Written by Well, that was the fun. The nice people at the Meaning Conference gave me 13 minutes to try to explain what a blockchain technology is, what blockchains might do, and what the implications might be, to an audience of largely creative people. Quite a challenge.
Since they were creative types, I thought I ought to frame my explanations with poetry rather than mathematics. I decided to start with the Ur-statement of ordered immutability, the Rubiyaat of Omar Khayyam (1048-1131):
“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”
You can see a revised version of the slide deck here (we accidentally sent the wrong version on the day, but it really didn’t matter). It sets out the revised “4x4x4” model of shared ledgers, so that there is context for talking about the blockchain, and then quickly works through how there are different kinds of blockchains (and bitcoin is only one) and then gets to what I think will be the lasting impact: ambient accountability and new kinds of transaction environments where traditional auditing and policing are taken care of by the environment itself.
In order to explain my focus on ambient accountability, we went back to poetry, this time with T.S. Eliot and choruses from The Rock (1934).
“They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.”
The point here is to frame shared ledgers as as much of a regtech as a fintech. The technology may well not cut the cost of financial transactions at all — as I constantly point out, when people tell me about bitcoin’s incredible ability to move money around the world instantly and for free, the blockchain isn’t instant and it isn’t free — but it has the potential to cut the cost of regulating financial transactions substantially. We can, I think, see ways to dissolve traditional notions of auditing and replace them with infrastructure that embodies auditing instead. If there’s no way that your view of the ledger and my view of the ledger can differ, then there’s no need to reconcile them.
You can watch the presentation here on YouTube (where it takes 19 minutes – I failed). They were kind to me with their feedback, although going back over the presentation I’m a little disappointed with it. I think I can do better to bring the new world of the shared ledger to the general audience. So I’d appreciate your feedback on two elements of the presentation. First, does the “real world ledger” model help with the discussion or is it an unnecessary complication and second do the example ledgers presented across those six layers make sense? I want to quickly show the different types of ledger in one slide, so I want a decent graphic comparing Bitcoin, Ethereum, R3, Hyperledger, DAH and so on. If someone has one I’d love to use it (fully credited, of course).
Any pointers?
Hello Dave,
On your slide № 14 “examples” it seems like Corda and Hyperledger covers same “shared ledgers terms” but they look not alike. What’s the point?
Thanks for taking the time to read the slide. I was trying to convey that Corda is a single specification across all the layers whereas hyperledger, as I understand, allows for different options at different layers.
Dave, it’s also interesting why you chose this set of blockchian platforms in particular? Am i right to think that other platforms are about marginal use cases when we talk about enterprise usage?
Don’t read too much into the choices here: I just picked a small number of examples that I thought people would have heard of.