Distributed Trust in the UNTHINKABLE age

4 min readNov 12, 2017

As regular readers know, I’m obsessed with the idea that #OpenLeadership is a radical approach that can make a massive difference for humanity and our planet in this UNTHINKABLE age that we live in.

Change is SO rapid that we cannot have the answers, yet we aren’t yet acting in recognition of this.

Recently I wrote a post “What a fool believes about Bitcoin“. Yes, it primarily focussed on the bitcoin bubble and psychology of the “greater fool theory, but I also said :

“I do actually believe that Blockchain in 2017 is at just such a moment as Netscape and the “WWW” was in 1994. Distributed trust is going to change our world, and at such a speed we cannot even imagine.”

Let me run you through a line of thinking.

First though, some history for fun :

In 1876 the first telephone exchange was created, connecting users for calls with a dedicated connection over (gasp!) wires from point to point.
In 1991 the internet began when the World Wide Web launched. Information was shared over “IP”, with packets of data going across the network
in 1994 Netscape appeared and all of a sudden we got the point of the internet.
In 1999, Napster explodes with peer to peer sharing of music files. Amusingly, people trust each other to share data across thousand of computers in order to pirate music illegally
In 2003, Skype takes technology for peer to peer data sharing to another level by sharing voice and video for calls. Again, the driver was for users to save money over the cost of conventional telephony
In 2009 Whatsapp begins. Within a few short years, the “upstarts” of the mobile telephony world, having “disrupted” conventional “fixed line” phone companies to the edge of extinction, now find themselves in the business of selling data for whatsapp messages and calls, as who uses texts or phone call anymore ?

Wow, speedy, huh ? What’s next ? No idea.. and literally we can’t think of what it could be, we can only guess. UNTHINKABLE !

Now, what about this blockchain stuff then ?

Let’s talk about money and central banks for a minute then, shall we.

No, stay with me, I promise I won’t get into numbers.