Brendan Blumer, the CEO of Block.one, presents his keynote speech on Sept 26, 2018 in Olympia, London for the Blockchain Live 2018 conference.
Blumer outlines a cogent overview of blockchain and its transformative promises. He notes that it is a technology that welcomes everyone with no prerequisites and which will inevitably become part of our future.
Blumer offers this definition: Blockchain is simply a mutually agreed set of standardization of data storage and transmission. It’s a set of constraints that developers agree to abide by in order to obtain security, auditability and interoperability.
He suggests an analogy that blockchain is to data in some ways what regulation is to society.
He describes blockchain as a social and economic movement that offers the promise of a more transparent, efficient and interoperable world.
Blumer notes it includes a promise that, over time, it will allow our governments to better represent all of us.
He highlights how blockchain can transform centralized platforms, like Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, GitHub, insurance institutions and banking, into decentralized networks, where the profits of such networks would be minimal to non-existent and any excess value could be driven back to those who contribute to the prosperity of the project.
Blumer further elaborates: “Shareholders, as we currently understand them, are in many cases beginning to represent pricing inefficiencies and we may yield them less competitive to projects with perfectly priced goods and services.”
As an example, he describes a social network that rewards users with tokens for content creation, and requires advertisers to purchase those tokens, which drives value to the users, as opposed to traditional shareholders.
He remarks upon the democratization of blockchain with the idea that transparency may usher in a new era of equality and accountability.
Blumer describes blockchain tokenization as an opportunity that allows consumers to store value in projects they know and understand, which they can also engage in for their own prosperity. In such a tokenized economy the activity of early discovery and evangelism can and will be a career in itself.