What is Trust ? In simple terms "Trust is expectation of certain behavior". Simple examples include "Expecting your friend won't reveal your secrets" , "Expecting you will be paid back the money you lent" , "Expecting that the product you ordered in an online retail store will be delivered" , "Expecting the bank you hold an account with will keep your funds safe" , "Expecting your government will deliver the promises they made over their election campaign"... it is fundamental that almost every expectation is built on top of Trust.
What is Value ? Value is perception of benefit. Anything your mind perceives that you can be benefited of is Valuable for you. It can be a conversation, a transaction , a trade , an article or simply any act you feel benefit out of the action.
Network is collection of nodes that can communicate. For example a cell phone network, a social network, internet, online retail network, payment network ,... any group that can communicate (usually with a set of rules (protocol)) is a network.
As we defined Trust, Value and Network, let's understand how they play out in our daily life.
How many people can you trust in this world ? Before answering the question , How many people do we really know with their names so that we can list them? May be couple of hundreds? or may be few thousands? out of them How many people can i trust to share my personal information or to make a transaction or a trade directly? may be very few. More often people whom we trust are the ones who breaks the trust.
So it is very difficult to establish trust directly between person to person.
How we establish trust to exchange value ? Using Intermediaries. Intermediary can be a person, group of people, a government organization, an internet company,... any of these mechanisms that provide ways to transact between people who want to exchange value with trust.
That's great. We built networks to establish trust with intermediaries so that we can exchange value. We built great networks like Governments, Banks, payment networks, retail networks, social networks, vehicle sharing networks, home sharing networks,... and the list is endless!
Perfect World right ? Ya! but we suddenly hear news about a hack of payment website, credit website, retail website, Bank fraud,... this list is also endless!.
What is the problem now ? Problem is that the users of these networks have to trust intermediaries. Some of the problems with intermediaries include:
These networks are Centralized/Hierarchical in nature.
Network users personal information is hosted centrally with Intermediaries.
Intermediaries should provide utmost security in such a way that the information won't be hacked.
Intermediaries has administration access to modify user data.
Intermediaries charge high fees to provide platform for the network users.
In Hierarchical networks information flow from bottom to top or top to bottom is not always transparent.
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Most of the problems with these networks comes from their Centralized/Hierarchical nature.
What if we can build networks where there are no Centralized/Hierarchical intermediaries to trust, only peer-peer, decentralized, trust-less, immutable, boarder-less networks ?
Peer-Peer : Transaction is only between the two parties who want to transact no intermediaries involved.
Decentralized : There are no central/hierarchical intermediaries.
Trust-less : You don't need to trust the party you are transacting with, in fact you don't even need to know whom you are transacting with.
Immutable : All the transaction records in the network are stored and secured in such a way that it is almost impossible to modify these records.
Boarder-less : Anybody in the world can use/participate in the network.
When i read something like this first time i questioned my self "How is this possible?", If it is possible to build networks with above listed characteristics, i believe that those networks will fundamentally disrupt centralized/hierarchical networks we use today.
Blockchains are technological innovations which are paving ways to build decentralized, peer-peer, immutable, border-less, trust-less networks. If you are working in a centralized technology business model or a technology enthusiast then it is the time to understand these new networks for the near future.
If interested to learn then Bitcoin blockchain network is the first one to use and understand how Blockchains work. I know Bitcoin has gathered huge amount of both positive and negative attention because Bitcoin network was built around payments and store of value. Money has the power to attract both positive and negative attention.
At this very moment there are many technologists around the world researching to build these networks for different use cases. These networks are at a stage where internet was in early 90's with many challenges to overcome but i believe it's just matter of time before they transform the world the way internet did.
There are many resources in the internet if you are interested to learn but if you want to start with Bitcoin Blockchain below is the link for great list of resources from one of the Bitcoin developers.