Excerpts from my book in writing, "A world for everyone": Smart contracts part one

Smart contracts are to contracts, what smartphones are to phones. So you might get an idea about what future generations may think about our financial system from this clip:

Back at the age of landlines, or even of “dumb” mobile phones, the device that we held in our hand was merely an earpiece, a microphone and a dial pad, and all the “intelligence” and processing power of the telecom system was in the network's infrastructure. This turned the telecom providers and their technology suppliers into giant and enormously rich corporations.

I worked at the telecom industry at the time of the transition. I saw with my own eyes how industry giants like Motorola, Nokia and Nortel, crumbled down. I witnessed how it was clear that the executive management of these corporations, including many good and smart people, just couldn't get it. They enjoyed the luxury of leading a mature industry, more than a century after it was young and disruptive. Their favorite analogy for their companies was of a big ship. It may be slow and cumbersome, but it is stable and safe. What they could not see was, that it was not that the direction of the winds and streams was changing, but that the sea was drying.

How could they be so blind? Well from knowning many of them in person, I can tell you that part of it was because of greed and hybris, but these were​ not the main reasons. The main reason was that it is simply the way progress works. Disruptions tend to come from outside the lines of sight of conventional wisdom. In the case of the telecom industry, the conventional wisdom was, that packet switching will never disrupt circuit switching. Similarity, the reason the conventional financial system can't see how smart contacts are disrupting their business, is that they still think that there is a clear line between the financial and commodity markets. They can't see how smart contacts and cryptocurrencies are neither and both.

But the change is already happening. Maybe it will not be as swift and dramatic as the smartphones revolution, but it is going to happen and it is going to change the world. Our grandchildren will be as puzzled about fiat money, as today's children are about rotary phones.