Blockchain Revolution

Implications for the Blockchain Economy: Later in the book, we tackle the issue of the prosperity paradox—how the first era of the Internet benefited many, but overall prosperity in the Western world for most people is no longer improving. The foundation for prosperity is inclusion, and blockchains can help. Let’s be clear that inclusion has multiple dimensions. It means an end to social, economic, and racial hegemony, an end to discrimination based on health, gender, sexual identification, or sexual preference. It means ending barriers to access because of where a person lives, whether a person spent a night in jail, or how a person voted, but also an end to glass ceilings, and good ol’ boys’ clubs of countless varieties.

DESIGNING THE FUTURE

Our conversation with Ann Cavoukian inspired us to follow up on Germany’s “Never again” promise. We came across the words of German federal president Joachim Gauck on the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of National Socialism, victims of Hitler’s regime. “Our moral obligations cannot be fulfilled solely at the level of remembrance. There also exists within us a deep and abiding certainty that remembrance bestows a mission on us. That mission tells us to protect and preserve humanity. It tells us to protect and preserve the rights of every human being.”⁵⁴ Was he alluding to genocide in Syria, Iraq, Darfur, Srebrenica, Rwanda, and Cambodia, after the German people had vowed, “Never again”?

We believe that blockchain technology could be an important tool for protecting and preserving humanity and the rights of every human being, a means of communicating the truth, distributing prosperity, and—as the network rejects the fraudulent transactions—of rejecting those early cancerous cells from a society that can grow into the unthinkable.

Admittedly, a bold statement. Read on and judge for yourself.

From a more parochial and practical perspective, these seven principles can serve as a guide to designing the next generation of high-performance and innovative companies, organizations, and institutions. If we design for integrity, power, value, privacy, security, rights, and inclusion, then we will be redesigning our economy and social institutions to be worthy of trust. We now turn our attention to how this could roll out and what you should consider doing.