A blockchain is a ledger of facts, replicated across many computers. It is a way of passing information from one party to another along a digital chain of custody. A digital file of currency is not valuable if it is easy to hack. Blockchain solves the hacking problem with an ingenious trick: every time a transaction occurs, a digital signature connects the sender's copy of the file with their transaction record and adds that signature to the next block of transactions in the chain. The signatures are impossible to fake; they require large amounts of computing power to produce or fake; and if any tampering is detected, all subsequent transactions will be flagged as invalid. Again, the blockchain is a distributed ledger that records transactions between two parties efficiently, in a verifiable and permanent way. Each party gets a copy of the information—and those copies are kept independently by everyone in the network. This makes fraud virtually impossible.

Decentralization is not a new idea. We have always had structures that involve multiple layers of hierarchy. But as technology changes, we can take advantage of different types of decentralization. The main ones are geographic decentralization and functional decentralization. The geographic type relies on the fact that everyone is far away from everyone else. If you were in a Community in the Middle Ages, or a town in ancient China, your group can't possibly know what is happening everywhere in your kingdom or empire. You have to trust someone who has eyes-on at ground level. To modernize this type of organization for a global age, the community would not just rely on people in their court; they would also rely on people in different fields, who have local knowledge and some sense of loyalty to their cause. Ideally, those local representatives would be paid in cryptocurrency so that part of their loyalty is to the money, rather than to any particular nation-state. This decentralized approach makes it far more difficult for anyone to control information flow. This can make the system less efficient, but it also makes it harder for any one political agenda to dominate the agenda-setting process. This could allow different parts of society to influence decision making, depending on their priorities and perspectives, while remaining loosely coordinated throughout. Decentralization is a powerful tool for security because there is almost no central point of weakness to attack. But decentralization makes it complicated to change the rules, because there is no central authority to agree on changes and implement them; this is where blockchain came in.

Blockchain technology is one of the most disruptive technologies since the internet. A decentralized global ledger that is open to anyone, where not just information but anything of value (e.g. money, titles, deeds, identities, etc.) can be moved and stored securely and privately? This decentralized global ledger has profound implications for our economic, social, and political systems; it has the power to greatly reduce/eliminate corruption, as it provides transparency & trust among all parties; it also has the power to create enormous opportunities for many of the 3.5 bln people who do not have access to traditional financial services.