At the inaugural SingularityU Canada Summit in Toronto, Andreas Antonopolous â one of the leading experts in bitcoin â explained why the technology is so revolutionary.
âWe are living in a world where we canât trust news, young people donât have jobs, where they canât trust institutions like banks, where they feel betrayed by government disenfranchised by democracy,â he said. âThe common institutions of society are failing to scale.â
“Trust moves from a person to a mathematical process thatâs neutral.”
– Andreas Antonopolous
While he acknowledges that these institutions have moved humanity forward, theyâre no longer able to fulfill their original purpose. A hierarchal society means that decisions, information â and ultimately, power â flow to the top. âThey get more and more power, and they get more and more detached from the people,â he said, adding that this ultimately leads to corruption.
At the same time, he says that these institutions arenât made for a world where borders are nonexistent thanks to the internet. Because of this, there is a need for structures that support decentralization.
Bitcoin has the potential to be a transformative technology that changes the way these structures function, specifically because it can scale trust. On a flat P2P, non-hierarchical network where no one knows or trust each other, this network can engineer a ledger that records transactions that cannot be modified.
âTrust moves from a person to a mathematical process thatâs neutral called consensus, which is fundamental invention behind bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, â he said. âThis is the way to achieve massive trust at scale on a completely flat network.â
The most obvious purpose for such a technology, understandably, is payments â even if banks havenât been the most supportive proponents of bitcoin. But considering that bitcoin can scale trust, he encourages people to think beyond currency.
âYou can use it for voting, you can use it to build massively decentralized corporations with tens and thousands of directors participating in decision making. You can have a company with a billion shareholders, none of whom are named or owned,â he said.
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