Yu Jianing, the director of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) made a speech supporting the development of what he called “industrial blockchain” – a backbone of every future successful sharing economy. He also laid out a blueprint of how blockchain could be used throughout the sharing economy.
Below are the main ideas of his speech:
- The blockchain concept sprang into our world sometime in 2016, combining elements of international payments and bank management concepts. By 2017, blockchain had become a seriously hot topic, and the markets were going crazy about it. At the end of 2017, Yu first brought up the idea of the industrial blockchain and started to promote the idea.
- The blockchain is not only something for speculating on cryptocurrency. A much more important use may be found in industrial development. During the first half of 2018, a survey of more than 100 companies was done. Yu discovered the blockchain had a revolutionary quality like no other concepts he had seen before.
- It’s possible to change the face of the industry as we know it, revolutionizing all the current systems of production and the way we create value. But what Yu believes the most important, is how blockchain can potentially change the way we allocate value in the first place.
Yu outlined existing elements of the so-called shared economy and pointed out how there are the things we were completely out of comprehension.
The example is DiDi (Chinese Uber analog), a company promised to revolutionize transport, is now dogged by issues of passenger safety (especially female), declining customer service and increasing difficulty in even securing a ride.
Another big “shared” enterprises are the bike sharing apps. Their apparent green credentials in the shared economy are being eroded by the evident waste the companies go through in order to even provide the service to users.
He also criticized the typical online entrepreneurship model – tell a story, get investors, cultivate users, get users to see the reliability of the platform, wait for it to monopolize the user market, sell out and issue investor returns.
Sounds great, but Yu reminds that this is a model in which users are just “crops” to be harvested and there is no real value to society. No user is truly involved in creating, managing or adding value to any part of the enterprise, so it eventually burns out.
In the final part of the speech, Yu was discussing how the blockchain technology solves a modern business dilemma – how to shift from a capital-based enterprise to a user-based enterprise. He describes a model based on the blockchain, where all the consumption is built and secured around the idea of certified “Token”. Under this system, every time a transaction happens, each and every part, along with its benefits, contributors and other elements, all get their dessert – everyone is recognized and recorded for what they put into the process.
He delivers the idea, that only blockchain and token can achieve a true sense of “collective” ownership of production materials; a real kind of “socialism” of the digital economy. The blockchain is a technology that best recognizes the cooperative and multi-faceted nature of an online platform. There are no one-man-bands! Blockchain will help us understand the real value of a team, and help us realize a kind of “organizational” revolution in the way we do online business.
