The discovery

We are experiencing a phase of exponentially increasing interest in the field of crypto-finance all of which is, from a personal point of view, the subsequently related product of a much broader and more disruptive phenomenon: the world-wide propagation of the Blockchain technology in all its evolutions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain).
As most people do when they approach this technology, I myself followed a path that started out of curiosity towards Bitcoin, the strange virtual object invented by an imaginary Satoshi Nakamoto. What was behind the first cryptocurrency? Which mechanism had enabled its development? How could you buy? Who was his inventor? Eager to find answers to these questions, I began to research and discovered that everything was born from the Blockchain technology, the decentralized register of bitcoin transactions (https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf).
Shortly after I realized I was facing an almost infinite set of potential applications of this chain of blocks I unlocked new horizons, able to arouse my curiosity and enthusiasm to a level that felt like the one I had back at the time when I first set eyes on the Internet.
So, I found myself studying what it means using the Blockchain technology, for individuals or for companies. I quickly became aware of the giant mental leap required to grasp the huge scale of this phenomenon: I did not have to look for possible applications, I had to change the way I saw the world around me!
As a man of communication, I realized that the greatest obstacle to the creation, implementation and dissemination of all sorts of applications based on Nakamoto's work was not a technological but a cultural shift and this posed a bottom line question: is the world ready for this leap?

Companies, hierarchies, intermediaries

To understand the motivations behind this question we need to step back and reflect on how society develops and on its forms of government.
The whole history of man relies on hierarchical social structures. Ever since homo sapiens began to reunite in small groups, tribal chief leaders had existed. With the growing complexity of society, structurally organized forms of government also developed, still based on the concept of leadership: those people who have the skills and abilities to guide others. From the moment we are born, we have someone guiding us and we assume it is going to be lifelong. In adulthood, this means being citizens aware of the social rules and the hierarchical structures that govern them.
Our behaviours and the very fact of being part of this social organization in today’s world constantly produce information stored on innumerable computer systems centralized and managed by specific organizations. From personal data to health data, from any sort of economic transaction to social security, without mentioning the growing amount of information that voluntarily we produce while using the Internet and other communication devices. Everything is recorded and tracked. Besides, The Internet of Things with its pervasive diffusion will contribute to increase even more the level of detail by which each of our action is going to be translated into digital formats and then stored in digital archives. This meaning that whoever is accessing those archives knows our lives and could exercise a level of social control never seen before. Governance management strategies, at all levels, are increasingly based upon the access to big data.
All these data, up to now, have gone through systems that, in order to function, assume an intrinsic reliability, a level of trust that we must grant to an entity which will then act on our behalf accessing and managing our data. Banks are a typical example of this.
What happens if this trustee agreement is broken? The 2008 crisis with the consequent series of bank collapses gives a clear idea of the chain reactions that can be triggered when the mechanism of trust is compromised.
Here it came, the time to think of a different model where the concept of trust was no longer granted to an intermediary. Technically, the question to resolve the so called Byzantine Generals Dilemma. In a nutshell: a computer science problem on how to reach consensus in situations where conflicting part of the system and potential failures are likely to happen. Namely, the strategy for reaching a common agreement between different components, communicating only through messages, in every event of conflicting information flows (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault_tolerance).
This is the typical situation happening when an exchange of information involves multiple subjects, as it happens in the world of finance.
The Blockchain was the answer that came a few months after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and what it meant. Finally, decentralized, transparent, secure and unmodifiable technology was available and it did not require intermediaries for any transactions. The foundations were laid for a society that could think of breaking free from traditional centralized systems, those that we must trust upon and allow their operations. The Blockchain technology made possible to eliminate the need for the so-called middlemen. The mechanism of trust became algorithmic.

A new World Wide Web

Tim Berners Lee, in an article published in The Guardian
(https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/15/tim-berners-lee-world-wide-web-net-neutrality), once stated he was worried about how the network is developing. The concentration of power to collect, analyse and manage information in a very few number of players is, objectively, a disturbing fact and raises several questions, not only to the inventor of the World Wide Web.
Today, those who use the Internet, and maybe even publish content, are at the centre of a flow of data that is constantly collected, analysed and processed by search engines as well as social platforms, to constitute a franticly dynamic model of global society. As any model, this one too can be used for very different purposes, positive and negative: from epidemiological analysis to the sale of targeted advertising, to spread out false information and discredit a political adversary.
Unprecedented power sits in the knowledge acquired from the management of the behavioural data of billions of people. A power now in the hands of Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and a few others.
Albert-László Barabási’s book, Lampi - The hidden plot that guides our lives, already in 2010 explained how the traceability of our actions enables us to produce predictive behavioural models. We are far more predictable than we want to admit.
Furthermore, it should be noted that the publication of content, with its ability to gather the attention of readers, is in itself a source of income for the publishing platforms but it is not for the authors, who at best, can earn indirect benefits from the on-line notoriety acquired.
Apart from the influencers’ use-cases (still very few in relation to the total number of users of the web) we can certainly see how today’s digital population produce the contents that are then re-used to direct their behaviour, in purchasing decisions as in politics.
We need to shift the paradigm and envision the Blockchain technology as the thrusting engine for change, there are the conditions to bring something new to the table of the oligopoly that is managing our on-line data. Social media and decentralized search engines can give web users the full control and ownership of their data, without the need to submit their trust to those big brothers who end up knowing every aspect of their lives. Of our life.
When relying upon new decentralized networks, I do see profound changes happening in the field of marketing and communication but also in the everyday business strategies. Companies will have new ways to directly convey their communication messages to the market thanks to the Blockchain-based advertising networks, certainly more transparent and less expensive by omitting all intermediaries. People will be better rewarded based on their ability to produce quality contents, either by making users pay directly or through advertising, without those intermediaries that, today, absorb large portions of these earnings.
Therefore, the enormous value of the Blockchain lies in the power of the network itself, in its ability to directly connect people and things with unprecedented proximity, transparency and security.

