This is an interesting, thought-provoking piece. Don&#x27;t be discouraged by the linkbaity title. The author himself acknowledges the linkbaityness:<p>&gt; Any reasonable answer to these questions has to be: Not yet. Not for a long time. But a person can dream, no?<p>But there&#x27;s a cool idea lurking somewhere just beyond his grasp:<p>&gt; Windley is excited about using blockchains today to build registries. We need directories to find things; here’s a way to “put a directory on” anything without requiring a private-company middleman. The companies won’t go away. But, as with email, he says, their services will be interoperable, and you’ll be able to switch providers.<p>A blockchain is a ledger (piece of paper that records transactions) with perfect memory of every single transaction that has ever occurred within a certain network. This makes double spending within the network impossible as you can trace every single &quot;coin&quot; in the network back to its origin, verifying that your trading partner does, in fact, have the coin he claims to. This removes the need for a trusted third party to oversee&#x2F;verify transactions.<p>The author misunderstands the properties of the blockchain, instead seeing it as some kind of handwavey tool that can decentralize any kind of listing + licensing + verifying-as-a-service type businesses.<p>If you got every Uber and Lyft driver to sign up on a single block chain, thereby creating a &quot;distributed&quot; ledger, you would basically just have an excel spreadsheet full of names, numbers, and constantly updated ride metrics (which both companies have right now). But the reason Yelp&#x2F;Uber&#x2F;Spotify&#x2F;AirBnB exist is because they actively verify and license products [restaurants&#x2F;drivers&#x2F;rentals] and resolve customer&#x2F;provider disputes.<p>The blockchain stores and remembers - it cannot license or remediate. This requires human action, usually in the form of a centralized, for-profit organization.<p>The cool idea is that if you were an organization that <i>only</i> focused on building these distributed ledgers, vetting and aggregating quality products [restaurants&#x2F;drivers&#x2F;rentals], you could then force Uber and Lyft into a much tighter competition as their pool of inputs (drivers) would be coming from the same source, rather than two walled-off ledgers. This is where the idea of a union&#x2F;collaborative comes in - strength in numbers. If the labor market was tighter and there were some sort of driver certification process besides getting a license, a driver&#x27;s union would solve the problem of too much corporate power, not enough labor power in negotiations.<p>But at the end of the day, you need someone to code and maintain the distributed ledger and to spearhead and guide the union&#x2F;collaborative. There is no such thing as pure decentralization.