Don Tapscott Quotes

Technology doesn’t create prosperity any more than it destroys privacy.

Imagine instead of the centralized company Airbnb, a distributed application—call it blockchain Airbnb or bAirbnb—essentially a cooperative owned by its members. When a renter wants to find a listing, the bAirbnb software scans the blockchain for all the listings and filters and displays those that meet her criteria. Because the network creates a record of the transaction on the blockchain, a positive user review improves their respective reputations and establishes their identities—now without an intermediary.

Every ten minutes, like the heartbeat of the bitcoin network, all the transactions conducted are verified, cleared, and stored in a block which is linked to the preceding block, thereby creating a chain.

We look at how blockchain technologies can change what it means to be a citizen and participate in the political process, from voting and accessing social services to solving some of society’s big hairy problems and holding elected representatives accountable for the promises that got them elected.

Industrial capitalism brought representative democracy, but with a weak public mandate and inert citizenry. The digital age offers a new democracy based on public deliberation and active citizenship.

In this book, you’ll read dozens of stories about initiatives enabled by this trust protocol that create new opportunities for a more prosperous world. Prosperity first and foremost is about one’s standard of living.

Today, both of us are excited about the potential of this next round of the Internet. We’re enthusiastic about the massive wave of innovation that is being unleashed and its potential for prosperity and a better world. This book is our case to you to become interested, understand this next wave, and take action to ensure that the promise is fulfilled.

(...) we’re talking about building twenty-first-century companies, some that may be massive wealth creators and powerful in their respective markets. We do think enterprises will look more like networks rather than the vertically integrated hierarchies of the industrial age. As such there is an opportunity to distribute (not redistribute) wealth more democratically.

Rather than simply regulating, governments can improve the behavior of industries by making them more transparent and boosting civic engagement—not as a substitute for better regulation but as a complement to the existing systems. We believe effective regulation and, by extension, effective governance come from a multistakeholder approach where transparency and public participation are valued more highly and weigh more heavily in decision making.

If we design for integrity, power, value, privacy, security, rights, and inclusion, then we will be redesigning our economy and social institutions to be worthy of trust. We now turn our attention to how this could roll out and what you should consider doing.

A fundamental change is taking place in the nature and application of technology in business, a change with profound and far-reaching implications for companies of every size and shape. A multimillion dollar research program conducted by the DMR Group, Inc., studied more than 4,500 organizations in North America, Europe, and the Far East to investigate the nature and impact of changes in technology. The synthesis and analysis of this information indicate that information technology is going through its first paradigm shift. Driven by the demands of the competitive business environment and profound changes in the nature of computers, the information age is evolving into a second era. Computing platforms in most organizations today are not able to deliver the goods for corporate rebirth. It is only through open network computing that the open networked client/server enterprise can be achieved. In nontechnical language this book shows managers and professionals how to take immediate action for the short-term benefits of the new technology while positioning their organizations for long-term growth and transformation...

Just as the Internet drops transaction and collaboration costs in business and government, it also drops the cost of dissent, of rebellion, and even insurrection.

Collaboration is important not just because it's a better way to learn. The spirit of collaboration is penetrating every institution and all of our lives. So learning to collaborate is part of equipping yourself for effectiveness, problem solving, innovation and life-long learning in an ever-changing networked economy.

Distributed ledger technology can liberate many financial services from the confines of old institutions, fostering competition and innovation. That’s good for the end user. Even when connected to the old Internet, billions of people are excluded from the economy for the simple reason that financial institutions don’t provide services like banking to them because they would be unprofitable and risky customers.

We believe that blockchain technology could be an important tool for protecting and preserving humanity and the rights of every human being, a means of communicating the truth, distributing prosperity, and—as the network rejects the fraudulent transactions—of rejecting those early cancerous cells from a society that can grow into the unthinkable.