Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy

“industrial” DAO/DAC phase brings up

interesting questions about how the

optimal mix of hierarchical and

decentralized architectures will play out

in large-scale design architectures.

Factom is a project developing the idea

of batched transaction upload in blocks

to the blockchain, using the blockchain

attestation/notary hash functionality to

batch transactions as a means of

avoiding blockchain bloat.

Personal Thinking Blockchains

More speculatively for the farther future,

the notion of blockchain technology as

the automated accounting ledger, the

quantized-level tracking device, could

be extensible to yet another category of

record keeping and administration.

There could be “personal thinking

chains” as a life-logging storage and

backup mechanism. The concept is

“blockchain technology + in vivo

personal connectome” to encode and

make useful in a standardized

compressed data format all of a person’s

thinking. The data could be captured via

intracortical recordings, consumer

EEGs, brain/computer interfaces,

cognitive nanorobots, and other

methodologies. Thus, thinking could be

instantiated in a blockchain—and really

all of an individual’s subjective

experience, possibly eventually

consciousness, especially if it’s more

precisely defined. After they’re on the

blockchain, the various components

could be administered and transacted—

for example, in the case of a post-stroke

memory restoration.

Just as there has not been a good model

with the appropriate privacy and reward

systems that the blockchain offers for the

public sharing of health data and

quantified-self-tracking data, likewise

there has not been a model or means of

sharing mental performance data. In the

case of mental performance data, there is

even more stigma attached to sharing

personal data, but these kinds of “life-

streaming + blockchain technology”

models could facilitate a number of

ways to share data privately, safely, and

remuneratively. As mentioned, in the

vein of life logging, there could be

personal thinking blockchains to capture

and safely encode all of an individual’s

mental performance, emotions, and

subjective experiences onto the

blockchain, at minimum for backup and

to pass on to one’s heirs as a historical

record. Personal mindfile blockchains

could be like a next generation of Fitbit

or Apple’s iHealth on the iPhone 6,

which now automatically captures 200+

health metrics and sends them to the

cloud for data aggregation and

imputation into actionable

recommendations. Similarly, personal

thinking blockchains could be easily and

securely recorded (assuming all of the

usual privacy concerns with blockchain

technology are addressed) and mental

performance recommendations made to

individuals through services such as Siri

or Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant,

perhaps piped seamlessly through

personal brain/computer interfaces and

delivered as both conscious and

unconscious suggestions.

Again perhaps speculatively verging on

science fiction, ultimately the whole of a

society’s history might include not just a

public records and document repository,

and an Internet archive of all digital

activity, but also the mindfiles of

individuals. Mindfiles could include the

recording of every “transaction” in the

sense of capturing every thought and

emotion of every entity, human and

machine, encoding and archiving this

activity into life-logging blockchains.

Blockchain Government

Another important application

developing as part of Blockchain 3.0 is

blockchain government; that is, the idea

of using blockchain technology to

provide services traditionally provided

by nation-states in a decentralized,

cheaper, more efficient, personalized

manner. Many new and different kinds of

governance models and services might

be possible using blockchain technology.

Blockchain governance takes advantage

of the public record-keeping features of

blockchain technology: the blockchain as

a universal, permanent, continuous,

consensus-driven, publicly auditable,

redundant, record-keeping repository.

The blockchain could become both the

mechanism for governing in the present,

and the repository of all of a society’s

documents, records, and history for use

in the future—a society’s universal

record-keeping system. Not all of the

concepts and governance services

proposed here necessarily need

blockchain technology to function, but

there might be other benefits to

implementing them with blockchain

technology, such as rendering them more

trustworthy, and in any case, part of a

public record.

One implication of blockchain

governance is that government could

shift from being the forced one-size-fits-

all “greater good” model at present to

one that can be tailored to the needs of

individuals. Imagine a world of

governance services as individualized

as Starbucks coffee orders. An example

of personalized governance services

might be that one resident pays for a

higher-tier waste removal service that

includes composting, whereas a

neighbor pays for a better school

package. Personalization in government

services, instead of the current one-size-

fits-all paradigm, could be orchestrated