This [TED Talk video](https://www.ted.com/talks/bettina_warburg_how_the_blockchain_will_radically_transform_the_economy) came across my [RSS feed](www.theoldreader.com) a couple days ago, but I just found it today.
https://youtu.be/-Vc6LzGV2nE

In the video, Bettina Warburg discusses the economics of the blockchain.  According to her bio, Warburg started her career as a researcher and political scientist at a Silicon Valley think tank, and is now running a venture studio that she founded, Animal Ventures.

She starts her discussion by talking about how blockchain technology is a continuation of a very old human story, the story of how humans find ways to exchange value with one another.  She discusses the idea of "New Institutional Economics," which was pioneered by Nobel recipient, Douglass North.  She says that institutions are sets of rules and constraints which help people to trust one another, and goes through a quick discussion of how that has evolved through history up until it migrated to the Internet through web sites like Amazon.com.

At this point, she moves on to describe the block chain as analogous to wikipedia, a decentralized permanent data structure that stores assets and ownership information instead of encyclopedia data.  "It's a public registry that stores transactions in a network, and is replicated so that it's very secure and hard to tamper with."

And that provides the foundation for the main thrust of her video.  The blockchain promises to transform the economic system in radical ways because it lowers uncertainty.  The forms of uncertainty that she discusses are:

1. Not knowing who I'm dealing with.
2. Not having visibility into a transaction.
3. Not having recourse if things go wrong.

I recommend viewing the video to see exactly how the blockchain (with smart contracts) addresses each of these forms of uncertainty and leads to radical evolution of our economics systems.

Here's a bonus quote from the video:
> I think what would really floor Douglass North about this use of technology is the fact that the very thing that makes it work, the very thing that keeps the blockchain secure and verified, is our mutual distrust, so rather than all of our uncertainties slowing us down, and requiring institutions like banks or governments or corporations, we can actually harness all of that collective uncertainty and use it to collaborate and exchange more and faster and more open.

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@remlaps is an Information Technology professional with three decades of business experience working with telecommunications and computing technologies. He has a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and is currently completing a doctoral degree in information technology.