Blockchain Economy | William Mougayar | TEDxIndianapolis

I'm going to start with a technology confession the mystery of the web has been spectacular across all aspects but it has been vexing in one thing that was missing from it being digital in the world of the web was missing something that was very native to it in the same way that web sites are very native to the web up until now if you think about it the web consisted mostly of moving information around being digital has been fundamental to many different areas from e-commerce to publishing travel services supply chain eServices it has touched every single industry that you can think of however there's one thing that the web has not touched yet in a very fundamental way and that thing is money so now you may be thinking well what are you talking about William we can move money today on the web yes you are right but up until now the banks were really in the middle of all of these transactions and they led us to believe that we were interacting with each other yes they fooled us whereas we they were facilitating these interactions on our behalf and as long as they controlled everything they led us to believe that we needed their trust in order to store our money or to move our money and that was true up until four years ago when a new word started to enter our vocabulary a new form of money digital money came along Bitcoin which I'm sure you've heard of but even more important that Bitcoin and more fundamental to our future is the technology behind the coin and that is the blockchain you may have heard about the blockchain maybe a new word maybe it's obscure but it's going to remain in our vocabulary in the same way as the web and the internet have entered our vocabulary and have been in it for the last 20 years what is the blockchain the blockchain is this invisible network that is an overlay on top of the web think of it as doing the same thing that banks were doing to our money banks were needed to move our money the block chains are going to be needed to move this new form of money the cryptocurrency so the block chains are this linkage between cryptocurrency but the main difference is that block chains are not owned by one entity or by one person they are collectively shared collectively operated and collectively owned by thousands and thousands of computers around the world so unlike banks there's no bricks and mortar they can scale and they can grow with no borders and without any regulation and that by the way is a feature not a bug so remember the word blockchain if money was the first application of the blockchain and the reason why I said that it had not been touched fundamentally it's because the banks were really between us and the Internet whereas cryptocurrency what the blockchain enables is now enabling peer-to-peer transactions that is really at the core of the Internet and if this was the first application what do you think the next application is beyond money work so let me ask you how many of you and please raise your hands have one job a job so keep your hands how many of you have two jobs how many of you have three jobs okay a lot of hands went down let me be honest with you I think most of you that did not keep your hands up I think you were lying to yourselves a little bit because in reality we all have three jobs the first job is the job that you go to the office for or to the factory or to a store you get paid at the end of the week or at the end of the month the second job is the job you have for taking care of yourself they can care of your kids your siblings your house cleaning doing the dishes the third job is the job that was out sourced not to somebody in the Philippines or in India or in Poland it was outsourced to you by a friendly company that you do business with on a daily basis perhaps they outsource the job that used to be performed by one of their employees and now you're doing it think about booking a travel online or booking a hotel online or any type of self-service tasks that you are now doing thanks to the web but the difference is that we had not been paid for this kind of job in the past and this is about to change work as we know it is going to be married to the blockchain in more ways than one and we can divide work in two different types there's active work and passive work active work is the work that you are very conscious about you know that you are doing something you are driving a car you are writing in a software program you are conscious of what you're doing the more fascinating type of work is passive work it is fascinating because you are doing it without being aware of you doing it and more importantly it is generating value without you knowing that is a generating value and the new thing with the blockchain is that somebody some company is going to be willing to pay you for the value that you are generating by doing passive work because that is valuable to them in the same way as government's issue currency and every government every country has their own currency in the near future and this is happening right now companies will be issuing their own currency which we will call crypto currency or crypto for short and they will be issuing that currency to us and this will be a currency that is liquid it is not the same as getting receiving points or are getting a store credit it is something that you can buy and sell with you can earn something and you can spend it at the same time let me give you some examples attention attention is a currency think about Facebook the average person spends about an hour per day on Facebook doing what we give them our attention they take our attention they take the eyeballs that we have the time we've spent and they repackage it and sell it as advertising and what do they give us nothing in return a Facebook was reinvented in the day of the blockchain in a decentralized manner they would be compensating us because we are the ones that are helping them to resell the advertising that they are making billions of dollars attention is a currency and we own it and we will be able to benefit from it in the future with the blockchain there are decentralized content networks now that will pay you if