Philosopher of technology (my appellation, not his) Vinay Gupta (
“We need to think much bigger, but we need to think much bigger in much more diverse ways. Simply thinking of the tax starvation of the state — the libertarian, anarcho-capitalist utopia — is retarded.
It’s a really narrow, brittle political vision; it doesn’t stand up very well to analysis. It’s increasingly rare to meet people who genuinely believe in that vision; and they tend to be very doctrinaire and dogmatic. That political position is not very helpful for us in public relations terms, and it doesn’t solve problems that anyone in the wider world really cares about in practice.
To be of actual service to humanity, we need to start making this blockchain absolutely, clearly visible to people as something that will help with the real problems of the world in big, heavy, tangible ways:
> Show me how we’re going to track refugee children so they don’t get lost when they’re transferred from one agency to another when they go into a new country.
> Show me how we’re going to track timber so that the rainforest isn’t felled to make people’s cheap, disposable furniture.
> Show me how we’re going to do the provenance of meat so that people don’t wind up with e-coli infections from random contaminations that are impossible to track because you don’t know which factory your hamburger came from.
If we start solving real social problems using these technologies, it provides us with the best defense possible against accusations that we’re a bunch of corrupt psychopaths, which is more or less the way regulators would choose to see us if they wanted to really hurt us.
If we are solving the world’s problems in a provable, fair way, and it’s improving quality of life for an awful lot of people simultaneously, that’s the best possible argument we can make for people looking at our mistakes and saying, 'Well, that’s a learning opportunity' — instead of, 'These people are just mad, bad and dangerous; get rid of them.'
Whether we are seen as being parasites or embryonic saviors is entirely about whether or not we’re talking in hard terms about this narrow, anarcho-capitalist vision (which no one likes — not in wider society —that’s why it’s a totally fringe thing), or whether we’re talking about doing the heavy lifting necessary to produce a better world using the best tools we have available, which are math and cryptography — which are actually the same field.”
“The human experience is changing so rapidly that those who have a better handle on what’s taking place than we do [by exploiting any of the myriad information asymmetries that result from the need we've had to trust 3rd-party middlemen] are in a position to abuse their insight, and blockchains may give us a way to prevent those abuses from happening.”
— The Ether Review #34 – Vinay Gupta on Rethinking Blockchain Use Cases
https://www.etherreview.info/2016/07/08/234/