The Future of the Internet – Economic Democracy

Forget Bitcoin. For the purposes of this article, our focus is going to be on the technology behind it.

Blockchain technology has been labelled the internet of the future by many, so to describe it as the technology behind Bitcoin is like describing the internet as the technology behind email. Cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, are one possible feature of this technology and Bitcoin was only the catalyst for the potential mass adoption of the technology.

Imagine how the older generation reacted to the rise of the internet in the late 1990s. The time-worn proverb ‘you can’t teach an old dog new tricks’ comes to mind.

Now imagine being Jeff Bezos, the founder of the biggest internet company today – Amazon, at the age of 30. How lucky was he, to have seen the potential of the internet at such an early stage of its development?

Better yet, imagine being the first adopter of this futuristic technology, with all its potential.

Enough gassing it up though.

Blockchain is simply the next phase of democracy. It’s the decentralised internet of things; the direct linkage of two nodes in a larger network. In this system, the middle man (who was once needed for the establishment of trust between the buyer and the seller), is cut out completely, and replaced by a peer-to-peer network that uses consensus between different nodes to determine the legitimacy of a transaction.

In other words, you won’t have to worry about Nigerian scammers any more.

Barclays, one of the oldest and arguably most visionary banks to date, has already implemented this technology in its system, and even the South African Reserve Bank has started working with it to create a relatively decentralised ledger that keeps track of all transactions between banks in South Africa.

We are at the advent of a technological revolution; let’s arm ourselves with the tools needed for the future while it’s still early.

Utani Hikuam is the director of a branch in a political consultancy called Future Africa. To read more articles like this,

go to their website at futureafrica.net

or contact him directly at

uhikuam@gmail.com.

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