Cointelegraph had the opportunity to meet Don Tapscott, one of the world's leading experts on the economic and social impact of technologies and innovations at the global level. Davos Economic Forum

Don has been defending Blockchain for many years and the digital economy. This year at the World Economic Forum is the first year in which he was not in the minority. Blockchain has been discussed more than any other topic (with the exception of Donald Trump attending the Forum in Davos) this year. Don Tapscott sat down with Cointelegraph to talk about the evolution of the digital economy and the impact blockchain has had and will continue to have on our lives.

Cointelegraph (CT): I am here with Don Tapscott, CEO of Tapscott Group, co-founder of the Blockchain Research Institute and one of the most influential voices of the blockchain and the Digital economy. Thank you for being with us today.

Don Tapscott: Happy to be here.

CT: You are a Senior Advisor for the World Economic Forum What do you think of the role that Blockchain and the digital economy are playing in Davos this year?

DON: This is interesting. First of all, I do not speak for the forum, I speak for myself, but I was interviewed recently by Wall Street Journal television and the guy said to me, "You know, it's the third year we've interviewed you on Blockchain and this year everyone is talking about it in Davos.Describe how it has changed over the past three years. "

I've I thought for a second and I said, "Three years ago, the person I was talking about was me and I was probably talking about myself, maybe other people." Last year, we talked about major financial institutions and convention entrepreneurs, central bankers and finance ministers.I spent time with them.Bundchain – number two word in Davos

Apparently Blockchain on the program Formal as a word appears more than the United States and Europe combined.Someone did an analysis of the lan used at the World Economic Forum and they found that "Blockchain" was the number two word in Davos, the number one being "Trump". Whatever it is, whatever it is, it is an extraordinary thing; It's not just embedded in the formal curriculum and not just powerful people are talking about it. I think that about 1000 entrepreneurs, investors, social activists, social entrepreneurs, academics and others – have come to Davos and are not inside the Congress Center. They are out doing all kinds of things. So, the Global Business Blockchain Council organizes whole days of programming, organizing a dinner with 200 people, with hundreds of people hoping to enter. Then there was the Crypto HQ – I wondered what it was. I could not get in because there were queues all the time. Everywhere there were activities related to Blockchain. For example, I walk down the street, someone recognizes me and says, "We are going to have a big Blockchain meeting on the floor. Would you like to come talk to us? "And I'm going up and there's a hundred people in the room and I'm doing a round table and answering a lot of questions, so it's a very good reflection of what's going on around the world. It's really becoming a part of the vernacular and everyone is trying to understand it. "

CT: Thank you, you come from Canada, how do you feel about it? you that the Canadian government is driving the Ethereum blockchain to create more transparency?

DON: Canada is a pretty interesting story, when you think of the place where all this thing [Blockchain] will be centered in the world, there are some candidates, Switzerland is obviously one, I do not think it will be Silicon Valley, mainly because the leaders of all the paradigms have a hard time adopting the new, but Canada will govern it. It's very interesting, especially with regard to the fact that the prime minister was here. He was totally in Blockchain and all things.

As part of our Blockchain Research Institute, we have organizations like the Bank of Canada, the federal government, the provincial government and the City of Toronto, but there are also 5, not 95, the big ones. banks working to reinvent the payment system. We also have Ethereum which was created by an academic who left the University of Waterloo. We have thought leadership with our Research Institute. The two largest incubators in North America are in Toronto. MaRS alone measures 1.9 million square feet

How to Manage the Brain Drain

We used to have a brain drain in Canada where the entrepreneurs were leaving the country and moving to the United States, but now two things that have been reversed. One of them is Donald Trump. Many people, particularly Canadians, want to come back to Canada, but the second is: there is a funding problem when you get to a point where your business might be making $ 20 million and you have to do a series A and some major capital-risk capitals in Silicon Valley would say, "Super. We will finance you, but you have to move in the valley. "

As a result, there was also a leak of the company.This has been reversed now because of the ICOs and people who do not have to take the route of the company. business to finance the business The other thing is that we also have a fairly easy regulatory environment in Canada We surely have some crazy things like in some countries of the world J & # 39; I am also hopeful that the Bank of Canada will become a true leader in space, because ultimately every country must adopt Blockchain for fiat money.

So we need the dollar digital, digital book, digital yen and so on.This would give central bankers powerful tools to manage the money supply and change the inflation rate.You can see what happens instantly.You have a crisis , and rather than giving money to a bank, you s can helicopter on mobile devices and save the poorest. A lot of things are happening in Canada right now.

CT: Thank you. You have already mentioned it, but perhaps you can tell us more. Do you think other governments will be as open to these technologies as Canada?

DON: Well, everywhere in the world, the understanding and understanding of government is very uneven. all the secondary era of the Internet. Because that's what we're talking about here. We have had the Internet of information for 40 years and now we get the Internet of value or anything else that the value can be moved, stored, processed from scratch. a safe and private way. Trust is achieved through cryptography, collaboration and code rather than intermediaries. It's a very, very powerful thing. This will be the center of any building and innovation economy, but governments …

Many do not understand it, you know. I was recently in Korea. Here is the country that has created a miracle around the whole first era and that has created these fabulous manufacturing facilities – they call it the miracle of the Han. Now, the Korean government is trying to figure out what to do with them. They have banned IFAs and are now seeking to restrict or even ban cryptocurrency. I was there meeting with government leaders and doing a lot of press conferences and saying, "It's going to hurt you. You do not want to do that. There is a public interest here. It's not like the Internet of information where I would say, "Leave it alone."

