This week’s Down to Business focuses on Web 3.0 or a new idea for a decentralized internet that many people think will be based on blockchain — the technology that enables bitcoin and holds vast potential to do much more.
The first guest, Lex Sokolin, head economist for Consensys, a blockchain software technology company in New York, said corporations are still only just figuring out the potential applications of blockchain technology, but its use is already growing more quickly than anyone could have predicted.
The second guest, Victoria Lemieux, an associate professor at the School of Information at the University of British Columbia, where she co-founded the blockchain research cluster, said that at a basic level, blockchain is a record-keeping technology.
Both guests said that blockchain could have profound implications for how the internet works, particularly the attention economy — or the way some of the largest tech companies have commoditized human attention by collecting and selling data and ads.
They also both said something else — that blockchain is likely to make the internet more like the physical world. As always the interviews were edited for clarity and brevity.