Towards a decentralized society

In the field of Blockchain-based social platforms and services, which has with truly disruptive potential to reinvent all sorts of human activities, we see names that might be still unknown to most: adChain, Change, Kik, Nexus, Nxt, PreSearch, Polybius, SocialX, Status, Steemit, just to give some examples.
Every day we witness the birth of some new projects, in every sector, many of them will disappear without leaving traces but some will really lead us into a new phase of the digital age.
For example, consider the fact that over a third of the world's population does not have a bank account. (https://letstalkpayments.com/39-of-the-worlds-population-does-not-have-a-bank -account /). Through a simple connection to the Internet and by using cryptocurrencies, each of these people can become a bank of itself and make transactions in real time with lower costs than those of traditional banking systems, creating therefore more wealth and prosperity.
Suddenly, without the need to build physical offices (branches) and organizational structures (the banking system), all those who can have an Internet connection, even if a narrow band, have the same opportunities as citizens living in the richest countries. Those people have the opportunity to become players of the global society by having full control over the economic value represented by the cryptocurrencies in their possession. No need for any sort of intermediary institution to set in, nor to seek permission from anyone. Blockchain​-based a very powerful communication system can thus be used by everyone to exchange valuable assets, just as simply as today we are used to write messages through a chat.
Being the owners of our data has a number of important implications; it means, first of all, taking on a new level of awareness. Decentralization embodies a kind of freedom, transparency, efficiency and security of the flow of information that is unprecedented but it equally requires responsibility and self-management skills that we are not used to having. If today we lose the access data to the online bank account, we can call the assistance service to allow them to retrieve the missing data on our behalf. This is possible because we are not the material account managers, because there is an intermediary that is called bank. If, however, we lose the key to access the wallet that contains our cryptocurrencies we cannot do anything to fix it. Nobody can help us recover that valuable data, it is lost forever.
The same can be said for every kind of information. Whether it is personal data or objects, decentralization will touch every form of information exchange. It's just a matter of time.
Returning we are to the original question: is the world ready for this change? Will mankind be able to learn to be truly free in a decentralized society? Or maybe, as Erich Fromm claimed in his book Escape from freedom about post-war freedom, will mankind be afraid of this freedom?
Personally, I believe the resistance to change is still strong, inevitably so especially for those who are in charge of managing the traditional centralized systems, no matter if they are banking or health systems, will do everything to preserve their role. On the other hand, isn’t it the Brexit or the Donald Trump's election an obvious demonstration of this fear of changing? From another point of view, we can already see great examples at a national level, like Estonia, which is fully embracing the concept of digital nation with the e-residency program and the country is about to launch its own cryptocurrency, or Japan, which in April 2017 officialised Bitcoin as a payment method.
Changing can be scaring. Freedom can be confusing. But unquestionably the time is ready for some radical technological shifts. And the Blockchain is one of these.
Perhaps, if we rapidly spread the awareness that our data is important, carrying in itself a concrete value, from which each of us can benefit, we will be able to become the players of a new season of the Internet and, more generally, of a more mature, equitable society with unimaginable opportunities.

Side effects

When I approached Nakamoto's work, I could not imagine how profound the consequences of that curiosity would be in my daily life. Today, I am working to integrate the Blockchain-based systems into my company's consulting activities, for everything related to marketing and communication, a limited but significant portion of the possible applications of this technology.
The spread of the first decentralized social platforms, Steemit is an example; it is opening horizons that, probably, frighten big data giants like Facebook. Their business model is based on the analytics on user data and the sale of advertising services can be questioned, just as Google itself could become obsolete in the face of nascent decentralized search engines, such as Presearch.
The side effects of the adoption of the Blockchain, and of similar technologies that will surely raise in the coming years, are difficult to predict but will surely have a profound impact on how to structure the market and ultimately our society. A new generation of entrepreneurs born from nothing will climb the heights of the rankings of millionaires exactly as it happened before, when people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates changed the world of computing by opening new scenarios that, even today, are inspiring creativity and innovation.
We can now understand how deeply the Internet has changed our way of living in just in a quarter of a century and most likely if we project ourselves on a similar time span we will see even deeper changes. It is up to us to decide whether to undergo these changes or to be protagonists of an extraordinary epochal shift. A giant leap towards a society that will make of the decentralized information flow its own engine.