Future Applications of Blockchain: toward a value-based society

The appearance of new technologies has often heralded radical transformations of the ways of doing work and disruptive social change has been concomitant. Steam, for example, powered the industrialization of economies and fostered the displacement of large segments of the working populace as well as laying the foundations for seemingly unstoppable environmental decline (Lewandowsky, 2016; Kittel, 1967) while the internet revolution has arguably been the most significant since the industrial and its effects upon business and society cannot be underestimated nor reliably further predicted (Agarwal, 2015; Feldman, 2002). Some technologies are, or have been, forecast to have the potential to generate further radical transformation of ways of working and ways of living. 3D Printing and Augmented Reality for example have been the subject of much debate, but the actuality has so far failed to live up to expectations (Mishra, 2013; Thierer, 2013).

Blockchain promises similarly startling disruption to business and society (Naughton, 2016). One must be careful however not to conflate ‘radical’, ‘innovative’ or similar synonymical verbiage with ‘revolutionary’ during the early stages of technology implementation and adoption: the rollercoaster emergence of Bitcoin for instance has been well documented (Chuen, 2016; Khan, 2015; Higgins, 2015; Simonite, 2015; Edwards, 2015; Dyson, 2014; Feld et al, 2014). The potential impact of blockchain however, both positive and negative, cannot be ignored and it has become the subject of numerous articles in technical and practitioner magazines (for example, Baxendale, 2016 and Rutkin, 2016).

This paper summarises the key findings of White’s (2016) research that explores potential future applications of blockchain technology before postulating how it may even provide the foundation for a new metric of social value.