Tag: Blockchain

Free The Data, Start a Business, Save Main Street…and Change the World!

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GmercyTavern
Gramercy Tavern in New York City

How a fictional “Token Act” might change the game in small business across our economy.

If Walmart can leverage data tokens to lure Amazon’s best customers away, what else is possible in a world of enabled by my fictional Token Act?

Well, Walmart vs. Amazon is all about big business – a platform giant (Amazon) disrupting an OldBigCo (Walmart and its kin). Over the past two decades, Amazon bumped Walmart out of the race to a trillion-dollar market cap, and the OldCo from Bentonville had to reset and play the role of the upstart. The Token Act levels the playing field, forcing both to win where it really matters: In service to the customer.

But while BigCos are sexy and well known, it’s the small and medium-sized business ecosystem that determines whether or not we have an economy of mass flourishing.  So let’s explore the Token Act from the point of view of a small business startup, in this case, a new neighborhood restaurant. I briefly touched upon this idea in my set up post, Don’t Break Up The Tech Oligarchs. Force Them To Share Instead.  (If you haven’t already, you might want to read that post before this one, as I lay out the framework in which this scenario would play out.) What I envision below assumes the Token Act has passed, and we’re at least a year or two into its adoption by most major data players. Here we go…

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Whither Middlemen?

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Is a world without middlemen really a good thing?

A recent piece in the Harvard Business Review entitled The Promise of Blockchain Is a World Without Middlemen lays out the case for decentralized networks in evangelical language. As the author writes, “Decentralization offers the promise of nearly friction-free cooperation between members of complex networks that can add value to each other by enabling collaboration without central authorities and middle men.”

But is it a given that such a world is what customers really want?

“Novgorod Marketplace”, a painting by Appolinary Vasnetsov (1856–1933)

The Job of the Middleman

Middlemen make for an easy target for disgruntled customers and observers of the economy. At times it can be unclear how they are adding value to a transaction. Sometimes it looks like middlemen are simply inserting themselves into a transaction to increase costs and take a cut.

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The Dawn of Digital Switzerlands

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Photo by Derek Thomson on Unsplash

The tech behemoths’ role in nation-states is evolving

The biggest US tech companies now have powers which challenge the primacy of governments in many domains. In many cases they also have capabilities not available to nation states. We touched on these issues, and the notion of “corporate foreign policy” in one of the previous issues of my weekly newsletter Exponential View.

Last year, Microsoft’s Brad Smith argued that — at least in the realm of cybersecurity — “the global tech sector needs to operate as a neutral Digital Switzerland. We will assist and protect customers everywhere.”

Now in the Pennsylvania Law Review, Kristen Eichensehr looks at the issue of Digital Switzerlands in greater depth, 66 pages of it to be precise. We’ve summarized parts of it here. One key distinction between large corporations and nation states is that they lack territory, control of state-violence, and have very different governance mechanisms to nation-states. But that is as true for many supranational bodies as well.

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Complete Energy Democratization Is Coming. Let’s Get Ready.

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Blockchain may play a key role in the next 10 years of electricity

“With the broadcast system, you have one person in one station deciding what gets put out over the airwaves. When you have a distributed network, like the internet, everybody can be a server. There’s no distinction between the broadcaster and the receiver: every computer does both. You can take your home laptop and run a server off of it in the same way that the biggest computers at Google can. There’s no fundamental difference between the computers they have in their server rooms and what you have on your desk.” — Aaron Swartz, cofounder of Reddit

Decentralization eventually comes to every industry.

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Winner Take All Platforms Won’t Necessarily Win

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How blockchain, backlash, and breaches may challenge conventional wisdom and reshape your industry


The Official Future Hits Some Speed Bumps

Ask anyone in any major sector of the economy about the future of their industry and the majority will say something like the following:

  • Our industry will be transformed by platforms
  • These platforms will extract the most value from our industry and determine the winners and losers
  • The most likely platform overlords will be the native digital tech giants: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple (or Alibaba and Tencent depending on where you live)

Essentially, what people are saying is that the notion of digital platform dominance is inevitable. In an Accenture survey in 2016, 81 percent of executives said platform based business will be core to their growth strategy within three years. As such, to understand where platforms are going is to understand the future of your industry itself. Either you will be that player (hard for most) or need to find a place to play and win within their ecosystem.

