TED: Don Tapscott on The Block Chain (and the trust protocol)

It is the first Sunday of the month and it’s a great time to talk a little about the technology that’s already revolutionizing our lives — The Blockchain

We all heard at one point about The Bitcoin, the new money that hackers use. It’s being adopted by more and more people, and the hacker thing is something that is going to be left behind.

Bitcoin is just the first cryptocurrency. Now they are many more and you can trade it. Some people got really rich on it while other lost fortunes. Although the general trend is that all of them will go up, the market will fluctuate. Big.

But what’s more important than the Cryptocurrency and the trading, and the money around it (billions of dollars in 2017) it’s the technology that stands behind it:

The Block Chain (and the trust protocol)

First of all the Blockchain is a part of the Disruptive age we live in and couldn’t have developed without the current technology: smartphones and internet. The same as for Uber, Airbnb, Napster to Spotify, Netflix and the list goes on.

It changed the game (I hope forever) and it came as a shortage of services that the (old) traditional system lacked in providing.

It will soon disrupt more the traditional education (how many people learn by themselves the careers they develop?) and medicine (especially VR-Virtual Reality, when a doctor in China could perform an operation anywhere in the world).

And the exchange of value (money) is part of the process.

All the major banks currently have a Crypto division that is expanding. The thing with crypto is that it cuts out the middleman (usually the bank) in most of the transactions (and that’s where the banks make money).

You will still need a proof of transaction (could it be the proof of work?) for legal issues (such as proving you paid child support for example).

This can be regulated by government but I think that’s why the BlockChain came to exist in the first place — not to have a central authority but only the users.

Could this be the highlight of Democracy?

No one really knows what it calculates. Bitcoin is the reward for some heavy mathematical calculations that only (strong, power consuming) computers can resolve. Remember PI, the movie? I like to make a scenario around it and truth is, everything is possible.

For me, the technology is a mixture of Kazaa, Napster, Odc, torrents trackers, bank systems and SETI — could we use this technology to have all the computer power in the world to process data? Yes, we do.

Ethereum is the next big thing and after you get more info on this, do some research on that as well.

Enjoy the talk, as the speaker manages to cover all the important aspects of this new industry. And a bonus: family — like father like son, Alex Tapscott's presentation, says the same things — they believe in it.