This is an interesting, thought-provoking piece. Don't be discouraged by the linkbaity title. The author himself acknowledges the linkbaityness: > Any reasonab

This is an interesting, thought-provoking piece. Don't be discouraged by the linkbaity title. The author himself acknowledges the linkbaityness: > Any reasonable answer to these questions has to be: Not yet. Not for a long time. But a person can dream, no? But there's a cool idea lurking somewhere just beyond his grasp: > Windley is excited about using blockchains today to build registries. We need directories to find things; here’s a way to “put a directory on” anything without requiring a private-company middleman. The companies won’t go away. But, as with email, he says, their services will be interoperable, and you’ll be able to switch providers. A blockchain is a ledger (piece of paper that records transactions) with perfect memory of every single transaction that has ever occurred within a certain network. This makes double spending within the network impossible as you can trace every single "coin" in the network back to its origin, verifying that your trading partner does, in fact, have the coin he claims to. This removes the need for a trusted third party to oversee/verify transactions. The author misunderstands the properties of the blockchain, instead seeing it as some kind of handwavey tool that can decentralize any kind of listing + licensing + verifying-as-a-service type businesses. If you got every Uber and Lyft driver to sign up on a single block chain, thereby creating a "distributed" ledger, you would basically just have an excel spreadsheet full of names, numbers, and constantly updated ride metrics (which both companies have right now). But the reason Yelp/Uber/Spotify/AirBnB exist is because they actively verify and license products [restaurants/drivers/rentals] and resolve customer/provider disputes. The blockchain stores and remembers - it cannot license or remediate. This requires human action, usually in the form of a centralized, for-profit organization. The cool idea is that if you were an organization that only focused on building these distributed ledgers, vetting and aggregating quality products [restaurants/drivers/rentals], you could then force Uber and Lyft into a much tighter competition as their pool of inputs (drivers) would be coming from the same source, rather than two walled-off ledgers. This is where the idea of a union/collaborative comes in - strength in numbers. If the labor market was tighter and there were some sort of driver certification process besides getting a license, a driver's union would solve the problem of too much corporate power, not enough labor power in negotiations. But at the end of the day, you need someone to code and maintain the distributed ledger and to spearhead and guide the union/collaborative. There is no such thing as pure decentralization.