Video interviews: who are you on the blockchain?

Is blockchain another example of the internet killing the middlemen? There’s a lot of – more or less educated – guessing about the disruptive potential of blockchain technology. Hence the Netherlands Ministry of Interior saw reason to host a Blockchaingers event on a topic affecting its core activities: global digital identity. There, I interviewed blockchain experts Vinay Gupta, Jason Law, Tey El-Rjula, Vasiliy Suvorov and Rutger van Zuidam as well as state secretary Raymond Knops and his digital governance manager Anton van Weel.

How do we recognise one another in the blockchain? Back in the days, we outsourced the bookkeeping of our transactions to intermediaries who had to keep ledgers for this purpose. Think banks, insurers, governmental agencies and the like. Hence they are traditionally reckoned trusted third parties (TTP). Now the times they are-a changing. Blockchain technology is a network that relies on connected ledgers on the servers of users: a distributed ledger technology (DLT). It validates transactions by adding blocks of transaction data to the ledgers of all users. In real-time, no intermediaries attached. For ever more transactions you can decide upfront, whom do you trust more: a couple of third parties, or countless second parties?

Such a promising technology demands some actual experiments, such as the second international Blockchaingers hackathon convened by Dutchchain on 5-8 April 2018 in Groningen. Disrupt or die trying…