March 12, 2017
“Overall, the Internet has enabled many positive changes—for those with access to it—but it has serious limitations for business and economic activity. The New Yorker could rerun Peter Steiner’s 1993 cartoon of one dog talking to another without revision: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Online, we still can’t reliably establish one another’s identities or trust one another to transact and exchange money without validation from a third party like a bank or a government. These same intermediaries collect our data and invade our privacy for commercial gain and national security. ”
March 12, 2017
“Moore’s law of the annual doubling of processing power doubles the power of fraudsters and thieves—“Moore’s Outlaws”1—not to mention spammers, identity thieves, phishers, spies, zombie farmers, hackers, cyberbullies, and datanappers—criminals who unleash ransomware to hold data hostage—the list goes on.”
March 12, 2017
“As early as 1981, inventors were attempting to solve the Internet’s problems of privacy, security, and inclusion with cryptography. No matter how they reengineered the process, there were always leaks because third parties were involved. Paying with credit cards over the Internet was insecure because users had to divulge too much personal data, and the transaction fees were too high for small payments.”
March 12, 2017
“In 1993, a brilliant mathematician named David Chaum came up with eCash, a digital payment system that was “a technically perfect product which made it possible to safely and anonymously pay over the Internet …. It was perfectly suited to sending electronic pennies, nickels, and dimes over the Internet.”
March 12, 2017
“Doing business on the Internet requires a leap of faith. Because the infrastructure lacks the much-needed security, we often have little choice but to treat the middlemen as if they were deities.”
March 12, 2017
“This protocol is the foundation of a growing number of global distributed ledgers called blockchains—of which the bitcoin blockchain is the largest. While the technology is complicated and the word blockchain isn’t exactly sonorous, the main idea is simple. Blockchains enable us to send money directly and safely from me to you, without going through a bank, a credit card company, or PayPal”
March 12, 2017
“At its most basic, it is an open source code: anyone can download it for free, run it, and use it to develop new tools for managing transactions online. As such, it holds the potential for unleashing countless new applications and as yet unrealized capabilities that have the potential to transform many things.”
March 12, 2017
“the most important and far-reaching blockchains are based on Satoshi’s bitcoin model. Here’s how they work.”
“... leverages the resources of a large peer-to-peer bitcoin network to verify and approve each bitcoin transaction. Each blockchain, like the one that uses bitcoin, is distributed: it runs on computers provided by volunteers around the world; there is no central database to hack. ”
March 12, 2017
“blockchain is encrypted: it uses heavy-duty encryption involving public and private keys (rather like the two-key system to access a safety deposit box) to maintain virtual security. You needn’t worry about the weak firewalls of Target or Home Depot or a thieving staffer of Morgan Stanley or the U.S. federal government”
March 12, 2017
“Every ten minutes, like the heartbeat of the bitcoin network, all the transactions conducted are verified, cleared, and stored in a block which is linked to the preceding block, thereby creating a chain”
March 12, 2017
“This structure permanently time-stamps and stores exchanges of value, preventing anyone from altering the ledger. If you wanted to steal a bitcoin, you’d have to rewrite the coin’s entire history on the blockchain in broad daylight. ”
March 12, 2017
“Some scholars have argued that the invention of double-entry bookkeeping enabled the rise of capitalism and the nation-state. This new digital ledger of economic transactions can be programmed to record virtually everything of value and importance to humankind: birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, deeds and titles of ownership, educational degrees, financial accounts, medical procedures, insurance claims, votes, provenance of food, and anything else that can be expressed in code.”
March 12, 2017
“This Internet of Everything needs a Ledger of Everything. Business, commerce, and the economy need a Digital Reckoning.”
March 12, 2017
“We believe the truth can set us free and distributed trust will profoundly affect people in all walks of life.”
March 12, 2017
“Ben Lawsky quit his job as the superintendent of financial services for New York State to build an advisory company in this space. He told us, “In five to ten years, the financial system may be unrecognizable … and I want to be part of the change.”
March 12, 2017
“Bankers love the idea of secure, frictionless, and instant transactions, but some flinch at the idea of openness, decentralization, and new forms of currency”
March 12, 2017
“To them, blockchains are more reliable databases than what they already have, databases that enable key stakeholders—buyers, sellers, custodians, and regulators—to keep shared, indelible records, thereby reducing cost, mitigating settlement risk, and eliminating central points of failure.”
