Every new technology makes someone’s job irrelevant. Blockchain and its by-products—NFTs, smart contracts, and stablecoins—decentralize transactions that are traditionally moderated by middlemen and gatekeepers. If you’re one of those middlemen today, it may be time to find innovative ways to create value that people will pay you for.

In This Episode:

• Technology eliminates people having to do predictable work in a process or system.
• Freed from doing predictable work, people can be creative elsewhere.
• The blockchain, which allows smart contracts and cryptocurrencies such as stablecoins, is a technology that eliminates middlemen and gatekeepers.
• NFTs allow creators to sell directly to buyers, and buyers to resell directly to each other.
• Originally, CryptoPunks’ pixelated cartoons were reselling for tens of thousands of dollars.
• Like Holland’s tulip bulb craze in the 1600s or the Japanese real estate craze in the 1980s, people are using these cartoons as an investment, believing they can sell them for much more later.
• Trust is the essence of capitalism.
• The internet has made it difficult to know whom to trust, but blockchain smart contracts solve that.
• Smart contracts are tiny programs plus data deployed on a blockchain, such as Ethereum, that automatically execute an exchange once the conditions have been met.
• Instead of having a third party such as Kickstarter hold all the money during a crowdfunding campaign and then take up to a 10% cut, a smart contract can eliminate that middleman at just the cost of hosting the smart contract on the network.
• Defi, or decentralized finance, works the same way to make secure loans available to people who were turned down by banks.
• Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies that are pegged to a stable asset like the U.S. dollar or gold.
• Because they don’t fluctuate wildly, stablecoins can be used for reliable international payments.
• Stablecoins also cut out fees to banks and other institutions because there’s no currency exchange and no service charge for moving across borders.
• If you want intellectual property protection today, you must file copyrights and trademarks in every country for it to be enforceable everywhere.
• With the blockchain, Strategic Coach could upload its thinking tools in a similar way to smart contracts or NFTs to universally prove ownership of creation.

CryptoPunks 

IBM article: “What are smart contracts on blockchain?” 

Forbes article: “An Introduction To Stablecoins” 

Your Life As A Strategy Circle by Dan Sullivan