Dare corporates not decentralise?
How can a highly centralised organisation, in fact the apotheosis of centralisation, such as a top level mainstream global bank, decentralise?
In a world where decentralisation is at the core of the next phase of the web and the internet this is a crucial question. The answer would seem to be it can’t. With Sir Tim Berners-Lee working to re-decentralise the web and Blockchain technology designed to make it decentralised and secure from its very core this could hardly matter more.
It is the great philosophical discourse of our time, being played out not so much in debate, or detente (as in the cold war) but technology initiatives and infrastructure.
On the one side is blockchain technology as Satoshi Nakamoto conceived it and gave it to the world. A technology without ‘rulers’ or centre. As decentralised as the original internet itself. Even more so in fact. Certainly more secure. More trustworthy – with that worthinness to be trusted flowing from open code and, defacto, the transparency that goes with it.
Without that transparency it cannot and should not be trusted. Without that transparency its magic evaporates and it loses its power to create trustworthy infrastructure that can, without the need for any perimeter, span many disparate organisations and individuals with nothing in common except, at any given moment for any two or more of them, the need to transact.
On the other side is, perhaps surprisingly, DLT. ‘Distributed Ledger Technology’ which is widely thought of as a near synonym for Blockchain. But in this one crucial respect nothing could be further from the truth. In fact they’re polar opposites.
When banks first got their hands on the first computers back in the 1960 they did what was, for them, the obvious: turned them into a digitised version of the ledgers they knew and understood. They did not re-think, or re-design much beyond that. They, and we, have been increasingly suffering from those quick-and-dirty decisions ever since. Creating the legacy systems on which the banks are still forced to rely and which are responsible for most of the recent outages which are becoming so familiar.
Why is DLT the opposite of Blockchain? Because history now shows banks look at technology and see only a ledger. They saw a decentralised technology and removed its beating heart replacing its transparency and openness, that’s gone, with a cadre of a handful of banks hoping to somehow build trust together in the hope the world will trust the result.
Seeking ‘efficiencies’. Seeking recentralisation. Perhaps it is inevitable that incumbents will overcome. But Apple and Steve Jobs famously harnessed a new digitally enabled way of doing things that’s massively more efficient and rearranged the economics of the music industry. We’ll see.
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