IBM talks about its blockchain ventures here but what caught my eye was this statement:
Bitcoin, Ripple and Ethereum are “Iteration 1” of blockchain technology, the three time IBMer told his audience. Wolpert thinks blockchain technology will soon evolve to “Iteration 2.”
The problem with it?
“The Internet is constrained,” Wolpert said. “You have a fabric that allows for lots of competition on platforms and huge amounts of competition on solutions and applications on top of it, so we need to evolve the Internet to become economically aware, and that Internet isn’t going to be an application, it is going to be a fabric and then lots of applications on top of that.”
Pretty amused and excited about this because I recommended to one of the IBM team members that was working on a IoT PoC on the Ethereym blockchain 1-2 years ago to check out the SAFE project
I may be day dreaming now but who knows what their plans are, they seem to be pretty open to innovation
That sounds very cool, but honestly I don’t know what he means with that.
Also:
Wolpert cites the Arab Spring, and the role the Internet played in that
uprising, as how a permissioned, yet permissive, structure functions.
Websites, albeit technology permissioned by ICANN, remained online
during the protests and played a major role.
I very much wonder if the same would happen in a hypothetical “American Spring”. And then this:
In Wolpert’s view, finance does not need to go from today’s system of
trust – where consumers trust institutions to handle their money – to
one of complete trustlessness, like the Bitcoin system in which a
protocol, not a centralized authority, manages the movement of value.
And:
“Lots of banks pay us lots of money and we like that, and we want to
radically improve them,” Wolpert explained. “[Bankers] are gonna try
like heck to radically improve what is going on ahead of the disruption,
disrupt themselves if you will.
I get the feeling that IBM’s vision is one where cartels of banks/companies control these systems. They’d be almost like a corporate government.
Well the USA is a corporatist type state, create by and for the land owning gentry (moneyed class) who today own/control the majority of the powerful corporations. And the banking in the USA is essentially a cartel called the Federal Reserve System.
I can only make some assumptions right now, that’s why I said I was day dreaming when imagined he was talking about SAFE
Also, IBM is a for profit company nonetheless, and every blockchain project in cooperation with the banks will inflate their accounts. I got nothing against that personally.
I will be happy though if they think about building something with Maidsafe or on the SAFE network. It will attract more awareness to the project.
