One unique aspect that separates human beings to other animals is the ability to collaborate at a large scale. By large scale, I mean not only at the immediate community level like 50 – 100 people; but also at a level of tens of thousands or even billions of people. How do we do that? By agreeing on social contracts. We agree on social contracts with our peers and the institutions we are a part of.
The significance of the era we are in is that technology has infiltrated in our daily lives to such an extent that it starts to prompt us to re-think our existing social contracts — how we relate to each other and the society at large.
You see, sometimes, the frictions or problems in our lives have been around for too long that they become invisible. For example, the long queue at Customs for international travels just to verify identities and paperwork, the fact that paper bank checks are still mandatory for certain type of transactions. Bigger issues such as insider trading, audit fraud and political scandals. At the heart of all these is that the current trust system simply doesn’t work.
But now we have a technology that can program trust so as to eliminate most of these frictions and persistent social issues. The decentralized technology could be the answer to majority of these problems that human society couldn’t solve in the past decades if not centuries. Token is just one of blockchain’s use cases. But at the core, blockchain is trust technology. I didn’t come up with this. It was pointed out by Sergey Nazarov in one podcast. And it hit me immediately.
At a high level, the human society is experiencing a trust crisis. The trust between peers, the trust between individuals and organisations, the trust between individuals and the society at large. We are told to check ingredients of the food we purchased at supermarket to make sure there is no harmful substances. We are told to check supply chain journeys of the clothing we bought to make sure it is eco-friendly. We are also told to stay skeptical to the media contents we consume daily as they might be fraudulent or twisted intentionally. And these are just a few examples of the mental burdens we have to live with because the failing existing trust mechanisms.
I am not saying decentralized technology is the answer to all our problems, no. I don’t think it can address the trust between lovers or couples, for example. But it is significant enough to address a long list of trust issues that are currently outstanding.
We see its use cases in finance first because it is the most obvious use case. But in reality, decentralized technology has a long tail of use cases that can reshape the way many corporations operate today as well as how we go on with our daily lives.
It might take long, or it might take shorter time than anyone expected. No one can predict the future but societal progress is never linear.
Dreamerella 