{"id":21694,"date":"2018-07-31T23:27:20","date_gmt":"2018-07-31T23:27:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ci027cfe6ed00d26c3"},"modified":"2018-07-31T23:27:20","modified_gmt":"2018-07-31T23:27:20","slug":"more-ledger-how-blockchains-will-democratize-wealth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/culture\/more-ledger-how-blockchains-will-democratize-wealth","title":{"rendered":"More Than a Ledger: How Blockchains Will Democratize Wealth"},"content":{"rendered":"
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To Mark Pascall, co-founder of BlockchainLabs New Zealand (NZ) and president of the Blockchain Association NZ, the blockchain space is more than just a new technology layer, it\u2019s a \u201cfundamentally different way for organizations and societies to operate.\u201d<\/p>\n

It represents a historical reversal of the movement toward an evermore centralized society.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe major problem is that without mass decentralization, we get a bigger and bigger wealth disparity between the rich and the poor,\u201d Pascall said in an interview with Bitcoin Magazine.<\/em><\/p>\n

Although we were in a hunter-gatherer society and it was relatively easy to protect assets many centuries ago, as society became more complex we built more things of value and so had to build bigger things to protect those things.<\/p>\n

Pascall explained that this has led to requiring third parties to protect our assets \u2014 like banking systems and the sovereign state \u2014 and these institutions are fundamentally rooted in a logic of violence.<\/p>\n

The shift toward a centralized society took place over many hundreds of years, but it wasn\u2019t until the invention of the World Wide Web in the 1980s, that the \u201cinternet accelerated that centralization to an alarming degree,\u201d says Pascall.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow, the boundaries have been hit as we\u2019ve got global monopolies. We\u2019ve got five or six companies who own alarming amounts of data and wealth and control.\u201d<\/p>\n

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They control how we think, they control how we vote now, and that\u2019s a pretty scary space, and they\u2019re very difficult to displace. We know the network effectively is very powerful and it would be incredibly hard for somebody else to displace Facebook with another decentralized model.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Globally, many people\u2019s awareness of current events is shaped by Facebook<\/a> and Google, which determine, with hidden algorithms, what information we see and consume.<\/p>\n

But Pascall hopes blockchain technology can now enable these monopolies to be undone in order to create \u201ca better, fairer, more equitable society.\u201d <\/p>\n

This is why he believes many are so passionate about the potential of the blockchain space; it carries potential to shift power away from some of the world\u2019s most extreme monopolies.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo the blockchain is this infrastructure that can allow that centralization to move to a decentralized world,\u201d says Pascall.<\/p>\n

While many people talk about the blockchain as a decentralized ledger or a database, Pascall believes that this narrow definition \u201cin itself is missing the point.\u201d<\/p>\n

So what is the point? Pascall draws another lesson from history: the creators of the first internet in the 1980s didn\u2019t actually make any money out of it. <\/p>\n

The inventors of the so-called \u201cfat applications\u201d \u2014 the Googles, Facebooks and Amazons \u2014 were people who now extract massive value out of that fat layer on the thin protocol and make the money.<\/p>\n

Now, blockchain technology enables people to build fat protocols that are open source; these are open, transparent protocols built by communities of developers.<\/p>\n

The people who come up with these new ideas and protocols, the startups, can raise a lot of money to support them in building communities to develop these second-layer, foundational bits of the internet.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a bit of a wild west money grab out there and I think that\u2019s one of the things the ICO concept has driven.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the last century when we saw the<\/a>dotcom craziness and then the crash \u2014 there\u2019s a bit of that going on, so we are going to see, out of the thousands of ICOs that are being generated now, a bunch of core foundational protocols emerging which will be open, community-driven, fully decentralized, with no central organization or person. They\u2019ll be controlled by the token holders, which could be you or anybody, so those will emerge as the winners,\u201d says Pascall.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt should get us to a more equitable place where it\u2019s not just the high net worth people in Silicon Valley or in Singapore or in London who are the financial investors who are making the big money \u2014 it should democratize that space.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can now share in a fairer system and a tokenized economy where everything can be tokenized, from a football team to a building to a new idea, and they can be fully liquid and tradable, and individuals can become their own Swiss Bank,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n

So blockchain technology and tokenization will enable the purchase of more assets and remove previous barriers to trading and investing that meant that, previously, this was often reserved for the wealthy few.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow I think about it is that the internet democratized knowledge, the blockchain will democratize wealth,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s the positive future that a lot of people in the blockchain space see, and that\u2019s why we\u2019re passionate about it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cIt should get us to a more equitable place where it\u2019s not just the high net worth people … who are making the big money \u2014 it should democratize that space.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3500,"featured_media":21695,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[556,514,3088],"class_list":{"0":"post-21694","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture","8":"tag-blockchain","9":"tag-democracy","10":"tag-new-zealand"},"author_data":{"id":3500,"name":"Marianne Lehnis","nicename":"marianne-lehnis","avatar_url":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/bitcoin-schmitcoin-promo-image-1-96x96.png"},"featured_image_url":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/more-than-a-ledger-how-blockchains-will-democratize-wealth.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3500"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21694"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21694\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}