March 12, 2017
“We’re quite confident,” said Marc Andreessen in an interview with The Washington Post, “that when we’re sitting here in 20 years, we’ll be talking about [blockchain technology] the way we talk about the Internet today”
March 12, 2017
“Regulators have also snapped to attention, establishing task forces to explore what kind of legislation, if any, makes sense. Authoritarian governments like Russia’s have banned or severely limited the use of bitcoin, as have democratic states that should know better, like Argentina, given its history of currency crises. ”
March 12, 2017
“Carolyn Wilkins, the senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, believes it’s time for central banks everywhere to seriously study the implications of moving entire national currency systems to digital money. The Bank of England’s top economist, Andrew Haldane, has proposed a national digital currency for the United Kingdom.10”
March 12, 2017
“How do we get from porn and Ponzi schemes to prosperity? To begin, it’s not bitcoin, the still speculative asset, that should interest you, unless you’re a trader.”
March 12, 2017
“Globally, CEOs and government officials continue to be the least credible information sources,”
March 12, 2017
“American confidence in institutions that “business” ranked second lowest among the fifteen institutions measured; fewer than 20 percent of respondents indicated they had considerable or high levels of trust. Only the U.S. Congress had a lower score.”
March 12, 2017
“If an object, whether it be a sensor on a communications tower, a light bulb, or a heart monitor, is not trusted to perform well or pay for services it will be rejected” “The ledger itself is the foundation of trust."
March 12, 2017
“ In our view, companies that conduct some or all of their transactions on the blockchain will enjoy a trust bump in share price. Shareholders and citizens will come to expect all publicly traded firms and taxpayer-funded organizations to run their treasuries, at minimum, on the blockchain. ”
March 12, 2017
“Some of this has come to pass. There have been mass collaborations like Wikipedia, Linux, and Galaxy Zoo. Outsourcing and networked business models have enabled people in the developing world to participate in the global economy better. Today two billion people collaborate as peers socially. We all have access to information in unprecedented ways”
March 12, 2017
“economic power has gotten spikier, more concentrated, and more entrenched. Rather than data being more widely and democratically distributed, it is being hoarded and exploited by fewer entities that often use it to control more and acquire more power. If you accumulate data and the power that comes with it, you can further fortify your position by producing proprietary knowledge. This privilege trumps merit, regardless of its origin.”
March 12, 2017
“While they create great value for consumers, one upshot is that data is becoming a new asset class—one that may trump previous asset classes. Another is the undermining of our traditional concepts of privacy and the autonomy of the individual.”
March 12, 2017
“Rather than trying to solve the problem of growing social inequality through the redistribution of wealth only, we can start to change the way wealth is distributed—how it is created in the first place, ”
March 12, 2017
“In the early days of the Internet, Tom Peters wrote, “You are your projects.”19 He meant that our corporate affiliations and job titles no longer defined us. What is equally true now: “You are your data.” Trouble is, Moreira said, “That identity is now yours, but the data that comes from its interaction in the world is owned by someone else.”20 That’s how most corporations and institutions view you, by your data contrail across the Internet. They aggregate your data into a virtual representation of you, and they provide this “virtual you” with extraordinary new benefits beyond your parents’ happiest dreams.21 But convenience comes with a price: privacy. Those who say “privacy is dead—get over it” are wrong.22 Privacy is the foundation of free societies.”
March 12, 2017
“Joe Lubin, CEO of Consensus Systems, refers to this concept as a “persistent digital ID and persona” on a blockchain. “I show a different aspect of myself to my college friends compared to when I am speaking at the Chicago Fed,” he said. “In the online digital economy, I will represent my various aspects and interact in that world from the platform of different personas.” Lubin expects to have a “canonical persona,” ”
March 12, 2017
“Your black box may include information such as a government-issued ID, Social Security number, medical information, service accounts, financial accounts, diplomas, practice licenses, birth certificate, various other credentials, and information so personal you don’t want to reveal it but do want to monetize its value, such as sexual preference or medical condition, for a poll or a research study. You could license these data for specific purposes to specific entities for specific periods of time. You could send a subset of your attributes to your eye doctor and a different subset to the hedge fund that you would like to invest in. Your avatar could answer yes-no questions without disclosing who you are: “Are you twenty-one years or older? Did you earn more than $100,000 in each of the last three years? Do you have a body mass index in the normal range?”
