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Non-monetary blockchain use cases and smart contracts

Published on April 30, 2018   16 min

A selection of talks on Finance, Accounting & Economics

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0:00
Hello, my name is Garrick Hileman from the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance. Now, we're going to talk about some of the non-monetary use cases of blockchain technology and smart contracts. My earlier lecture really focused on cryptocurrencies and the monetary aspects of this technology. But you can use the underlying technology of Bitcoin, which we call blockchain, for many, many non-currency or non-monetary things. This is where, I think, executives or people in business, it's very important, even if you don't have an interest in Bitcoin per se, to think about how this technology could be used in your own business, how it could potentially impact your business in the many different ways that people are starting to think about how this will play out.
0:41
So, first, let's talk about these non-monetary blockchain use cases.
0:47
So, if you strip away the technology from blockchain and you say, what fundamentally is this doing, you can think of blockchain as a new trust and cooperation mechanism. So, it's a way for people to work together and solve this problem of what if someone reneges on a hand shaker or cheats me. Blockchain technology often times obviates the need for some kind of trust. Things happen automatically or they're verified, confirmed, and informed through computer software mathematics and therefore, you can think of blockchain in some ways as a kind of new digital handshake. It's a way to achieve trust and cooperation. If you think about all the different areas of life, business, government that rely on some type of trust and cooperation, you can start to imagine just how significant this technology could be if it's applied to these many, many different areas that require trust and cooperation. So, similar to Bitcoin gracing magazine covers starting in 2015,
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Non-monetary blockchain use cases and smart contracts

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