A philosophical take on Blockchain

I’ve been learning about blockchain technology since late 2015 and the more I learn the more I realize the true disruptive potential of a such technology … not because of all the hype in the media but really because of this ever-growing ecosystem that revolves around it.

In few years interval, a new line of thought was created from scratch that impacted virtually every sector of our everyday life. I believe this technology is not here only to help us find innovative solution to ever-existing and growing problems but to make us think philosophically toward problems and challenges that may emerge each time communities gather for business purposes.

The “Dunbar’s number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships — relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.” –Wikipedia

In other words, it is the maximum number of people that can be in a community. This number was estimated to 150. Exceeding this number requires setting a set of rules (laws), values (politics, religions, beliefs , … ) , tools (language, money, …) the member of the same community must go by.

I believe there is a Dumbar’s number for business communities too.Until now, we succeeded to exceed the natural limit of this number by artificially creating entities (third parties) that enforce Trust between member of the same community and act as the single source of Truth.

But this centralized way of guaranteeing Trust&Truth helped to push Power to the very top of the pyramid. And we all know that Power corrupts regardless of the integrity of who’s in the Top. The more power the more it corrupts. Also, this system is failing to scale the decision-making process globally. We are failing to take final and good decisions at global scale.

I believe, Blockchain technology provides a blue-print to design and build a new system that provides the required level of Trust&Truth while maintaining a decentralized deployment of power (the crowd wisdom). A system that is inherently scalable by design. For the first time we can build a system with Rules but without Rulers. A system that is regulated by algorithms instead of being regulated by bureaucracies.

Take for example what is happening with Internet stack.

In the Internet stack, most of the value is captured and aggregated at the application layer (think of Google, Facebook, Twitter, …), internet protocols generally produced low returns (TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, …). This led to centralizing the power in FAMGA (Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon) hands. However, in the blockchain application stack, this relationship between protocols and applications is reversed. Most of the value is captured at the shared protocol layer and only a fraction of that value is distributed along at the applications layer. Take Bitcoin network for example, it has a market cap of 150 B$ but the largest companies built on top are worth a few hundred million at best.

Blockchain will never stop disrupting the status-quo!!!!