I owe Jack Shaw a favor. It’s one of those, “This one time in Cambodia...” type of favors. We won’t speak of it beyond perhaps a nod and wink. It’s not written down anywhere; the details of such are so vague as to be almost non existent, while encompassing the known universe. It expires upon death, of the sun; and can be redeemed whenever and by another person who need only walk up to me and say, “Jack Shaw sent me. He says to tell you ________”. And tada, that favor has been redeemed for value.

Jack would call this favor a “marker.” It’s more valuable than your house, the Empire State Building & 100k Bitcoins combined. It can even be redeemed for something even more precious, my time or an opportunity or access to my network. You know, those things that money can’t buy. Well, you can lease my time from time to time.

Favors, markers and promises are humanities’ first virtual currencies.

They’ve gone digital recently, as Jack might redeem his marker via a Wh...more

What is Blockchain - The Santa Claus Perspective

Typically when people ask, “What is Blockchain?” the conversation quickly dissolves into “How” blockchain works. How blockchain works is actually only important to about half of 1% of the top tenth of techies. Business, Thought Leaders and pretty much everyone else pretending to understand how the tech works, should leave those technical elves to their wizardry and focus on the big picture. Being the proverbial Santa Claus. Cause really have you ever actually even heard of Santa doing anything? So why does he exist?

The Santa Claus of Blockchain Strategy

If I asked you “What is the Internet?”, assuming it’s three decades ago, would you run through the technical aspects of how ISP, LAN and DHCP work? Or would you tell me all the cool shit that it will spawn? How would you advise me from a strategic standpoint on how to understand the “www”, to position my business and investments to be relevant, successful and fabulously rich for th...more

Blockchain isn't hot sauce

The definitive executive guide to understanding WTF blockchain is AND why you should care.

Note — This is a brief executive guide because as an executive, you have better things to do than get a new degree in yet another decades old “emerging” technology.

What is blockchain? Think of it as a group text message. Those annoying times when you have twenty or hundred people talking about something. Where some people have names, some have numbers and they’re all actually just sharing data. Data can be anything from text, photo, meme, video or hotel reservations. A blockchain is immutable and distributed, just like your group text message. Send a classic Friday Happy Hour NSFW photo to a group text. Even if you delete it on your cell phone, it still exist on everyone else’s. That’s the essence of distributed ledger technology (DLT), aka blockchain. Shared, distributed, immutable data.

What can you do with blockchain? As a ledger it records and sha...more