How the blockchain could return privacy control to consumer Posted on : Jun 22 - 2018

Patterson: With the rise of social media, big data, and artificial intelligence, it's clear that our personal information is in the hands of just a few very large technology firms. The European Union has enacted the GDPR, that's the General Data Protection Regulation, but it's yet unclear on how the US will respond. One emerging technology however, the blockchain, could put privacy back into the hands of consumers. Alex Feinberg, you are a former professional baseball player, also a former Googler, you worked on Wall Street, let's talk about the blockchain.

First, help us understand who you are, and what qualifies you? Why with your background are you now interested in block chain tech?

Feinberg: Yeah, that's a great question and probably for your viewing audience they'd wonder the same thing. For anybody who's familiar with how division one athletics works or how minor league baseball works, or how employment relations in Hong Kong work or how employment relations in Silicon Valley have worked, I sort of realized in my late 20's that every organization or jurisdiction that I'd ever contributed to as an organization member had been legally challenged for abuses of power.

Starting with being a division one athlete a couple years ago, Northwestern football players made a motion to attempt to unionize and collectively bargain to battle against what they perceived to be an abusive authority by either the NCAA or their coaches, a year or two later minor league baseball players banded together and sued their professional organizations because they were claiming that rights that were granted to American workers since the great depression were being withheld from them with respect to making less than minimum wage and then my first job after I got done playing sports, working in Hong Kong where they had recently allowed for a minimum wage that was something like two dollars an hour and where collective bargaining and union formation was illegal, you start to see this pattern where large organizations or powerful organizations have been prone throughout history to abuse their power in terms of getting more and more leverage over the members of their organization to make them essentially their puppets over time.

Moving on to working at Google in Silicon Valley shortly after I joined there was unfortunately a multi-hundred million dollar settlement that a lot of the tech firms shared in due to the likely collusion to lower engineering wages in the region, and so you see this pattern once, twice, three, four times and you start to think "Oh wow, this isn't an individual problem, this isn't a problem of one human or another human, this is a function of how humans organize themselves where if you put a lot of power in the hands of very few people, you should probably expect them to at times, abuse their authority and the only way around that abusive authority that I have seen throughout my life is to figure out a way to decentralize that authority, to increase the bargaining power of the members who are essentially beholden to occasionally autocratic decisions by the higher ups.

And so as cryptocurrency started melting up in 2017, and blockchain's come to the forefront over the last two or three years, it's really intriguing because it's essentially a vehicle that allows decentralized autonomous organizations or organizations without a single king to potentially operate. And if you think about why that's interesting, if you're familiar with the formation of the United States and the suspicion that our founding fathers had about authority and centralized authority, this could potentially be a tool that allows corporations in the 21st century or organizations in the 21st century to operate in a more decentralized fashion. View More