An introductory essay on blockchain
Simplify relationships
One person’s freedom ends where another one’s begins, so we need rules. However, when managing these rules becomes too decisive then the game is flawed. With less centralisation and “smarter” automation we don’t change the rules but we make them transparent in their management, it is one of the major opportunities provided by blockchain innovations.
In order to face the complexity of equality, mankind had to organise and control value transactions. This organisation (territorial states, banks, legal third-parties…) centralises decisions with dedicated groups of people. These influence networks having to organise as well, making for a complex system. Too much so considering the operational weight of “human” orchestration.
In order to make up for the leeway and exploited flaws, the few chosen to manage this complexity are required to impose an increasingly intrusive economical and political system in their search for (pyramidal) globality.
In a nutshell, this system is becoming obsolete, fails millennials, it does not efficiently answer real and personal needs. The economic survival of these “intermediary” companies (unsuccessfully) imposes their costs ahead of each other’s projects.
Cypherpunks: coding a shared system
To share value with those that create it, we need to thank the cypherpunk developers that insisted for 20 years, despite being geniuses caricatured as “geeks” and marginalised in the 90s. They developed the cryptographic protocols that protect our communications and transactions’ confidentiality. The cypherpunks predicted and warned about the drift of states, monetary systems, FAGA… Above all they coded an original thought that’s become an evident and imminent decentralised future, with a compelling first use case: the exchange of value through Bitcoin. In order to understand this revolution, it is necessary to accept a certain ideological disruption.
While still not ideal, multiple technological advancements allow to beneficially delegate those arbitrations and redistributions, to stop trusting human organisations which are corruptible, and to directly rely on the associated registries and algorithms which are instantly and entirely shared with everyone.
It was necessary for these technologies to be distributed. That is for the operational means not to be controlled by one organisation but physically, logically, securely and transparently distributed in its governance, transactions and operations. All while protecting the personal ownership of information.
Therefore, there is no hegemony of one system, but numerous and various value chains that share one of several technical platforms, industry or community management protocols without excluding futures regulatory protocols suggested by the institutions most compatible with the blockchain revolution.
A societal revolution brought by technology and supported by global generations
With distributed systems, you would only need to contribute by creating value in order to automatically receive some, regardless of the nature of the contribution. It is then possible for humans and objects to pay processing power with creativity, clean water, energy, time and skills, introductions… And to benefit from a computerised intelligence and agreed upon as a community to handle the agreements and transactions. In sight, to win back real human time from the “management” of human activities.
Blockchain is a response to that need and we now have the freedom to create projects with an internal economy and to organise it within autonomous communities, open and accessible.
Regarding institutions, it is essential to avoid cliches and bad definitions. It is not an opposition but rather a transformation towards the distribution of management and decisional means. Pushing for a token diplomacy where the implementation of regulatory, distributional, maybe regal protocols on a blockchain would protect the execution of community and industry protocols globally. We can start to imagine a world where you can invest in public infrastructures or protection mechanisms rather than pay taxes or generate debt.
From this year on and in every industry, new operational systems will be available allowing new freedom and protection with regards to value ownership and creation, shorter circuits more compatible with societal and environmental requirements, cooperation and distribution, access to success… These opportunities correspond to what global generations expect, to whom state is not about identity, that assert their diversity, want to decide, live in international networks. They do not want to “climb the social ladder” as it is offered by institutions and most of current companies.
To preserve the neutrality of the internet of value
Preserving the neutrality of the internet of value is an essential condition to successfully operate a societal revolution. The blockchains are valid systems in order to share value, transparent and reliable alternatives to the systems regulated by “mystical” centralised entities. The tokens necessary to blockchains create a token economy with a peer-to-peer model that is radically different, inducing an estimation and a worldwide execution of trust that are by design different from current financial systems.
None of the regular financial systems’ regulations would make sense applied to tokens. The temptation for blockage of this alternative by banks and states is big, but it would be illegitimate for a state to try to regulate the internet of value, here being the value transactions on public blockchains.
Blockchain technology is evolving fast, protection of third-parties and self-governance are accessible through distributed code, in particular by DAO designing incentives and transparency over financial and operational activities.
Autonomous communities
Blockchain helps communities establish registries, reallocate value, automate social rules… safely, autonomously and transparently and without a centralised institution. For example, liquid voting power is more efficient than current electoral processes.
New access to success
By directly receiving the value of your contribution, access to success, employment and company structuring is completely revisited.
Put simply, you can be compensated and paid in value but also in creativity, expertise, time, talent, attitudes, material contribution, investment… in every economic sector that will have already switched to token economies.
