In short: The power of blockchain is “nerve-wracking for governments” regardless of their ideological inclinations and ambitions, according to Mick Hagen, Chief Executive Officer of decentralized app platform Mainframe. In an interview with AndroidHeadlines, Mr. Hagen reflected on Washington’s recent attempts to pressure Google into treating some political content differently than how it currently does, asserting that such policy shares some common points with China’s censorship. “There are similarities to how [all] governments will approach the Internet” given how they want to preserve and grow their monopoly on force, Mr. Hagen said, loosely retelling the classical theory of government.
Blockchain threatens any government’s power of gatekeeping, licensing, arbitration, identification and identity issuance, as well as a wide variety of other traditionally state-sponsored sectors by delivering a set of alternative tools that are both completely decentralized and capable of accomplishing the same tasks in a swifter manner, the industry veteran asserted. In combination with privacy-oriented tools such as Mainframe itself, blockchain threatens the very fundamentals of what constitutes a modern government, which is why countries around the world are now treating it with “aggression, fear, and confusion,” the executive concluded.
Background: Blockchain is presently being explored by virtually every industry on the planet and while it’s still best-known as the technology behind cryptocurrencies, its applications span far and wide beyond a fiat currency alternative. While most established technology giants such as Google and Samsung were relatively late to embrace the emerging field — which they deeply regret — everyone from Tencent to even Facebook is currently committing significant resources toward efforts to explore the sector.
Impact: By providing a set of solutions powering public digital ledgers that are extremely difficult to spoof, blockchain has major implications for any industry dealing with data management and verification. In today’s Internet-connected world, that’s pretty much every segment, and electronics and systems are about the become even more interconnected with the rise of IoT and 5G networking.