Every year, Jim denOtter, CTO at Computronix, delivers what we have all come to know as Jim’s Tech Rant. It’s an insightful look into advancements in technology and how it affects our daily lives. Read Part 1 and Part 2 here.
Part Three picks up with the idea that technical advancement democratizes such things as buying and selling commodities, how blockchain is a vital part of that process and the future of the banking industry.
“Right now, the production and distribution of electricity are just hugely expensive, and it takes massive infrastructure to build (a power grid), which takes billions of dollars of investment. But you can buy solar panels and put them on your roof, and you might even be able to sell some of that power back to the grid. But soon you could actually have a bunch of people (in a neighborhood with solar panels on their roofs) who just sell power back and forth to each other which results in these ‘electro-microgrids’ starting up. There are actually a number of nations looking into allowing entire provinces (or similar size counties and states) to do their own thing regarding power production and distribution.
The blockchain is a big piece of this because we need to be able to record who’s contributed and/or paid for what and be able to trust that recordation. We don’t want to have to trust some big third party (like a bank) to manage all of that for us. We can record things on a blockchain that we can believe in, that we know can’t be corrupted. We know the record isn’t going away and nobody can fudge with it. And we didn’t need anybody to manage that process for us.
How does this affect the current banking structure? As people begin to trust blockchain, banking as we know it will change. What do bankers do? They manage and distribute your money, they’re keeping track of the transactions for you. What if we don’t need them to keep transaction records for us anymore? Well, then we don’t need them at all. Then where do I go to get capital if I need it? Remember, I previously mentioned if there’s value to the thing you want to do and people believe you can pay it (the capital) back and everyone trusts the ledger, who knows, maybe we can democratize capital. We do it in the stock market maybe we can do it in small things, like a car loan.”
Can you imagine a world without big banks? Blockchain could change the entire way we buy, sell and trade several goods and services. In Part Four, Jim talks about how technology has already disrupted brick and mortar, network television, and album sales. There could be a time coming soon where AI could disrupt the entire automotive industry…and not just because of self-driving vehicles. Stay tuned, you’ll want to read about this.
