Short answer – global. Medium answer – as big as the internet was at the turn of the century. Long answer – How big is Apple? Everybody has heard of Apple, the company that launched the Apple Mac computer, the Ipad and the Iphone. They are the most valuable stock on Wall Street, along with Amazon, Google and Facebook. Well the co-founder of Apple – Steve Wozniak - has just co-founded a new company called Equi Global, a venture capital fund built using Blockchain technology. That’s the same technology upon which Bitcoin is based. Bitcoin was the first ever Blockchain invention, and now it’s gone viral.
It says a lot about the tech if the co-founder of the biggest computer company in history goes off to start another company based on that new tech. You may not have heard of blockchain but it is the next step after the internet. It’s the new world wide web. Web 3.0. And smart money has already got involved and become an early adopter while the rest of us wait to buy their products once they’re launched. Basically what the new company Equi Global will do is scout for the brightest new tech stars of the future. “Woz” apparently gets requests and innovative pitches all the time but this is the first time since Apple, in maybe the past 20 years, that he has agreed to co-found a new company. That’s how revolutionary this Blockchain invention is. It will modify and improve business and be a game changer in the future world we live in.
They are already looking at 20 new companies and are working on a short list of the ones that they will sponsor and mentor. The company has already developed a $325 million residence in Dubai and sold 50 apartments to Bitcoin users, probably for Bitcoin. So while 80% of their funding and focus will go to tech companies, 20% will go to real estate and “investment collectables”. How’s that for a business plan? And it’s tokenised so investors can buy in, not in the old way where you buy shares in a company, but in the new way, where you buy their equivalent of Bitcoin. By tokenising the asset or company, what you are doing is launching your own new cryptocurrency and asking investors to buy some of your newly invented coin. This is only possible due to the Blockchain and is an imitation of Bitcoin. Already there are over 2000 cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, launched in this way by start-up companies globally. You buy the company’s new currency and hold it or trade it on crypto exchanges, like a stock, security or commodity. They have called theirs’ the Equitoken. This is the new model. Everything can be tokenised, from knowledge to art to tech. Such is the shifting field of new tech and equally importantly, new money. It’s a new value system and it’s digital and failsafe thanks to Blockchain.
In the same way that money has become decentralised in Bitcoin, similarly apps have become decentralised via the Blockchain. They’re now called dapps. And the new money is based on a concept called “token economics” or “tokenomics”. This Blockchain tech is pretty much mainstream already. Standard Bank, the biggest bank in my country, South Africa, is launching events this month to help teach the benefits and risks of this emerging technology in the financial services sector. Bitcoin and its foundation tech Blockchain are the new buzzwords in the finance and tech industries. Banks know that it could put them out of business or make them redundant, so they are rather embracing the new decentralised model of doing things. Since China is the biggest partner of our banks, and China (Asia in general) is the world leader in accepting and using Blockchain tech, South Africa was probably obliged to come up to speed in order to do deals with their big brother. Nobody foresaw the disruptive and revolutionary advantage of the internet when it first launched and Blockchain is just like that now. Bitcoin was simply the first protocol based on the Blockchain that enabled peer to peer payments without a third party or traditional bank. And thousands more have followed. If you want to pay me or vice versa, you don’t have to put the Bitcoin in an account held for me by Standard Bank. You just put it directly into my digital wallet, which could be on my phone or other device as a Dapp (download free from Google play store). The transaction is private, untraceable and untaxable.
“In this world, you have to make peace with the fact that you will be disintermediated, your way of making money now and operating will be disrupted, because we are in a space where everything is being decentralised.” Naomi Snyman, Standard Bank group, South Africa
So Bitcoin is the face of Blockchain technology, but the tech is usable in many more ways and forms. Blockchain is a decentralised, peer to peer platform that facilitates what are called “smart contracts”. It expands the concept of “trust”. In the past it was enough to put on your currency “In God we trust.” But those days are over in a secular world. Then in the recent past we put our trust in our local community and more directly in our banks, thinking that any agreement with them was safe. But today we are entering into a “trustless” society. Ask the Greeks or Cypriots if they trust their banks after their deposits were hijacked by the government “Bail-in”. And what about the financial crisis of 2008 that destroyed Lehmann Brothers, a global financial institution? And then there was “The Wolf of Wall St” as well as Bernie Madoff, middle men who made off with all their investors’ money. You can’t trust anyone. Yet at the same time, paradoxically, we now have internet technology that allows us to trust total strangers, as we do when using AirBNB, or Uber. If we expand on that concept, the new tech means that trust is distributed. Blockchain is simply the newest form of tech that is so robust due to being decentralised, that it can never be hacked and thus it facilitates trust in agreements between parties known as “smart contracts”.
“Distributed ledger technology is about more than just providing a medium for Bitcoin transactions. With the insurance industry being driven to a large extent by the claims process, Blockchain seems to be an ideal way to automate processes that are still mainly paper-driven, manual and prone to human error.” Jonathan Jardim, senior developer for Rubix Digital Solutions – a subsidiary of SilverBridge Holdings
Decentralised means that everybody saves a copy of a specific file or transaction. It’s a distributed ledger. It needs to be verified by all the users in that network. So you need to hack everybody on the blockchain to corrupt a transaction, which is impossible. Nobody has done it in ten years of Bitcoin’s existence. Exchanges have been hacked, and digital keys have been stolen along with cryptocurrency, but nobody has been able to hack the Blockchain distributed ledger. It is protected by high level encryption called Cryptography. This transparent and immutable open ledger allows anyone in your specific contract to track and trace transactions, assets, data, etc based on the digital signature or timestamp. Each transaction is verified by all the users in your chain, based on your contract rules agreed upon by you. That is the smart contract that you created using Blockchain protocol. Whether you want to track goods in your supply chain around the world or complete a course to get a degree, what to speak of financial transactions – all are possible on the Blockchain. Insurance companies may be slow on the uptake of Blockchain, but it makes sense for them to use a system where multiple participants need views of common info, and where the removal of a central authority as record keeper that acts as an intermediary has the potential to reduce costs and complexity... as well as fraud. I think we should put BBT out of business, since they have been corrupted by book editors that change Bhaktivedanta Swami’s words, and put all of Srila Prabhupada’s writings and translations from Sanskrit on the Blockchain.
I hope this has added to your knowledge of this new tech which is transforming the world today. If you wish to contact me to chat further, email me on julescape@gmail.com or if you wish to leave a donation for my writing and research my Bitcoin address is below. So until next time, when I discuss more about token economics and the new value system, may your trust be well founded and verified and may you find the real value of this human form of life.