The Promise of Blockchain Is a World Without Middlemen (hbr.org)

dryriver writes: The Harvard Business Review has an interesting article about how Blockchain technology may bring down the cost of business transactions and enable new ways of doing things: "Consider the problem that small manufacturers have dealing with giants like Wal-Mart. To keep transaction costs and the costs of carrying each product line down, large companies generally only buy from companies that can service a substantial percentage of their customers. But if the cost of carrying a new product was tiny, a much larger number of small manufacturers might be included in the value network. Amazon carries this approach a long way, with enormous numbers of small vendors selling through the same platform, but the idea carried to its limit is eBay and Craigslist, which bring business right down to the individual level. While it's hard to imagine a Wal-Mart with the diversity of products offered by Amazon or even eBay, that is the kind of future we are moving into." "Decentralization" is the idea that a database works like a network "that's shared with everybody in the world, where anyone and anything can connect to it," writes Vinay Gupta for Harvard Business Review. "Decentralization offers the promise of nearly friction-free cooperation between members of complex networks that can add value to each other by enabling collaboration without central authorities and middle men." The proposition ultimately makes things "more efficient in unexpected ways." For example, "a 1% transaction fee may not seem like much, but down a 15-step supply chain, it adds up. [...] The decentralization that blockchain provides would change that, which could have huge possible impacts for economies in the developing world," writes Gupta.

Comments

Previously in the news

[fiannaFailMan]

The Economist also wrote about this in 2015.

Re:I call bullshit

[madumas]

Yup that's the biggest hurdle right now but multiple ideas are being explored. The one that I personally find the most promising is "sharding", an idea developed to allow the Ethereum blockchain to scale massively. In a nutshell, they will split the blockchain in multiple shards and allow transactions between them.

More details here: https://github.com/ethereum/wi...

Re:"Disintermediation": Remember that 90s buzzword

[Motherfucking Shit]

eBay, Craigslist, Etsy, Airbnb, etc. are the middlemen, they all extract their pound of flesh from people who are "doing business with each other."