Beauty of #blockchain - game of intermediaries

Any blockchain-based solution is a virtual (invisible but real) intermediary (with its data, computing resources, workers, miners and decision makers) between people using this solution (the users). Actually, the users agreed to trust the goodwill of networked miners (not technology as claimed by many blockchain enthusiasts) to be able to work between themselves (e.g. carry out some transactions) without trusting each other. Although, some blockchain-based financial solutions already formed real infrastructures for their world-wide operations but they are lacking the legal endorsements from financial and governmental authorities.

Obviously, blockchain or not-blockchain, following the financial and governmental regulations and usual good business practices is even more important in the digital era than before because the damages can be huge and done quickly ( see http://taxilife.ru/nationalnews/7124/ and http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/uber-tfl-london-taxi-black-cabs-regulation-a7964066.html ).

It seems that the blockchain-technology and cryptocurrencies is a way for replacing the existing intermediaries by new ones. The majority of blockchain enthusiasts claims that their technology removes intermediates although this is not true.

However, it is possible to do such replacements differently. Possible examples are the following.

• A country may introduce a national cryptocurrency or digital analogue of the national currency (see https://hightech.fm/2017/09/27/jcoin and http://uk.businessinsider.com/japan-plans-new-digital-currency-j-coin-2017-9 ).
• A country may overhaul its own financial market infrastructure ( see. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/gld-alternative-global-digital-currency-charles-moore/ and https://www.copernicusgold.com/ ).
• A group of countries introduce “regional” cryptocurrency to bypass the existing (e.g. US dollar) middleman ( see https://www.coindesk.com/political-china-hates-bitcoin-loves-blockchain/ ).

In any of such replacements, it is mandatory to

• avoid sudden creation of a powerful intermediary like Uber, Airbnb, Facebook, Amazon, Alibaba, etc.
• understand what services are provided by new intermediaries, 
• what are contractual agreements (including SLA) for these services;
• impose transparency of new intermediaries and 
• exercise necessary control via explicit ownership (in different forms) or external testability.

See also https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/activity:6320376284153282561/ 

Thanks,

AS

See the whole collection of bogposts about blockchain - http://improving-bpm-systems.blogspot.ch/search/label/%23blockchain