介绍:
7:22
So the Bitcoin blockchain is just one. There are many. The Ethereum blockchain was developed by a Canadian named Vitalik Buterin. He's [22] years old, and this blockchain has some extraordinary capabilities. One of them is that you can build smart contracts. It's kind of what it sounds like. It's a contract that self-executes, and the contract handles the enforcement, the management, performance and payment — the contract kind of has a bank account, too, in a sense — of agreements between people. And today, on the Ethereum blockchain, there are projects underway to do everything from create a new replacement for the stock market to create a new model of democracy, where politicians are accountable to citizens.
8:09
(Applause)
8:13
So to understand what a radical change this is going to bring, let's look at one industry, financial services. Recognize this? Rube Goldberg machine. It's a ridiculously complicated machine that does something really simple, like crack an egg or shut a door. Well, it kind of reminds me of the financial services industry, honestly. I mean, you tap your card in the corner store, and a bitstream goes through a dozen companies, each with their own computer system, some of them being 1970s mainframes older than many of the people in this room, and three days later, a settlement occurs. Well, with a blockchain financial industry, there would be no settlement, because the payment and the settlement is the same activity, it's just a change in the ledger. So Wall Street and all around the world, the financial industry is in a big upheaval about this, wondering, can we be replaced, or how do we embrace this technology for success?
9:14
Now, why should you care? Well, let me describe some applications. Prosperity. The first era of the internet, the internet of information, brought us wealth but not shared prosperity, because social inequality is growing. And this is at the heart of all of the anger and extremism and protectionism and xenophobia and worse that we're seeing growing in the world today, Brexit being the most recent case.
9:45
So could we develop some new approaches to this problem of inequality? Because the only approach today is to redistribute wealth, tax people and spread it around more. Could we pre-distribute wealth? Could we change the way that wealth gets created in the first place by democratizing wealth creation, engaging more people in the economy, and then ensuring that they got fair compensation? Let me describe five ways that this can be done.
10:15
Number one: Did you know that 70 percent of the people in the world who have land have a tenuous title to it? So, you've got a little farm in Honduras, some dictator comes to power, he says, "I know you've got a piece of paper that says you own your farm, but the government computer says my friend owns your farm." This happened on a mass scale in Honduras, and this problem exists everywhere. Hernando de Soto, the great Latin American economist, says this is the number one issue in the world in terms of economic mobility, more important than having a bank account, because if you don't have a valid title to your land, you can't borrow against it, and you can't plan for the future.
10:56
So today, companies are working with governments to put land titles on a blockchain. And once it's there, this is immutable. You can't hack it. This creates the conditions for prosperity for potentially billions of people.
11:13
Secondly: a lot of writers talk about Uber and Airbnb and TaskRabbit and Lyft and so on as part of the sharing economy. This is a very powerful idea, that peers can come together and create and share wealth. My view is that ... these companies are not really sharing. In fact, they're successful precisely because they don't share. They aggregate services together, and they sell them. What if, rather than Airbnb being a $25 billion corporation, there was a distributed application on a blockchain, we'll call it B-Airbnb, and it was essentially owned by all of the people who have a room to rent. And when someone wants to rent a room, they go onto the blockchain database and all the criteria, they sift through, it helps them find the right room, and then the blockchain helps with the contracting, it identifies the party, it handles the payments just through digital payments — they're built into the system. And it even handles reputation, because if she rates a room as a five-star room, that room is there, and it's rated, and it's immutable. So, the big sharing-economy disruptors in Silicon Valley could be disrupted, and this would be good for prosperity.
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