PAUL BESSEMS – CEO, WECONOMICS BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGIES

Paul Bessems, CEO – Weconomics Blockchain Technologies, will be joining other industry leaders at Corporate Parity’s upcoming Global Blockchain Technology Summit

Selling your house as easy as sending an email?

What if selling your house would be as easy as sending an email? There is a big chance you would not believe that this could become reality in the near future. But, blockchain makes this possible, at least technically. When the internet started nobody could imagine that it would be possible to operate an application such as Spotify on the internet.  As Halfdan Mahler, former director of World Health Organisation once said:

                                                                                                            “What sounds idealistic today becomes realistic tomorrow”

But from ‘today’ to ‘tomorrow’ is a long and difficult road where leadership and management need to play an important role. It is also important that they take time to understand blockchain: what is it, why is it important and what can you do with it (and what not)?

Leadership is a key stakeholder in blockchain and the bigger picture that is digital transformation. Will management be proactive or reactive? Will they be ambassadors or resistors of change? Will they give up some autonomy and believe in decentral decision making? One thing is clear: leadership and management must innovate more fundamentally than they have in the past, especially in organization models. You could say that the real challenge is the reinvention of an outdated organization model combined with traditional leadership. Technology is not the problem.

The Internet makes it possible to send a message in a secure way from sender to receiver. But basically every time you send a message, you make a copy. The email you send is in your ‘out-box’ and in the ‘in-box’ of the receiver. We find it okay to copy information when we send hundred carbon copies of an email. But when I, as a sender, have to pay you and your neighbour each twenty euro and a make a photo of a twenty-euro bill and email it to you and your neighbour with the remark: ‘it is paid for’, you probably will say: ‘that is not okay’.

It is certainly not okay to copy money, or more general: values. And the receiver probably also wants to know, whether or not, the sender is the rightful owner of the twenty euro bill. So basically, blockchain adds two important functions to the internet that already has secure transport from sender to receiver in its protocol. These two functions are: are you the owner of the value you want to send and do you send it only once? A blockchain secures these three important value transaction characteristics.

Blockchain can be regarded as the next phase or an additional layer on the internet: a layer of value and trust. With the internet, we can share information without any significant friction. Sending e-mails (bits & bytes) costs almost nothing. With blockchain technology, you can transfer values (also bits & bytes) from supply to demand without irrelevant third parties, without any significant transaction costs. This does not just apply to selling and buying a house, but also for other products and services. To bring supply and demand together against the lowest possible costs is not just the essence of organizing work, but also the essence of organizing our economy.

More information at the Global Blockchain Technology Summit 

 Paul Bessems, blockchain consultant, 3-5-2018 –

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