| | | Elroy
Good reading
Blockchain: The Invisible Technology That's Changing the World
Blockchain is becoming the foundation of much of your digital life. And you probably don't even realize it.
The change blockchain represents to our digital world is tectonic. Blockchain is broad and coming to the fore on such a massive scale that explaining it often falls back on the abstract, rather than grounding it in the kind of foundational change the technology will have on the culture of how we interact online.
The Web 1.0 was a read-only Internet of static web pages. Web 2.0, where we are now, added dynamic user-generated content and the rise of social media. Web 3.0 has many definitions, but one of the most popular is that of connective intelligence: where the next generation of applications, data, concepts, and people are connected by an unmediated fabric where you don't need a trust broker like a bank or tech company in the middle to ensure privacy and security. In blockchain, we finally have the technology to power Web 3.0.
"The first four decades of the Internet brought us email, the World Wide Web, dot-coms, social media, the mobile web, Big Data, cloud computing, and the early days of the Internet of Things," the Tapscotts write in Blockchain Revolution. Through that lens, MIT's Brian Forde said, we can understand where blockchain fits into our lives.
"People have forgotten how powerful it is not to have to worry about what email app you use. When I email you, it doesn't matter if you're using Gmail or Outlook or Yahoo—you just give me your email address and go. Now think about sending money today. If I want to send you $20, we're going to play a game of 20 questions. Do you have PayPal? How about Venmo?" said Forde.
"Imagine if we still chose our cell phone carriers and ISPs based on whether your friends and family were using Sprint or AT&T," Forde went on. "That's still the world we live in today for most digital services. You joined Facebook because your friends did. You're not going to sign up with a new payments startup if your friends are all on PayPal. It's going to be incredibly powerful for consumers to have more choice when everything running on blockchain just works."
pcmag.com |
|
