So far all applications of blockchain have been about one thing: censorship resistance — The value of decentralization has been exclusively that, censorship resistance.

Let me explain:

The blockchain is a ledger that thanks to decentralization enforces some rules that cannot be overridden by any authority. The basic rule is that whoever holds the private key is allowed to spend the funds. It all started with a monetary application with Bitcoin and then evolved into more applications with Ethereum.

However all those applications have been about censorship resistance, the best example is ICOs which started as a way to raise funds in an unregulated way which was very borderline and which most likely would have been blocked by the regulators had it not been decentralized. In this case the decentralization was key to allow something that at the time was so much borderline.

There is however another type of value in decentralization that so far no one has managed to exploit. The point of decentralization is the lack of a central authority. If we stop looking at purely financial applications we can imagine blockchain as a platform for cooperation where all the participants are on a same level playing field.

Wireline is a great project which is going to fill a gap that is extremely important today and which could only have been solved with blockchain:

At the moment we have two different worlds: on one hand we have proprietary software developed by big corporations, closed source, you buy a license and get a software that usually you cannot customize and you get a SLA. On the other hand you have open source. You don’t need to buy a license and you can customize the code. However most of the time you would have to customize it yourself meaning that you may create some conflicts or issues unless you understand exactly how the code works. You also don’t have any SLA and have to hire very senior developers to manage the operation since basically no real support is available.

Imagine now if there was a third way. Open source software, that you can customize but you can also get SLA and support from the developer.

How does that work? Imagine that the best developers instead of working for a large corporation or volunteering for free on an open-source project were able to produce very well polished small components of code. Libraries, routines, algorithms, etc. well tested and with well-documented interfaces. You can get support and you can get SLA from the developer, but the code will remain open source and can easily integrated with other modules.

So why is block chain important for this? Because for something like this to become widespread you cannot have special interests controlling it. It cannot be like an App Store where Apple decides based on their internal policies what to allow and what not. It cannot be a place where some authority decides to terminate some library because they don’t like it. Especially considering that in software development dependencies are so tightly connected imagine the disaster if the central authority decides to remove some module many other dependencies rely upon!

The App Store is certainly not a good example of cooperation, because there is actually no cooperation. There is simply developers uploading their applications and hoping that they get approved and don’t get removed later.

The point is blockchain truly allows to build a collaborative platform, a true cooperation born from a peer to peer platform. I think this is the first time where someone has managed to leverage blockchain in a way to get a real benefit which is not just censorship resistance but actually cooperation on an open platform.