In addition to being more accessible, access to success will be quicker. With tokens trust allows to quickly benefit from outside contributions without having transformed the value already. In the event of obstacles, token liquidity makes it easy and efficient to bring in more funding without reducing the project’s autonomy.
New organisational, transactional and governing liberties
We have here new organisational, transactional and governing freedoms that are given back directly to the individuals (and smart objects/animals/plants). Therefore, the influence of institutional and centralised communications will be very different.
With blockchains, local communities would have simple decision and enforcement means and therefore, total control over their budgets which they could delegate or not to third parties. It would then be easier for cities to become real smart cities. Decisions are made through a local DAO, involving experts in total transparency. It also allows to organise votes, automate budgets, fund through shared public property, open and measure the efficiency of bid solicitations, collectively decide who contributes and the terms of a contract, and immediate trigger its execution. This granularity would allow to help cities progressively evolve.
Free ourselves from territorial authority
Historically, in order to fulfil its mission the state associated with banks needs to make himself necessary et maintain authority over its territory and its economic partners. This fundamental constraint that comes with a republic is strictly opposed to decentralisation and to the new freedom brought by blockchain.
With time, humanity has the mean to leave its social cave to free itself from territorial authority and arbitrary borders defended by blood. A decentralised, direct, readable and secure world is slowly shaping. It is important to mention it from the country of the “Franc CFA”, this currency sadly carries the antithesis of the blockchain revolution.
Innovations and opportunities in every industry
To fully understand that opportunities lie in the public sharing of blockchain infrastructures and its ease of adoption, it is always necessary to precise the technological innovation associated with blockchains. The blockchain revolution will happen only if the cypherpunks’ concept of social “smart” contracts is understood and validated by all.
A blockchain is a ledger that contains the history of proof or event signatures. We can’t corrupt it because it is physically, instantly spread out over multiple duplicates in a decentralised network. A neutral ground that allows a community to exchange information, transactions, value and rights. The transactions happen instantly peer-to-peer: each member has access to the other members without any intermediary.
BC Diploma for example certifies diplomas over the blockchain and create a new generation of digital diplomas around the world, or Skillz that certifies identities and professional experiences. In retail, ProdTrust in particular helps protect and track original packaging in order to prevent counterfeits and therefore contribute to consolidating the necessary trust in these transactions and industrialising processes even locally.
This is made possible thanks to a cryptographic foundation that provides a level of proof and confidentiality, thus of trust, at least equivalent to ones of a regular contract, with a major advantage: the automatic execution of the terms and rights of the contract.
Collectif Fashion applies this process in fashion et provide a smart traceability that orchestrate the value chain over products, with an involvement from the local producers all the way up to successive consumers. With this global view, each contributor to the value chain can freely choose to incentivise or order from a particular supplier in real time, depending on the entries/exits and of the measured success of the common protocol. The entire chain benefits from a view and focus over all the niche or performance opportunities. In human resources, Talent Coin allows organisations to value internal talents and to create cooperation between talents from structures sometimes rival through an exchange of skills and time valued by tokens. It is then cheaper, easier and safer for companies to transition into open companies or activate rewards mechanics valuable for the individual involved.
Furthermore, trust relies on the full transparency of transactions, of the code (open-sourced) including the consensus mechanics (whether they are computational algorithms, individuals, IoT data, etc).
For example, Talao enables freelance service provision without any third party costs, by offering a transactional protocol between technical communities and managers.
The technology includes governance algorithms that are key, real architecture topics because they define the rules of the game (e.g. who can enter/leave the network, value allocation and retribution rules, decision incentive mechanics); a governance now reinforced if not completely delegated to AI in the daily management of the network (e.g. correction of distribution ratios, identification of participants that validate the rules of governance).
That’s what Blockchain Mali illustrates for the diaspora, with the possibility to contact first class african architects to conceive relevant solutions (electricity generating brick, bamboo water filter, no concrete…), to register blueprints according to the BIM method, manage the building site from distance, and peacefully follow the advancement of the construction and automatically trigger payments or penalties, and contractualise work and equipment and material orders safely, even with contributors with no bank accounts. On the other hand, for non-digitalisable verifications, the token system allows us to distribute through the network the verification tasks and compensate them. The savings are such that projects with a common interest are picked and built (e.g. construction of a school in Mali). It is then possible to directly acquire currency in exchange for chickens, verifications, hammers… all certified while still being in a virtuous and industrial economic model and for example pay for education with it (the cost of education in the school in construction should be the equivalent of 2 euros per month).
