Blockchain is Eating Wall Street | Alex Tapscott | TEDxSanFrancisco – YouTube

Highlights

13:32 after the brexit vote the leading brexit
13:36 eers all scurried from view like rats
13:39 from a sinking ship. And the political
13:42 establishment was tossed into this
13:44 caustic battle for control. And oddly
13:47 enough one person emerged to provide
13:51 leadership and it was the governor of
13:52 the Bank of England Mark Carney. Who in
13:55 the weeks leading up to the referendum
13:57 vote and in the weeks after made
13:59 speeches and introduced papers from the
14:03 Bank of England that basically argued
14:05 for a radical rethinking of how
14:08 economies oughta function. Starting with
14:11 financial services and he focused on two
14:13 things in particular. FinTech – which is
14:15 the umbrella term to describe how
14:17 technology is impacting finance and
14:19 blockchain. And one of the most radical
14:22 proposals that he made and had and who
14:25 and the bank has continued to make is
14:27 the idea of introducing a digital
14:30 currency to replace the existing fiat
14:34 currencies that countries and
14:36 intergovernmental organisations like the
14:37 EU issue and control call it a Brit coin

15:16 … if you had a
15:17 native digital medium for money you
15:20 could actually transform a lot of things
15:21 and you could create a lot of benefits
15:23 the first one is speed cost and
15:26 efficiency
15:28 if transactions settled in a native
15:31 digital bearer instrument like a Brit
15:33 coin then you wouldn’t need third
15:35 parties to perform all of these
15:37 important clearing and settlement
15:38 functions that would drop the settlement
15:40 time from anywhere from two days and
15:42 public equities to 25 days and trade
15:44 finance and interbank lending to zero
15:47 day is actually zero seconds and would
15:49 take the cost from whatever it is in
15:51 those markets to next to nothing

16:40 improving transparency and reducing risk
16:44 if transactions settle instantly then
16:47 you don’t have to worry about settlement
16:48 risk if it takes no time for value to
16:52 reach another person you don’t have to
16:54 worry about counterparty risk the risk
16:56 that the person on the other end might
16:57 not have the funds to settle the trade
17:00 and in aggregate all of these risks
17:03 together reduces systemic
17:05 risk the risk that too much risk gets
17:08 concentrated in one part of the system
17:10 and that can create problems overall but
17:12 ultimately improving transparency will
17:15 improve accountability and hold those in
17:17 power accountable for their actions so

17:23 … trust is the
17:29 expectation that the other party will
17:31 abide by their commitments that they
17:34 will act with integrity and it’s been
17:37 very difficult to get people to do that
17:40 what if we could program that into the
17:43 fabric of our economy what if we had a
17:45 new protocol a trust protocol on top of
17:49 which we could build any kind of
17:51 business so it’s an exciting time one
17:57 fraught with peril but also lots of
17:59 possibility because it appears that once
18:02 again the technology genie has been
18:04 unleashed from the bottle summoned by an
18:08 unknown person or persons with unclear
18:10 motives at a very uncertain time in
18:13 history this genie is once again at our
18:16 disposal to broker to fix a broken
18:19 system and to transform the economic
18:21 power grid and the old order of human
18:24 affairs for the better if we will it

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