Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures recently gave a talk at the 2017 Blockstack Summit about “Decentralization and the Knowledge Age.”
He starts by talking about motivation and coordination.
The state, he argues, is good at coordination, but not so good at motivation. The market, on the other hand, is good at motivation, but not so good at coordination. Money and self-interest are powerful incentives.
He then talks about how networks have improved the market, the firm, and the state. When the cost of sharing information drops, everything gets better.
But there are downsides to networks. For one, they form monopolies. Consider Facebook in social. Google in search. Amazon in ecommerce.
They also create environments ripe for censorship and “algorithmic abuse.” Everything you see in your feeds is optimized to make you respond and/or feel a certain way. The line between delivering you relevant content and deliberate manipulation is perhaps a fine one.
So what’s the solution? Decentralized blockchain networks are one exciting possibility. But they also have their own limits and drawbacks. Albert touches on those in his talk.
The video is about 24 minutes. If you can’t see it below, click here.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgQT874KHuw?rel=0&w=560&h=315]
I just backed this project on Kickstarter.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wmougayar/the-business-blockchain-books/widget/card.html?v=2
I haven’t backed a lot of projects on Kickstarter, but I definitely enjoy the process of discovering a project that I’m interested in and then providing a small, seemingly insignificant, sum of money to help make it a reality.
In this case, it’s a collection of two books by William Mougayar about Bitcoin, blockchains, cryptocurrency, and decentralization.
These are all topics that I’ve touched on before on this blog, albeit with much less rigor than what I’m sure William will be applying to his books. I wrote this post about 2 years ago, when I first started wrapping my head around Bitcoin. And more recently, I wrote posts about
I am very interested in bitcoin because of the underlying technology behind it – namely the blockchain. And that’s because it has the potential to be applied to and to disrupt many different industries and sectors, including real estate.
That’s why I was fascinated to learn over the weekend that Honduras, with the help of a Texas-based company called Epigraph, is in the midst of building a permanent land title registry system based on the blockchain architecture.
This is particularly important for Honduras because the country currently suffers from a significant amount of land fraud. And