With regard to territories, Poï digitalises local economies/currencies/systems in order to transform them into industrial levers for economic steering. Incentivising through the use of tokens one or another type of business, and one or another type of consumption that is favorable to the local ecosystem or if it’s the case, a CSR policy. With this system it is also possible to fund projects of common interest and to share their ownerships with the local populations (cubic centimeters of a monument for example). Therefore, during bid solicitations and development choices, inhabitants can regain ownership of common goods and operationally contribute to the choices made while still maintaining maximum efficiency in the process. This type of protocol can be replicated outside of territorial constraints. In more transversal topics (identity, health, economy, mobility…) this type of public interest protocol leads the way towards a token diplomacy that is still hard to measure.
Recently, different blockchains have become interoperable with each other, thanks to their organisations through hubs (solutions such as Cosmos or the evolution of Ethereum blockchains with Plasma and Bitcoin with sidechains, Lightning or Colored Coins) and in a broader way decentralised protocols shed light on new technical opportunities. For example, decentralised data centers based on IPFS (decentralised web), become alternatives to the GAFAs’ cloud solutions/services (Tresorio, Golem, I-exec), but also DDNS, alternatives to regular DNS solutions that include a far better level of cybersecurity for companies.
Hospitals currently have two critical problems, collaborating with other research and healthcare centers, and sharing the execution of patients files and the management of orders throughout the process safely. In this context, Tresorio offers hospitals the possibility to freely use failsafe resources to exploit health data shared by all the healthcare actors (ddns, distributed computing, distributed storage, governance…) without going through a GAFAM. They do so while their servers also heat the building at the same time.
These offers are rivals to those of GAFAMs’ with advantages such as their transparency in their operation and governance, data of which the owner is the only one who can physically decide (private cryptographic key) how it is used, low costs, and unmatched reliability. Also the control by Google of web DSN that allows them to technically dominate the worldwide network is ineffective in the case of distributed systems.
A world hard to reinvent
So the world needs to be reinvented according to freer communities with economies that are immediate, smarter, liquid and more engaging in a secure, transparent, and fair world with new freedom in transactions and governance. This is made possible by sharing blockchain innovations in open-source.
However, the creation of these new value chains is still complex. To list the most common challenges, we need to create exchange models in the existing value chains, engage and define governance for the involved parties, judiciously pick technologies in a highly innovating context, anticipate future legal challenges. There is a strong need to structure and activate classical means of funding as well as other innovative ones. They are lightning fast and massive but are almost a second project within the project. It is also necessary to include a time to market often worldwide, and base all of that on few scarce skills dispersed around the world in an ecosystem still being built…
In order to build a project that involves the realisation of technical solutions and/or their integration and/or a token economy, it is necessary to roam the world and show clean intentions in an ecosystem weakened by technological immaturity and original scams.
It is therefore necessary, and prior to the growth of “blockchain” projects, to offer solutions that provide a warranty on one hand to ease the use and deployment of technologies but also to increase trust between projects, talents, investors, communication relays and mentors.
An economic sector in hyper-development
Teams grow quickly especially when they are quickly funded through the attributes of a token economy. ICOs for example, already dominate classic VC investments by volume. It is common to see millions raised in just a couple of months with a failure rate just a little bit higher to those of more classic fundraising.
According to the study of a future startup accelerator in France, we estimate the number of blockchain startups in France to be around 500, they already cover most industries. They should be about 3000 by the end of 2018, knowing they plan on increasing their workforce tenfold within the next 6 months. It will therefore be necessary to train 60,000 blockchain experts (legal, technical, economic…) by the end of 2018 in order to capture the entire development. It’s only the beginning of an massive and international call for skills. Engineering, business, finance, political schools have to start moving forward.
One third of blockchain companies in France are foreign (Mali, Monaco, Hong-Kong, Vietnam…), essentially motivated by technical expertise and a strategic position in Europe. It should be mentioned that one third of french startups consider leaving for somewhere where the legal environment is more inclined. Let’s hope that the political announcements of the end of the year will reassure startups: salary, equity, ICO, accounting, taxes, exchanges… There is a structure that is expected on one hand and, on the other hand, the structure has to be ready to see a tokenisation of its activity. To go further than state borders.
Some startups are already being scouted by potential buyers in while the market is still being structured. The blockchain revolution is going much faster that what was observed for the web. Especially because the creators with an average age of 35 years old have experienced the web’s growth and its problems. Their shared experiences are true engines for the entirety of startups looking for an ecosystem that’s already built.
As much at the international entrepreneurial influencers’ level than at the confirmed developers’ level, blockchain seems to be the culmination of 25 years of web and the beginning of a new type of network: a transformation of the internet with a greater impact.
