TechRepublic and ZDNet's Jason Hiner spoke with Arun Sundararajan, a professor at NYU, at DES 2018 this week about why digital trust is the key to unlock the coming revolution in crowd-based capitalism.
You can watch the interview above or read the transcript below.
Arun: Central to the emergence and success of the sharing economy and crowd-based capitalism, is the maturing of digital trust.
20 years ago when we traded on eBay, there was a little bit of trust created by the platform and it was enough. To trust someone enough to send them money, or to receive a package from them but it takes a different level of trust to get into a stranger's car and say, "Drive me to another city." Or to hand over the keys of your apartment to a stranger.
And so, what today's successful sharing economy platforms have done is they have encoded enough digital information into their platforms, verified IDs, real world social capital through Facebook and LinkedIn, sophisticated learning from others through reputation systems, in a way that is allowing us to take these leaps of trust.
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Over the next 10 years, I expect that crowd-based capitalism will expand even further as blockchain based trust systems come of age.
I think today, we still need the centralized intermediary. I don't think that we're sophisticated enough to create a blockchain based solution, for example, for getting subscription to a music service.
I mean, if even the Ethereum programmers can't figure out the security holes in Ethereum then I think we have a few years to go before it's mainstream; but in the long run, I think all of