Jerry Yang, Yahoo's Taiwanese-American co-founder, says that despite the cryptic hype has yet to become reality, that blockchain and finance are a natural choice, according to the first comments of Finews Asia.
Yang spoke at the Nikkei Innovation Asia Forum held on Thursday in Singapore, where he took part in a discussion titled The rising tides of innovation in Asia.
But before the blockchain can ensure the necessary traction for adoption, paradoxically, given the technology that started the word "without trust", Yang says that he must first build trust.
Although in his observations he did not explicitly explain who needs to trust who, given his observations at a previous session at the same conference, in which he exposed what he considers to be the three-sided confrontation between China and the United States in the spheres. interconnected geopolitical hegemony, trade and technology – presumably trust must be established not only with individual consumers or within and between societies, but also between states.
"Blockchain is a natural technology for banks and commerce: If you look at the institutions and banks of the United States, the type of infrastructure you are developing has long-term implications." For technology to succeed, the question is whether it can be built trust – this can open a huge number of doors, "Yang predicted.
Clearly, the starting point for such trust must be at the level of individual companies but, as the attention of several consortia attests, interoperability and industry standards indicate that development in isolation must eventually lead to collaboration between competitors. These types of relationships require the trust of an antiquated type, probably cemented by financial incentives and disincentives.
When trust breaks down
Think of the days gone by when Eric Schmidt of Google sat on the Apple card happily absorbing iPhone plans just so that Google could work on an operating system for a similar device at the same time, not based on the touch screen. That's why Steve Jobs called Android "a stolen product" and the trust between the two technology giants has collapsed.
Schmidt joined the Apple Board in 2016, a year before the iPhone was launched, and Apple probably continues to deeply deplore the appointment.
It is fair to say that one of the factors that push the pilots that the big banks have been involved in making operational products is the difficulty of agreeing practices and standards between competitors with different legacy infrastructures and levels of technological ability.
Remaining with the theme of trust, Yang added: "In order for applications to be implemented successfully, trust must first be built".
However, once the problem of trust is solved – a problem that stands out in a mixture of trust in technology and confidence in the ability of competitors and states to cooperate for mutual benefit, then technology will take off.
"With confidence, enormous opportunities will be created for blockchain mass adoptions," concludes Yang.
Geopolitics, commerce, technology … and blockchain
Speaking at a previous session, Yang said he saw both the positives and the negatives come out of the competitive rivalry between the United States and China, a rumble that he sees no end soon.
"It continues to be the accelerator, both for the greater good and for greater division.There must be a sort of mutual security and trust, which seems to worsen."
The unintended consequence of the struggle that the Trump administration has chosen with China is that it will encourage the Chinese Communist Party to double its quest for leadership in the field of technology.
Although Yang has framed his comments in the context of the US financial industry, the blockchain is identified by China as one of the key technologies in its fourth industrial revolution plan, with applications far beyond banks and commerce. In fact, China seems to see those as perhaps the less important sectors, although its large technology companies have an advantage in areas such as mobile payments.
Blockchain is one of the technologies that China is probably the most confident in establishing an advantage over the United States, as are the domains of artificial intelligence, internet of the things and smart city.
To put it briefly, one could argue that China does not have the same problem with the "trust" that the West has regarding the adoption of blockchain, because it can direct the economy from (up to a certain point), forcing industry standards, if desired.
Certainly, some of these emerging standards may seem to hinder the development of the generalized register, but it is a general misinterpretation by Westerners. China has banned trade and ICOs not because it wants to kill blockchain. On the contrary, it wants full control of the spectrum to stimulate development for economic gain and not for individual reinforcement.
The natural form with finance
As for the natural correspondence with the world of finance, it seems increasingly likely that the most successful financial applications will initially be in raising funds and in trading in securities rather than in reducing back-office costs that make technology so attractive for banks and other financial intermediaries.
Consumer payments are also likely to be late in adoption, for well-proven reasons.
In an indication of the direction of travel, a number of high quality security token (STO) offerings are beginning to land on the banks of analysts, including this author. More information on this in the upcoming stories of Ethereum World News.
The other success story, apart from the security aspects, are obviously centralized exchanges for the crypto trade.
Yang put his money where his mouth is gone since he left Yahoo in 2012, creating AME Cloud Ventures.
The venture company of Yang is an investor in Blockstream. The high goal of the blockchain company is "to solve problems that undermine confidence in today's financial systems".
Other portfolio members include Ripple Labs, BlockCypher focused on the BitPay infrastructure and payment processor.
Yang is a "believer" in bitcoin, even though he thinks, like others do, that he has a way to go before he breaks the means of payment. In 2017 he said:
"Bitcoin as a digital currency is not quite there, people are not using it for transactions, people use it as an investable asset, I think digital money can play a role in our society. the front end of the transactions, but also the back-end to create a much more efficient system and a much more verifiable system ".