocurrency world, has continued to reveal strengths—and this has been reflected in its price. Despite a bitter fight between developers and the “miners” that validate transactions on the Bitcoin network, a feud that led the currency to split into two separate coins with different software codes, bitcoin’s price surged to a record high of $11,323 in late November 2017, taking its market capitalization to almost $190 billion according