Inventions like driverless cars and burgeoning industries like the sharing economy are commonly named as the ways that tech is changing our world.
But in a special blockchain-themed show on The Disruptors, co-host Amber Kanwar sat down with two co-authors who believe that the biggest tech innovation of our time will be blockchain. Don and Alex Tapscott are the father and son co-authors of The Blockchain Revolution, an upcoming book that examines the ripple effects of blockchain in the world market.
The Tapscotts say that today’s biggest disruptors, like Uber and Airbnb, could be in trouble in the world of blockchain. “You can go to your app, and rather than Uber, it’s like super Uber,” said Don. “If you want a car, you would say where you want to go, and it says it will be there in three minutes. But there will be no company running all of this. It’s just a distributed software application running on this blockchain. There’s no reason to have a $65 billion company running this.”
Instead, these kinds of services can be completely run by “clever code”, and the people who actually create the value get to keep the value. The latter point is the most important for the Tapscotts, who say that blockchain could be key to addressing social and economic inequality. “The only way to solve that problem is to redistribute wealth. The government says they’ll tax the rich, but what if we pre-distribute wealth and change how wealth gets created in the first place,” Don said. “We can democratize the creation of prosperity.”
Watch the whole interview below: