Robbie Maltby

April 6, 2021

Blockchain

I'm pretty underqualified to be talking about blockchain.

I've studied and cogitated over it for at least a few hundred (if not thousand) hours, but I'm not a programmer to trade so I've never got into the nitty gritty.

At a very high level, Blockchain is about engineering Trust.

It's most popular use is for Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, but the use cases are literally endless.

It is used to make data 'immutable' which basically means it can't be faked, deleted, censored, or changed. When something is created using blockchain technology it is there forever.

Why is this so important?

Humans are so easily influenced by what they see and hear. It takes as little as 66 days to form a habit (which applies to 'thinking' as well as 'doing') so by gradually feeding people certain targeted information you can quite easily make them think differently.

This happens to all of us regularly. Whether it's google manipulating autocomplete, or Facebook manipulating your emotions, almost everything we see and read is shaped in a certain way.

This isn't bad if you think the world is a benevolent place and big tech companies have your best interests at heart, but history will show you this just isn't the case.

Blockchain levels the playing field.

It's like a glass door into the way a company works. If a company acts unethically, their users will know. And they can leave or 'fork' another version of that company themselves.

This is kind of hard to comprehend, but what blockchain does is it helps to democratise technology.

Now, at the moment, democracy doesn't really exist in many places because we're not all like Switzerland and we certainly don't have a free press. But the idea of democracy is sound.

Blockchain provides us a digital way to vote for the technology we want. To vote for the type of discussion we want to have. To remember it. To make it open. To make it trustworthy.

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The flip side to blockchain is it creates a platform where Trust is default, which actually puts less emphasis on the development of the human intention to trust and be trusting. For example, in the future it may be that if something's not on the blockchain it's simply not trusted. I think that would be taking things too far.

Implemented correctly though, and with the proper thought and governance, blockchain is going to change the world as we know it.

About Robbie Maltby

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