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In this video, we will explore the ecosystem and
opportunities for the groups and communities utilizing blockchain technology.
You will be able to identify industry groups and understand
the appeal of blockchain technology for special interest communities.
This will help you to leverage resources and best practices available from
your industry to envision a new marketing approach for your targeted communities.
This lesson is building on the industry examples and terminology to prepare for
connecting your organization with the relevant communities and their resources,
as well as explore the opportunities of creating
technology communities for you and your clients with blockchain technology.
Ecosystems. The benefits for groups to use
specific blockchain technologies are tremendous and just starting to be explored.
Groups can be formed around common interests,
and preferences is generally notating financial transactions or is specific
as security in the supply chain within an organization or special dietary interest group.
Some groups are unorganized and self-formed.
Others are based on traditional industry organization,
and even government and regulation efforts.
All of these communities have in common that
there's a lot of passion about the potential.
The passion drives the engagement.
blockchain communities are moving very, very fast.
The passionate users who benefit from the underlying product outsources
a very different future for transactions,
communications, collaborations, messaging, and even branding.
And as these things evolve,
I will keep you updated on our Facebook and LinkedIn pages
to making sure that you have the latest information in front of you.
Communities are not so different than the open source community.
But we'll see in the blockchain technology.
Ultimately, it is all about collaboration.
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The first community that formed around
blockchain technology was really the Bitcoin blockchain.
They have in common the interest of enabling trusted peer-to-peer transaction
over the internet without an intermediary that binds them together.
Bitcoin was really an example of a perfect marketing.
The brand manager for blockchain-based system, Satoshi Nakamoto,
released the Bitcoin wipe out on and put the genesis block on January 3, 2009.
The brand product's vision was simple: A world of payments that does
not require a third party intermediary. They had a clear mission.
What is needed is an electronic payment system
based on cryptographic proof instead of trust,
allowing any two willing parties to transact directly
with each other without the need for a trusted third party.
They built a community with block post to create more and more believer.
The first believer in the Bitcoin opportunity was healthy.
He even argued for the value that
the Bitcoin network could create in the financial systems.
He was the first that stipulated the value of a Bitcoin could go into the millions.
That attracted enthusiasts and protocols for new believers.
The system grow and increased the values of the initial coins at the newly created coins,
and stimulated the innovation around the new formed technology.
Admittedly, there's a huge amount of speculation in cryptocurrency market right now,
but we can see over the years,
the trend goes up and up and up despite a lot of attacks around it.
The second big example in the blockchain environment is Ethereum.
Community is based upon a goal to create
decentralized platform that runs smart contracts.
Remember, a smart contract applications that run
exactly as programmed without any chance of fraud,
censorship, or third party interference.
The founder of Ethereum,
Vitalik Buterin, a Russian-Canadian programmer,
created the concept and founded
the Swiss-based non-profit Ethereum Foundation to drive that mission forward.
Other industry organizations you probably are going to hear about, the Hyperledger.
That's an open source collaborative effort to create
an advance cross-industry blockchain technology.
It's a global collaboration hosted by
the Linux Foundation including leaders from finance,
banking, internet of things,
supply chains, manufacturing, and technology.
The big company behind Hyperledger you probably have heard about is IBM.
Another group that has been going to the news over the last years is called r3.
r3 is a distributed database technology company
that leads a consortium of more than 70 of
the world's biggest financial institutions in research and
development of blockchain database research in the finance's system.
And then, based on Etheruem,
over the last years,
it's strongly growing, we have the EEA,
the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.
Here, the Fortune 500 enterprises plus startups, plus academics,
and non-profit organizations come together to drive
Ethereum as a larger and more involved environment.
They really focused on refining enterprise-grade software capable
of having the most complex and highly demanding applications.
Their key focus is to learn together and build upon the only smart contract
supporting blockchain currently running in the real world, which is Ethereum.
Governments themselves are starting to understand and embrace
technology speed that you haven't seen not even since the internet.
I discussed in 2016,
the delegates from APEC improve the potential of blockchain technology,
and you could see that countries like Singapore or China are
already going down this route of trying to embrace it.
China, I've mentioned, has at least three cryptocurrency projects that are going on.
But countryside, Papua New Guinea,
I think, they bought a cryptocurrency,
and Estonia on the European side as well is pushing forward hard.
And my own state, Washington State,
is not only embracing cloud computing but it's very strong
in understanding what blockchain technology can bring and enable an innovation here.
There are regulations and restrictions.
On the U.S. side,
states and federal know your customer regulations before exchanges have been implemented.
That means, everybody who's
transacting needs to know where the money's actually coming from.
In the late summer of 2017,
we have seen the Chinese government stepping up very,
very intensively and nearly closing down all the ICOs that are happening in China,
hence, providing a lot of limits on the exchanges that are operating in China itself.
On the other hand, South Korea now has
officially embraced international transfers of up to
$2,000 with Bitcoin and cryptocurrency as fully legal, and Yahoo!
Japan is moving very much forward as an accepted payment method as well.
One interesting thing we have seen in 2017,
governments can only influence so much.
The moment individuals have entered the cryptocurrency of the blockchain world,
it is much, much harder for a government.
They cannot easily control the on-ramp and the off-ramp of the cryptocurrency world,
but the cryptocurrency world,
like the internet, is really hard to relate.
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What are the benefits for a member of the blockchain community?
The decentralized protocols or cryptotoken offers really the same benefits.
Only in a blockchain world,
the privileges are not just access,
but token value appreciation.
They get an economic privilege.
They get social privileges being part of the community,
and potentially in alignment with their core beliefs
and psychological spring water privileges.
Members have the privilege of the network.
But to do have the privilege,
you need to be a member,
which means you need to get token earned.
You need to invest into the network and make the network more valuable.
The purchase of a token of any of those blockchain networks is
a chance to benefit economically from the growth of the network as it happens.
And at the same time, it represents
an opportunity to support others who share similar values,
thereby allowing people to live in greater harmony.
It also makes, in effect, the marketing protocol,
reducing customer acquisition times and cost for this specific environment.
As new communities and organizations are being
created everyday around their own interests,
you can see how collaboration plays a big role in blockchain technology.
I'm asking you, is there a community you would like to join?
Or perhaps, do you want to create your own community
and be a change agent in your environment and your industry?
Mark Mueller-Eberstein, Dipl. Kfm.Instructor of Professional Practice - Faculty
