Idiot's Guide to Decentralization

[MachineGhost]

In 2009, I wrote a book called Pull, on how things would be different once everything is online and interconnected. That vision is finally coming to life. This short essay is my attempt to describe the fast-moving world of decentralization: blockchains, cryptocurrency, triple ledgers, distributed apps, and more. Here is the one-minute summary:

Blockchain technology is a shared ledger that everyone trusts to be accurate and permanent. By sharing a single reliable database, we can:

• Eliminate trillions of dollars of wasted effort in coordination, market functions, and clearing.
• Record data - including ownership rights to anything of value - permanently, in a way that can't be hacked or stolen.
• Eliminate middle men - companies that bring buyers and sellers together and charge high fees (everything from banks to insurance companies to ecommerce to Uber)
• Eliminate data centers, which are targets for hackers.
• Eliminate IT departments, which are expensive, sluggish, and prevent companies from being agile.
• Radically transform government services to be far cheaper, faster, and better.

In addition, we can now add programming to blockchain-based assets, which makes them programmable and "smart." We are actively creating new data ecosystems that allow many real-time innovations, from remote surgery to fleets of drones to programmable music rights to tracking blood diamonds and minerals. While it's still in its infancy, blockchain technology has tremendous promise. Our estimate is that by 2030, more than $10 trillion and possibly as much as $20 trillion of world GDP will be on the blockchain.

To unpack this, I’m going to start using eBay as an example.

http://www.decentralstation.com/

[Pointedstick]

Hubristic techno-utopianism. "Eliminate middle men?" "Eliminate IT departments?" Gimmie a break. These kinds of goals are based on a misunderstanding of human psychology and motivations.

[MachineGhost]

Hubristic techno-utopianism. "Eliminate middle men?" "Eliminate IT departments?" Gimmie a break. These kinds of goals are based on a misunderstanding of human psychology and motivations.

I'm not sure what you mean? Menial & mundane middleman tasks are easily replaced by low-cost algorithms. A robot is just an algorithm with a hardware shell.