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How to Succeed at Being a Crypto & Blockchain Influencer Without Really Trying

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A photo of me (center) in Bay Area Musical’s “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” 🎭🎶Photo by Ben Krantz.

In July of 2017, I wrote a post on Medium titled What It’s Like to Be a Woman at a Tech Conference. The article has since been viewed ~64k times, and has become the piece of writing I am most recognized for. Usually if someone says “hey you look familiar” at a conference, I do the pose (😐👍pictured below) mimicking me in a wine cave full of dudes, and they figure it out.

It me.
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Old Man Tech to New Digital Moguls: Beware the Power of Government

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When Bill Gates says you’re tempting fate, best to listen

Screenshots from what became a disastrous deposition of Microsoft CEO Bill Gates in 1998

Bill Gates was the Mark Zuckerberg of the 1980s and 90s. Microsoft in the late 1990s owned the tech world. It was an unmitigated monopoly in computer operating systems, poised to do the same in the Internet and web browsing markets. But then it tangled with the US government. A bruising legal battle with the Dept. of Justice culminated in a humbling settlement in 2002. As it licked its wounds and considered how to operate in a post-settlement world, Microsoft missed the search revolution, ceding it to Google, missed the mobile revolution, ceding it to Apple, and missed the social revolution as well. Given all those misses, it’s that much more remarkable how healthy Microsoft’s business is today — it remains a major force in tech, particularly in enterprise, an area where its FANG rivals have mostly whiffed.

So when Gates uses his most potent current platform — the release of his annual Gates Foundation letter — as an opportunity to warn his industry of its blinkered arrogance, well, the man knows of what he speaks. He’s lived through through the government ringer, he’s been the blinkered tech icon who thought he was smarter than the rest of the room, and he’s lived long enough to realize the error of his ways. Given the moment in which our industry finds itself, Gates’ admonition is both poignant and timely.

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Digital Currency and Blockchain: How are Financial Institutions Responding?

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A survey of the early stages of a financial revolution


Beyond the hype around Bitcoin, there is a quieter revolution taking place as various governments and industries explore the potential uses of digital currencies and their underlying blockchain technologies. Governments as diverse as Russia, Japan, China and Dubai are developing state cryptocurrencies to supplement (and maybe even eventually replace?) their more tangible fiat currencies. Meanwhile, a whole range of industries from banking and finance to insurance and big tech are looking to streamline systems, lower costs, and explore new revenue streams by leveraging tokenized systems and public and private blockchain platforms.

As with any emerging and disruptive technologies, there are those industries and companies which sense new opportunities and want to get ahead of the game through early exploration and adoption, while others wait to see how things will shake out.

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An Insider’s View of Bitcoin, Blockchain, and the Future of Money

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Insights from Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam

Just another year of up and to the right.

I host a podcast which takes deep dives into science, tech, and sociological topics. I do this via interviews with world-class experts who have the patience to engage in truly unhurried discussions of their fields. My episodes are untethered from the headlines, as they’re meant to resonate with future as well as present-day listeners, ideally over a span of years.

Occasionally, though, things happen to line up with current events. And was that ever the case this week — as today’s episode is about cryptocurrencies, which have been repeatedly dashing price records, even as Bitcoin debuted on the futures markets this past Sunday.

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The Best Of NewCo Shift — Week of November 7th

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Once again, here’s a summary of our most popular and impactful stories we’ve recently published. Thanks for both reading and sharing these stories. Remember to follow us on Medium and social media to receive real time notifications from all our stories as they go live.

We also want to remind our readers that NewCo Shift sources and edits extraordinary stories into Medium’s membership area, which is on a “metered paywall” similar to the New York Times. Anyone can read them, until they hit their limit. We’re including them in our roundup so you know about this great work — and we may be biased, but we think Medium membership is well worth it!

Let us know what you’re interested in us covering or pitch your own stories at editorial@newco.co.


We’ve Not Thought Through the Legal and Ethical Disruption of Augmented Reality

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