Why Europeans Embrace the Blockchain More Than Others? Short Answer: Hitler

Recently, I had a conversation with a good friend, collaborator, and Stanford postdoc in computer science about why blockchain technology has seen more adoption and acceptance in Europe than any other comparable region in the world. During our back and forth, he uttered a surprisingly succinct yet profound answer to this question: Hitler.

My friend grew up in India and spent many years in Germany getting his undergraduate and doctorate degree in computer science. He told me that one of the most lasting effects that Nazi Germany and WWII had on the ordinary people of Europe is individual privacy. And blockchain technology when applied in its purest form is the best guard against the infringement by any centralized organization on an individual's privacy.

This observation make sense. To enforce the kind of extreme policies that Nazi Germany administered to persecute people it deemed "inferior"--Jews, gays, Roma (or Gypsies), Jehovah's Witness, and others--it must strip away any semblance of personal privacy in equally extreme ways. The after effect of this terror on ordinary people may indeed be a general suspicion towards any single authority with too much power, while a decentralized framework would get the benefit of the doubt. This is consistent with the EU's tendency to lead the way globally on privacy frameworks like "right to be forgotten" and antitrust enforcement like its 2.7 billion USD fine on Google.

This observation also illuminates why in comparison to the EU, the United States' pace of blockchain adoption has been lagging. Even though privacy is certainly as important of a social issue in the U.S. as it is in Europe, Americans for the most part have not suffered from privacy infringement to the same degree as their cross-Atlantic neighbors. The privacy concerns usually get a huge amount of publicity from isolated, high-profile incidents, like the iPhone in the San Bernardino shooting, the Equifax hack, or the occasional Supreme Court case (Carpenter v. United States). But consequences on the lives of ordinary people en masse tend to be small. Thus, there's less grassroots-level yearning for blockchain-based solutions or any distributed ledger technology.

What this observation does not explain is why the blockchain is taking off in China, a country that has known nothing but centralized governing, except for maybe a few years in the early 1900s. Why the Chinese central government has so far been comfortable with the flourishing of blockchain startups, organizations, and consortia, not to mention massive Bitcoin mining operations? My best educated guess is that the government is confident in its ability to shut down any application inside its border, whether it's a blockchain-based one or not, and not suffer any political blowback from its people large enough to endanger its grip on power. It has been shutting down Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, among many other tech platforms, without much consequences. Its shutdown of certain Bitcoin exchanges last year is another more pertinent example of this power and confidence. Thus, it's willing to let the blockchain startup scene grow, so to not miss the opportunity and innovation it could bring, but can turn it off at will when things get less comfortable. Thus, the nature and context in which blockchain applications are taking off in China is not quite the same as in Europe.

At the end of the day, I have very little personal experience with Europe, and my learning is primarily from conversations like the one I had with my friend, reading, and best-effort pattern recognition with places and cultures I do know well. I understand that there are quite a few generalizations here, which is always a pitfall when observing broad trends. And I'm happy for, if not a bit envious of, the amazing blockchain ecosystem that exist in Europe, while I miss out on many ICOs simply because I'm in America, though fellow Steemians are providing solutions.

I would love to hear from the many European Steemians here on why you think blockchain is taking off in Europe more than other regions, and whether the after effect of Nazi Germany is still influencing the way and intensity in which people think about privacy, consciously or subconsciously.