Page 2 - February 2018 Disruption Report Flip Book

THE DISRUPTION REPORT FJEABNRUUAARRYY 22001188
and a 50% drop in the number of shares, plus a real dearth in IPOs—a 90% drop in the average annual number of IPOs. So-called Communist China now has twice as many IPOs as we do, and a smaller government measured by share of GDP.
If you consider the entrepreneurial doldrums instead of GDP, we’re not making progress at the rate we did in the 1980s and 1990s. However, the sources of revival are very much present. There’s a worldwide eruption against U.S. stagnation in the crypto-currency movement, which is a global campaign, and many of its leaders are outside the U.S. It’s providing alternatives to this daily $5.1 trillion in gambled money. It’s providing alternatives to today’s porous, insecure Internet, in which Equifax or Yahoo can lose hundreds of millions of items of personal data and the reaction of the big five Internet leviathans is merely to demand more passwords. They make our computers increasingly inaccessible to us but not to the pop-up malware minuses called “ads.” All of this is being remedied through the new crypto-currency movement that began in 2009 with Satoshi and bitcoin...
[Blockchain is much bigger than cryptocurrency.] A totally insecure Internet is being addressed globally by the movement toward blockchain: distributed security, a “layer-eight” new security architecture for the Internet. A Blockstack to replace the increasingly perforated Internet stack. So, yes, I think that the foundations for an era of very rapid growth exist...
The blockchain field is an amazing efflorescence of creativity, entirely comparable to the dot- com eruption of the 1990s. It will similarly have a lot of losers, seminal losers like Netscape, as well as obscure, prospective giants like Amazon and Google.
George Gilder
Author of Wealth and Poverty Forbes
February 9, 2018
© 2018 by Canfield Press, LLC. All rights reserved. www.canfieldpress.com
2