"Blockchain is the internet's second chance"

Everyone’s heard about blockchain. It’s one of the technologies most often cited as holding great promise for the future, but it’s already here and we can use it. Marc Rocas is one of the people in Catalonia most involved in this technology’s development and dissemination. A doctoral student in the Digital Commons (DIMMONS) research group, Rocas studies blockchain’s interrelation with the sharing economy and how this technology intersects with the cooperative world. He also chairs the Blockchain Catalunya association which is working to expand this technology’s user community by organizing events and meetings. Rocas is also an adjunct professor of Strategic Management at the University of Barcelona and a strategic management consultant on blockchain.

Everyone’s heard about blockchain. It’s one of the technologies most often cited as holding great promise for the future, but it’s already here and we can use it. Marc Rocas is one of the people in Catalonia most involved in this technology’s development and dissemination. A doctoral student in the Digital Commons (DIMMONS) research group, Rocas studies blockchain’s interrelation with the sharing economy and how this technology intersects with the cooperative world. He also chairs the Blockchain Catalunya association which is working to expand this technology’s user community by organizing events and meetings. Rocas is also an adjunct professor of Strategic Management at the University of Barcelona and a strategic management consultant on blockchain.

The first difficulty in defining it is that we use blockchain as a polysemic concept. From a strictly technological point of view, we can describe blockchain as a distributed database that keeps a unique record of transactions shared by all the nodes in the network. But it is also a general-purpose technology at a highly incipient stage of development. When we say “general purpose” we mean that blockchain affects all areas. A ready example of general-purpose technology would be the internet itself. In fact, blockchain is often compared with the internet of the 1990s. They have a lot in common.

It’s a good way of defining the system’s governance. Blockchain has three governance levels: the governance of the network itself, which comes from the consensus protocol established within blockchain; the governance of the system’s users, who hold the distributed ownership of the system and make decisions about it; and, above these two, the governance of market interaction, which would be similar to the relations established between any service and users. Blockchain enables us to trust actors who we’ve never trusted before to carry out transactions, as the network will have already have told us that this actor is valid.

Yes, and that’s important, because blockchain already has user experience, since we already know how the internet works. For the user it’s as easy as opening an app on a mobile or a tab on a web browser. If you’re a user who wants to discover blockchain and you’re in the Barcelona metropolitan area, you have a very large community to find out about it. I would start there, by getting to know people in the community. Becoming a member of the Blockchain Catalunya association is also a good idea. Right now it’s an expanding world and there’s a lot of information.

My opinion is a bit biased because I’m a great advocate, but a big advantage I would point out is that blockchain potentially enables a transformation of the economic and social value systems. For example, with blockchain it’s possible to design a giant sharing economy network that operates in a city. In the energy field, it allows you to eliminate intermediaries and democratize energy. It’s a technology that allows assets to be collectivized. I know this all sounds quite revolutionary, but it’s very interesting to be able to develop the management of common assets through individual incentives. For example, I can work in the fight against climate change, which would be a global asset, but I do so individually, because by working on this I benefit personally. This duality makes blockchain very attractive.

There’s a digital divide; it’s clear that we need a new culture to use blockchain. There is a very strong and solid security field. I would also note as a negative element the fact that it is very enticing; right now it’s fashionable and has attracted a lot of attention. Blockchain can’t do everything. My advice is that if you can do something without blockchain, do it without blockchain, use fully developed technologies. As a consultant, my first task in the diagnosis is to explain to clients why blockchain is or isn’t necessary, and I often don’t recommend it.

There is no mass take up of blockchain, although it’s a sector that moves a great deal of money. When I say that blockchain isn’t a mature technology, I mean, for example, that we don’t have standards. There is no dominant platform but there are many operating, and at the moment we don’t know which one will win out and dominate in a few years’ time. To give you an idea, the same thing happened with the war between the VHS and Beta video formats in the 1980s.

The answer is complicated. For many people blockchain is the internet’s second chance, a way of righting what it has done badly. From a business point of view, blockchain can represent immense cost savings because by eliminating intermediaries, companies can have more efficient systems. Companies are interested in implementing blockchain and the regulatory authority has a complicated place in this task. First, order must be imposed, and, in a system as open as blockchain, this is complex. If a technology is regulated extensively from the beginning, it eliminates innovation, but if it is only regulated a little, it might not respond to negative externalities. There is also a political backdrop: the choice between American-style regulation, in other words, minimal, or European regulation, providing more guarantees.

It depends on the sector. In Catalonia, at the association, we’ve set up an observatory of the sector that, through a collaborative map, give us a dynamic view of the blockchain sector in Catalonia in real time. After we’d started it, we discovered that we were a bigger community than we thought. Academically, there’s a lot of momentum and a great deal of research, and in business the development stage of technology is creating an environment between sharing and competition, which we call coopetition. In Spain, there is the case of Alastria, which is a very powerful consortium promoted by companies in the IBEX environment. In Catalonia, the community is very active but, let’s face it, we users are early adopters. I think we still lack a killer app to reach high levels of use, but it will come in the end.

This is already happening. I know that Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Nicosia and many other centres already have courses related to blockchain. Here in Catalonia, the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), for example, also offers training. And on 26 June the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) will begin a conference on blockchain technology as a tool for social transformation. In the future, however, generic blockchain training will be meaningless, because it will already be integrated. Now no one “teaches internet”, but rather far more specific aspects of the technology and aimed at a specific application. The same thing will happen with blockchain, but this will be in a few years.