Open Source / Free Software / GPL Mindset & Blockchain Adoption Among Governments / Multi National Companies
This is my first post, so it would act like it is an introduction but mostly it would be an opinion piece about what I feel about Blockchain revolution and how the governments and multi nationals are adapting to it and why in my opinion their efforts would reap little rewards for them.
I come from a sunny island country by the name of Singapore. About 20 years ago, I did my small part by being in the committee that brings the awareness of open source to Singapore. Singapore Linux Conference and also LinuxWorld Expo, the first few really big events about 20 years back that we painstakingly organized for the purpose of bringing awareness of Linux & open source.
After 2 decades, I cannot help but wonder whether I have achieved much success since the Singapore mindset does not lend itself to understand open source very well. To the Singaporeans or bureaucratic structures in general all over the world, they just don't know much about open source revolution.
Fast forward to now, we are now at the onset of another revolution - the Blockchain revolution. Which to me, is just an extension and continuation of the Open source revolution. Having talked to the 3 main dudes in free software and open source;
Richard Stallman (and I am sure he would cringe now when you mention Open Source in front of him, just use the term Free Software when talking to him).
Eric Raymond
Linus Torvalds
There is a tinge of rebellion and a sense of anti establishment that is in the code and mantra of Open source. By extension, this tinge of rebellion and anti establishment is also in the Blockchain revolution. When the creator of OpenOffice was asked of his reason of developing OpenOffice, his reason was to defeat Microsoft Office - it was not for profit.
The governments and the companies just simply would not get it, because the bureaucratic framework they are adopting to look at the Blockchain revolution would make them not get the Blockchain revolution at all.
I am actually quite impressed at the Central Bank of Singapore. Monetary Authority of Singapore just did a White paper on encoding the Singapore Dollar on the Blockchain. In all honesty, I glanced through the white paper and did not go through in detail. For those who want to go through may read the following URL;
http://www.mas.gov.sg/~/media/ProjectUbin/Project%20Ubin%20%20SGD%20on%20Distributed%20Ledger.pdf
I am sure worldwide that there are many banks, MNCs and perhaps even governments would be leveraging on Blockchain on various of their use cases and application. However, as long as they are approaching from a standpoint of bureaucracy, success would be limited. Bureaucracies would probably be implementing private blockchains instead of public ones, which makes it less trustworthy because the open source cum Blockchain revolution would demand the Blockchain implementation to be trustless (not needing to trust anyone) and the bureaucratic mindset just would not get it.
What are your thoughts on this matter?