Blockchain Systems Consortium: Scalable AI + Blockchain For Humanity
The MIT Blockchain Systems Consortium will conduct anti-disciplinary research to create and disseminate new knowledge about the interplay of money, economies and people.
Spearheaded by Prof. Alex "Sandy" Pentland and Dr. Yaniv Altshuler (founder of Endor), as part of the Trust::Data Consortium, the MIT Blockchain Systems Consortium is dedicated to advancing the state-of-the-art in research on blockchain and cryptocurrency.
Blockchain Systems are unfinished technologies that do not yet represent the full potential of what people will eventually be able to do.
Its only beginning to reach an early point in maturity, where we are starting to see these systems as a practical way of dealing with data without ever decrypting it, which, in this world, is immensely important.
Things that we thought don’t work, or were impossible, are suddenly now possible. You can encrypt data and still compute on it on it, without ever having to decrypt it. You can share data, safely.
That these things are impossible is so ingrained into our mental models that it really changes the discussion to know they are now, suddenly, possible.
What else is out there? What are the next things that were always impossible, until suddenly, they not longer are? There are probably lots things out there that will change the discussion, and change the world.
We need a different way of thinking of economics and value, that can account for this strange phenomenon of these distributed things that are not backed by assets, yet have billions of dollars worth of value.
What’s going on here? Well, we need an economics that is not about rational individuals, but rather about the social fabric, and the value of that social fabric.
The vision of MIT Blockchain System Consortium is to help humanity think about how to take the impossible, and make it possible, in the service of a better society.