Some thoughts on consensus and tulips

The world is built on consensus.

Concepts like ownership, law, money, monarchy, governance etc — they are merely constructs built on this fundamental mechanism.

Said another way: the only reason we can own a piece of land or money has value or the queen is the queen is because a sufficient number of people agree that those things are true. All the mechanisms and norms of society only exist because the majority basically agree they exist.

In an era where our most senior business and political leaders are explicitly calling into question our fundamental institutions of operationalized consensus — or manipulating them for their own greedy and corrupt ends — a new kind of consensus needs to emerge.

That’s why Blockchain technology is so very important.

Being able to turn human consensus into running code and an immutable distributed dataset (e.g a ledger) transforms out implicit rules operated by central authorities into distributed, peer-to-peer operations.

We can now #unbundle consensus from legacy, centralized institutions and put it at the edge.

The implications are profoundly disruptive. For both good and ill.