We interviewed Don Tapscott for the world’s first blockchain docuseries - NEXT
Watch some of the clips here!
How will blockchain affect ordinary people?
Don Tapscott: Well right now, blockchain doesn't affect the average person on the street too much, but it will in the future. It will enable us to have a home environment to create an experience culture, where if you're a musician or a songwriter or an artist or a journalist or scientists on the street, you can get compensated for that. If you're one of the 70 percent of the people in the developing world that own land, right now your land title is not enforceable. And you're in Honduras, a dictator comes along, he says I know you own, you have a piece of paper saying you own your farm, but the government computer says my friend owns your farm.
Or you're in India and you take your land title to the local office and summons bribe the bureaucrat there, and all of a sudden you're paying rent. So if we move towards, titles being stored on a blockchain, no corrupt bureaucrat or no dictator can mess with that. It means that the trillion dollars of money that moves from the developed world to the developing world. That's part of what's called remittances, the global diaspora. People have left their ancestral lands, have left China for example, and they moved to Toronto and there are a million Chinese people in Toronto. A lot of those people send money home.
This is bigger than all corporate investment in the developing world and it's bigger than all foreign aid. Right now those people are being ripped off. They are being charged 10 to 20 percent. Well with blockchain, they will be able to move that money, and it'll cost them 1 percent and it won't take four to seven days. It'll take four to seven minutes. So those would be three of hundreds of ways that this is going to affect us very directly as people, not just rich people but everybody.
What are the deficiencies of intermediaries?
Don Tapscott: So, well, today if you look at intermediaries, they slow things down. They cause additional cost. There's additional risk and we rely on the behavior of intermediaries which is not always in the interest of everybody. So consider the financial system, there is this global system worth trillions and trillions of dollars, manages trillions of dollars. It's highly centralized. That means it can be hacked. Any centralized system or institution can be hacked. It is expensive. It taxes things, can cost 10 to 20 percent to send money from one country to another. You know cross-border and exchange fees. Well you don't hear of cross-border e-mail fees. It's the same idea.
So they unnecessarily create cost. They capture all our data. Data is the biggest asset of the digital age. It's a new asset class that probably is more important than land or even loyal and physical resources under the industrial economy. We created, but they captured, they've monetized it and they've captured most of the benefit of the digital age.
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