March 12, 2017
“In the physical world, your reputation is local—your local shopkeeper, your employer, your friends at a dinner party all have a certain opinion about you. In the digital economy, the reputations of various ”
March 12, 2017
“personas in your avatar will be portable. Portability will help bring people everywhere into the digital economy. People with a digital wallet and avatar in Africa could establish the reputation required to, say, borrow money to start a business. “See, all these people know me and have vouched for me. I am financially trustworthy. I am an enfranchised citizen of the global digital economy.”
March 12, 2017
“If we try to record all these into the blockchain, an immutable ledger, we lose not only the nuance of social interaction but also the gift of forgetting. People ought never be defined by their worst day.”
March 12, 2017
“Pundits often refer to Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, TaskRabbit, and others as platforms for the “sharing economy.” It’s a nice notion—that peers create and share in value. But these businesses have little to do with sharing. In fact, they are successful precisely because they do not share—they aggregate. It is an aggregating economy.”
March 12, 2017
“ Now with blockchains, the technology exists to reinvent these industries again. Today’s big disrupters are about to get disrupted.”
March 12, 2017
“Whereas most technologies tend to automate workers on the periphery doing menial tasks, blockchains automate away the center. Instead of putting the taxi driver out of a job, blockchain puts Uber out of a job and lets the taxi drivers work with the customer directly.”2”
March 12, 2017
“Even when connected to the old Internet, billions of people are excluded from the economy for the simple reason that financial institutions don’t provide services like banking to them because they would be unprofitable and risky customers. With the blockchain these people can not only become connected, but more important become included in financial activity, able to purchase, borrow, sell, and otherwise have a chance at building a prosperous life”
March 12, 2017
“The technology holds great promise to revolutionize the industry for the good—from banks to stock exchanges, insurance companies to accounting firms, brokerages, microlenders, credit card networks, real estate agents, and everything in between. When everyone shares the same distributed ledger, settlements don’t take days, they occur instantly for all to see. Billions will benefit, and this shift could liberate and empower entrepreneurs everywhere.”
March 12, 2017
“a majority of the world’s property holders can have their homes or their bit of land seized arbitrarily by corrupt government functionaries, with the flick of a software ”
March 12, 2017
“Without proof of property ownership, landowners can’t secure a loan, get a building permit, or sell the property and they can be expropriated—all serious impediments to prosperity.”
March 12, 2017
“The central idea to blockchain is that the rights to goods can be transacted, whether they be financial, hard assets or ideas. The goal is not merely to record the plot of land but rather to record the rights involved so that the rights holder cannot be violated”
March 12, 2017
“Blockchain is for a world that’s governed by real things instead of fictitious things. And I think that’s good,”30 said de Soto. And it’s decentralized. No central authority controls it, everybody knows what’s happening, and it remembers forever.”
March 12, 2017
“Abra and other companies are building payment networks using the blockchain. Abra’s goal is to turn every one of its users into a teller. The whole process—from the funds leaving one country to their arriving in another—takes an hour rather than a week and costs 2 percent versus 7 percent or higher. Abra wants its payment network to outnumber all physical ATMs in the world. It took Western Union 150 years to get to 500,000 agents worldwide. Abra will have that many tellers in its first year.”
March 12, 2017
“The global community donated more than $500 million to the Red Cross, a known brand. An after-action investigation revealed that funds were misspent or went missing altogether.”
March 12, 2017
“The blockchain can improve the delivery of foreign aid by eliminating the middlemen who take the aid before it reaches its destination. Second, as an immutable ledger of the flow of funds, blockchain holds institutions more accountable for their actions. Imagine if you could track each dollar you gave to the Red Cross from its starting point on your smart phone to the person it benefited. You could park your funds in escrow, releasing amounts after the Red Cross reached each milestone.”
Notes From: Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott. “Blockchain Revolution.” iBooks.
Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itun.es/dk/Aoc4bb.l
