Alex Tapscott > Quotes

“Today, commercial banks typically lend up to 10 times as much money as they hold on deposit. This expansion of money in the form of new credit can help fuel economic growth but raises systemic risks when depositors get jittery and demand their money back.”
― Alex Tapscott, Financial Services Revolution: How Blockchain is Transforming Money, Markets, and Banking

“Open finance is a 9 to 10 innovation—an improvement on what we have today. Decentralized finance is a 0 to 1 innovation—creating a parallel financial system that will allow humans to send value and organize in ways we have never experienced before.”
― Alex Tapscott, Financial Services Revolution: How Blockchain is Transforming Money, Markets, and Banking

“When these agreements are written to an immutable blockchain, parties to the contract can now trust that no other party can intervene in the automatic execution of their rights and obligations.”
― Alex Tapscott, Financial Services Revolution: How Blockchain is Transforming Money, Markets, and Banking

“Bitcoin does not have any private profit center and uses its native cryptocurrency, bitcoin, as a means of decreasing the risk of under-contribution and overexploitation.”
― Alex Tapscott, Financial Services Revolution: How Blockchain is Transforming Money, Markets, and Banking

“According to Ostrom and Schlager’s taxonomy, these may include distinct rights of access, withdrawal, management, exclusion, and alienation.101 If we can capture these quasi-legal notions in a token, it becomes a meta-asset, a thing of value that is simultaneously a governance vehicle.”
― Alex Tapscott, Financial Services Revolution: How Blockchain is Transforming Money, Markets, and Banking

“Economist Ronald Coase presented his views on why the firm existed in a lecture in Dundee in 1932, when he was just 21 years old. He argued that the firm was created and still exists because going to market for the resources was more expensive than hiring those resources internally. More specifically, the firm exists to lower transaction costs. The search for resources, their coordination, contracting, and the establishing trust was easier inside the walls of the firm. He further argued that these transaction costs tended to grow as the enterprises grew. His insights were dismissed and ignored for decades, but he was eventually awarded a Nobel Prize in 1991.”
― Alex Tapscott, Financial Services Revolution: How Blockchain is Transforming Money, Markets, and Banking

“Therefore, ecosystem tokens align individual incentives with those of the public commons.”
― Alex Tapscott, Financial Services Revolution: How Blockchain is Transforming Money, Markets, and Banking

“Equity is a classical instrument used to fund private enterprises, with the value of shares based on the expectation of revenues and profit in the private enterprise. As such, equity is an appropriate tool to fund private profit centers, such as the centralized online platforms from the Web 2.0 world, or even the various Dapps emerging in the Web 3.0 landscape.”
― Alex Tapscott, Financial Services Revolution: How Blockchain is Transforming Money, Markets, and Banking

“Stating blockchain can cut X cost from a market segment assumes that the market segment itself will continue to exist. History tells us that technology not only disrupts industries but also can eliminate them altogether.”
― Alex Tapscott, Financial Services Revolution: How Blockchain is Transforming Money, Markets, and Banking

“As we discussed, without liquidity through secondary markets, attracting node validators to a new network will be difficult, as the tokens compensate for their time and resources to maintaining network infrastructure.”
― Alex Tapscott, Financial Services Revolution: How Blockchain is Transforming Money, Markets, and Banking

“We predict market adoption of block-chain-based decentralized alternative trading platforms that enable peer-to-peer exchanges of security tokens with transactions recorded to a distributed ledger.”
― Alex Tapscott, Financial Services Revolution: How Blockchain is Transforming Money, Markets, and Banking

“As the Court in Howey determined, an investment contract requires (1) an investment of money (2) in a common enterprise (3) with a reasonable expectation of profits (4) to be derived from the entrepreneurial or managerial efforts of others. All elements must be met for a security to be found, thereby implicating securities laws and regulations.”
― Alex Tapscott, Financial Services Revolution: How Blockchain is Transforming Money, Markets, and Banking

“Perhaps what we need is a new “Telecommunications Act” for the blockchain economy. The US Telecommunications Act of 1996 was a significant overhaul of broadcasting and media regulations that for the first time included consideration of the Internet. Section 230 of the Act stated, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”95 This opened up the floodgates for the Internet revolution to occur free of concern over being caught in the snag of retrograde regulations.”
― Alex Tapscott, Financial Services Revolution: How Blockchain is Transforming Money, Markets, and Banking

“Typically, commons suffer from two issues in economic theory: 1. Maintenance, or the question of who will fix issues in the code and, 2. Governance, or the question of who decides upon the direction of development.”134 To deal with those challenges, CTO Arthur Breitman said, the Tezos team created a “self-amending blockchain.” He modeled it on the game Nomic, invented by philosopher Peter Suber, in which the rules of the game include mechanisms for the players to change those rules.”
― Alex Tapscott, Financial Services Revolution: How Blockchain is Transforming Money, Markets, and Banking

“An ecosystem token essentially solves the problem of the “Tragedy of the Commons” that characterizes many common-pool resources.169 The tragedy of the commons emerges from two conditions: 1.​Participants individually benefit from the use of common-pool resources 2.​The externalities of overuse or under-contribution are shared among all members of the community.”
― Alex Tapscott, Financial Services Revolution: How Blockchain is Transforming Money, Markets, and Banking

“When regulators face an industry in a state of rapid evolution or revolution, that is, high uncertainty, regulators have three possible responses. They can make new laws through rulemaking and potentially through enforcement actions. They can refrain from taking any action and simply observe, study, and learn. Or they can watch developments and periodically issue reports, guidance, or threats. They may end up requiring some combination of the above. But determining which approach is optimal, we believe, must start with a process of informed questioning”
― Alex Tapscott, Financial Services Revolution: How Blockchain is Transforming Money, Markets, and Banking

“These methods emphasize how a community can use the economics of tokens to incentivize its members to push for the betterment of the underlying platform, the commons of the blockchain itself.”
― Alex Tapscott, Financial Services Revolution: How Blockchain is Transforming Money, Markets, and Banking

“The distributed ledger cannot be edited, even by an individual who holds all of the access keys. The stockholder record can be appended, but retroactive adjustments to the record cannot be made. This process generates a highly dependable audit trail that clearly—and indisputably—indicates how each stockholder acquired stock and from whom. That trail would be essential in a court of law, should a plaintiff dispute who the stockholders were at a given moment.”
― Alex Tapscott, Financial Services Revolution: How Blockchain is Transforming Money, Markets, and Banking

“So why did Blockbuster not create Netflix, and why did Sears not create Amazon? One reason is the innovator’s dilemma, where disruptors of old paradigms have trouble disrupting themselves, largely because of good management.”
― Alex Tapscott, Financial Services Revolution: How Blockchain is Transforming Money, Markets, and Banking