In this story written by Mike Casey:
What would be the point, critics of these new offerings say, of such a blockchain? How is it an improvement over an ordinary corporate database?
The answer, says Preston Byrne, the London-based co-founder of Eris Industries Ltd, is that a blockchain can be programmed to manage relationships between different units within an organization and thus achieve levels of “data-driven integration” that were previously impossible.
The presence of a verifiable, indisputable record of blockchain “transactions” means that disparate units – let’s say, a company’s payrolls department, its Treasury, its human resources division – can carry out functions without requiring human intervention by different managers.
What’s key, says Mr. Byrne, is the idea of “smart contracts,” which function as a set of automated instructions for a computer to perform if a set of conditions is in place. Blockchain-adjudicated smart contracts can make organizational processes more efficient and integrated…
…In a private Twitter message, Mr. Byrne, who finds himself frequently arguing with bitcoiners, wrote: “There are two ways to go about the ‘change the world’ thing: sledgehammer, trying to break down the gate, [or] surreptitiously through a back door. We’re after the latter.”
Yet, right across Silicon Valley, investors are betting that bitcoin’s decentralized model can achieve profound structural change. Venture capitalists have poured more than $600 million into projects based on bitcoin.
In short: blockchains have nothing to do with money and everything to do with data, specifically collapsing process logic, and securing and automating its execution.
That’s betting against (now nearly) $700,000,000 of VC money. But then, I’ve never liked following the crowd.
It helps that we’re right.
