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Will blockchain transform social relations, citizen-government relations, public-private relations, and what is it doing to us as a society?

SociologySociety+2
Olga Zeveleva
  ·   · 441
University of Cambridge PhD researcher, Computer...  · 9 янв 2018

Blockchain is not transforming social relations yet, but it has the potential to do that. It has the potential to make our institutions a lot more robust.

Just recently there was an election in one of the states in India. And immediately, the opposition party has claimed that the voting machines were hacked. People are already demotivated from voting, people don’t really have the motivation to go to the voting booth, and when you can’t even trust the results because half of the population is saying that the voting machines were hacked, why would you vote? I can imagine this being transformed if you have a system where people can say, “yes, I voted for these people, and these are the people that got elected, and everyone can verify this” - and that could revolutionise democracy.

Similarly, there is this whole technology of smart contracts. Smart contracts are an interesting idea. Normally, what you would do is you would write a program, run it on the computer, and get an output. What smart contracts do is they decentralise that process. So now you write a program, you put it on the blockchain, and everyone executes that program. This is, in a way, an electronic contract. I could have a contract with my bank saying that I am taking a loan for 1000 pounds, and I have to pay it back by December 22, 2019. If I don’t, they get ownership of my house. And this contract is published on the blockchain, and everyone executes it. And when that date arrives, if I haven’t paid back the loan, the bank can take my house because everyone now knows that I breached the contract. You don’t have to rely on a trusted intermediary anymore.

This is a very specific example, but smart contracts can be as generic as needed. So you could have a smart contract for basically anything, and that is a pretty revolutionary idea, where you can enter a contract about anything with anyone, and everyone can verify it, so there is no way for me to deny it later on, or to say I didn’t mean something or I didn’t sign something. If you could prevent that kind of fraud, it would be pretty revolutionary.

Research Fellow, Judge Business School...  · 31 дек 2017
This is not discussed enough and is very important. There are many ways in which technology is transforming society: when you think about the ‘uberization’ of the economy and about artificial intelligence (AI), bots online... Читать далее