you spend time with them another example data we are data emitting devices constantly everywhere we go everything we do everything about us our height weight demographics age what we are doing this is all valuable data what if we could provide that data to another entity that could take the data aggregated and give us something back in return that is more valuable to us but for them it was valuable to receive our data what if they give us some value a token for our data it token in the form of the cryptocurrency which we can then reuse to buy something else I'm sure that many of you maybe not all would gladly say if that was the case please take my data another area is something we own and maybe we can share and I'm not thinking of Airbnb think about your own computers which are sitting there for most of the time doing nothing what kid look whether if you could share a little tiny piece of your disk drive or a tiny piece of your processing power that you're not using and you can get paid for it and then one day you want more maybe you can use that currency to buy something yourself these are examples that are happening right now so what is going on right now we are moving from user-generated content which you are familiar with which is really the corner store of social media when you post a picture on Instagram or when you write a few lines on Facebook or on a blog that is called user-generated content in the future we're going to have user-generated work but this is work which we are going to get paid for by the blockchain by all of these cryptocurrencies that will come into existence these are some examples of some of those tokens or cryptocurrency tokens golem is for buying and selling cloud computing another one called storge for cloud storage seiyya for file transfer steam it for content publishing you publish something you get voted up you earn some steam dollars and you can trade them for real dollars and there will be a plethora of these types of work related cryptocurrencies that will be issued by these companies and we are going to be the recipient of these currencies now let's think about this what's going on here we have three big themes that are have converged at the same time we have a new system of money digital money cryptocurrency which is the Internet of money money on wings that can travel very fast nobody in the middle will have a new system of work where we do passive work we generate value and we get paid for it and we have a new system of technology the blockchain which is very decentralized peer-to-peer like the web it's everywhere and nowhere what's the end result the end result is that we're going to have a lot of services that are going to become decentralized that are going to not be centralized Facebook is centralized so let's imagine imagine banking without banks that maybe we don't trust or maybe are not fast enough for us or too expensive to do business with imagine e-commerce without eBay without credit card fees without listing fees imagine gambling without a house maybe we don't trust the house imagine transportation without uber where every driver is a node of their own and we can deal with them directly imagine stock trading without the Nasdaq or stock exchanges where we can interact and peer-to-peer trade with each other this is happening right now in a small scale that is how the web started as well more than 20 years ago and we are going to be moving from a web economy to a blockchain economy today the blockchain economy overall is probably about 40 billion dollars when you add the value of all of the cryptocurrencies that exist today in addition to the companies that are part of this phenomenon but in the future it is going to get bigger and bigger slowly everything starts small until it is big the end game is going to be a combination of currency tokens and work-related tokens and we'll be able to trade them and we'll be able to spend and earn at the same time and that is why this is now going to be a new economy of its own so how did you get involved how do you benefit and how do you participate in this you have to be curious and try to go and find out out where you can get involved and earn tokens or earn currency for some of the work that you cut you could be doing or maybe you have something that others want and you could be sharing it and receiving tokens in return this is the future so the blockchain has not just given us a new form of money it has given us a new form of earning money as well and spending it and you might think well what's wrong with the system that we have today why are we not happy with what we have this is not something about changing what we have today we cannot change the current system there comes a point in the technology evolution where there is a paradigm shift and you cannot change anything anymore you have to go to a new system the cellular phones when they came along they did not use the landlines they put new towers everywhere there was a new infrastructure when the web came along the web did not use the old mainframes the computer mainframes it was a new network out there the same thing is happening with the blockchain and the currency is behind it this is a new form of money it's a new form of network where the trust is with the network not with the banks not with the credit card companies not with the financial intermediaries and that is really the future of the blockchain so I'm going to leave you with this thought remember that the money in your pocket and the money in your bank account is going to get some competition competition is going to come from cryptocurrency in your smartphone wallets and inside of the applications in your smartphones that you will be using on a daily basis where you earn and you spend crypto currency this is the future and I hope you are as excited as I am about it it's going to touch you and I hope it's going to inspire you at the same time welcome to the blockchain economy [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 67,513

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Business, Economics, Future, Internet

Id: onYKgO6ogJg

Length: 17min 14sec (1034 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 05 2017