Blockchain and Distributed Web: Why You Should Care — from ideou.com

Excerpt:

To help get our heads around emerging tech, we invited our IDEO friends, IDEO CoLab, in for a Creative Confidence Series session about emerging tech (and why you should care).

In this first session, we sat down with CoLab’s Joe Gerber and Gavin McDermott to talk about the distributed web and blockchain and why it’s important to experiment with these emerging technologies. Many people conflate blockchain and bitcoin, but as Joe and Gavin discussed, bitcoin is just the tip of the spear and one small piece of a larger movement of blockchain and the distributed web. In this post, we’ll break down why, as Joe and Gavin say, the web is being rewritten from the inside out.

First, some definitions:

  • Blockchain: A blockchain is a peer-to-peer network that logs shared information about transactions. It’s provable because the transaction is validated by a broad network of computers. Joe quoted Vitalik Buterin likening blockchain to “a database we all agree on.” The magic of blockchain is that it solves the problem of digital abundance and computers’ innate ability for infinite copying by creating scarcity, ensuring that only one copy of something exists.
  • Bitcoin: Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency that uses blockchain technology, but there are a number of different applications for blockchain including contracts (smart contracts) and other types of information.
  • Distributed web: A movement that’s a complete reimagining of today’s internet infrastructure, it includes new and different protocols. We rely on protocols every day for things like email (simple mail transfer protocol, SMTP, allows Gmail, Yahoo Mail or Hotmail to all communicate) or for web browsing (hypertext transfer protocol, HTTP). In the distributed web, new peer-to-peer networks that do not rely on centralization are being built.

 

These technologies are still in their early days of construction and the blueprints are changing every day. What Joe and Gavin would recommend is that you start to experiment and prototype with these technologies to test assumptions for how they could affect your business. Don’t get ready, get started.