But you know, if you make an ICO and that token represents a part of the company called security, it should fall under the securities legislation. But we need microsurgery in this new economy. We do not need to bring a chain saw. This would be one of the three most important determining factors in terms of what countries are emerging not just with the Blockchain industry, but with all the new economy of innovation. Are governments doing the right thing and are they implementing sensible legislation or have they spoiled it?

CT: Thank you. How did you see mature blockchain and the digital economy throughout 2017?

DON: It was a rather extraordinary year. Of course, the biggest thing that has caught everyone's attention is the crypto craze, right? Just a word on that, you know, it's the tulip bubble, as in Holland. I do not think that kind of analogy is really right, actually. Yes, there will be all sorts of volatility and there will be bubbles, but think about it: in the first era of the Internet, information has been placed in the Commons by Tim Berners-Lee; in the second era the actual protocols are going to be owned by investors and people.

Internet hype

So the first era was worth how many – tens of trillions of dollars? The second era is likely to be bigger. Another way to see this is the greatest investment opportunity perhaps in human history. Now, is there a lot of this ICO waste? Yeah, well, but in 1995, a lot of those "dot coms" were also garbage. Will many people lose money? You bet! Will there be all kinds of speculation? For sure. Is there a hype? Yeah! There is hype, there is a lot of hype! But there was a lot of hype on the Internet in 1995 and we talked about it longer than in 1995. So, this hype is not going to explode, it's going to continue (probably for decades) we understand that it is the new operating platform for businesses and for the economy as a whole.

But what we have here is a kind of crypto asset class that stirs the Blockchain dog, you see. Because the real pony here is not all that active stuff, although maybe a great opportunity. The pony in this pile is that we have a new emerging platform that will change the deep architecture and the structure of the company. It will fundamentally transform all industries in our economy, and in the past year we have seen some very big developments. I could talk about it all day, but I'll give you an example.

Blockchain and Supply Chain

The global supply chain industry is $ 64 trillion and supply chains will move to Blockchain. You can see Foxconn doing that now, we made a case on that. On the sale of Walmart food, they use Blockchain for food security. The largest supply chain in the world is the One Belt One Road Project linking Hong Kong and Rotterdam. Blockchain is perfect for situations where you have a buyer and a seller and escrow agent, and governments, and various shippers, all the trade and finance and a lot of supply applications to this topic are done via Blockchain. and the tax authorities and so on. Instead of passing pieces of paper and faxing, and emails and so on, they have a single shared network state where they can all instantly see what's going on. It turns this supply chain into something we call a chain of assets. And finally, this thing becomes cognitive. It really becomes a new cognitive computer. This is where the supply chain will be.

CT: Thank you. How do you think cryptocurrencies will impact how we understand and use money?

DON: It's a good question. I do not think that non-fiat currencies replace fiduciary money. Many people may disagree with me. I would be surprised if Bitcoin got more than 1% of deals in a big country in five years. There is a rule for these currencies, but more as a tool for creating new applications. For example, the global diaspora. People who have left their land and they send money home. This is what is called handing over. It's a trillion dollar market. For example, if you are a Filipino nanny in Toronto, you do not have to pay 15% Western Union to send money to your mother in Manila. You can use a platform for delivery, but this platform actually uses Bitcoin as the underlying tool to enable this. So, this is not the actual currency. Money is a kind of transition between the two fiduciary currencies. And as I said before, the greatest opportunity is to turn fiduciary money into a cryptocurrency.

CT: As national or …?

DON: Yes. I think every country should have its cryptocurrency for the next period of human history. In the end, I'm like John Lennon who said, "Imagine there is no country. It's easy if you try. You know, the idea of ​​all these nation states is that they are an interesting idea that has been developed at a certain period of human history. We have these regions and there was a group of cities that came together and had a common currency and borders. They created institutions, the rule of law and bureaucracy, and so on. So there were nation-states for national economies, but more and more the economy is becoming multinational.

You know, it's not against Donald Trump and "America first". No country can succeed in a world that does not work and, increasingly, we have regional economies like North America and Europe and, more and more, they will need to. 39, a global economy. So it's fun to speculate on things like that in the future, but I think that's probably not in my life.

CT: It's very interesting! Could you tell us what you are going to focus on in 2018?

DON: In the Blockchain Research Institute, we are doing 75 projects right now. Blockchain's strategic implications for transforming businesses into 10 different industries we study. We are also looking at seven management functions. What is the three-entry accounting for the CFO? What do smart contracts mean for the head of legal services? What does Blockchain mean for enterprise architectures? This is a good group of pilots, but, you know, companies are not a group of divisions, it's a business ultimately and we need architectures from within. business.

We have a large group of about 60 leading thinkers who lead these projects. Over the next year, we will complete these projects, and then our management team will be present in all these companies during information sessions for senior management. These usually consist of the CEO and executive committee of some of the world's largest companies. I am very excited that this is causing big changes.

The other thing is that my son Alex and I spend a lot of time talking at major conferences and smaller and more important events. In three weeks, I'm talking to … I do not want to mention the name, but it's 150 CEOs from 160 larger companies in America. They are very curious about it. Most of them have not yet figured it out, so we serve to clarify the market. We work in partnership with the company Hyperledger, Ethereum, the Digital Chamber of Commerce and other organizations. They are affiliated. We do not duplicate what they do. We are trying to address these strategic issues. It will keep me busy for next year.

CT: Thank you very much!

DON: Thank you!

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