Creation of Blockchain and a New Ecosystem
Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI), Tokyo, Japan
The Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry regards the process of incorporating new information technology, such as artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), and big data analysis into society as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This view is reflected in the Fifth Science and Technology Basic Plan. The plan advocates Society 5.0, in which cyber space and physical space are integrated to support an affluent and human-friendly society. Computer scientists regard the interconnection of industry and society through information technologies, with people creating and using such technologies, as a single ecosystem. They have actively participated in the design and discussion of such an integrated ecosystem. Blockchain is considered to be at the core of such a cyber ecosystem.
Terms like the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Society 5.0, and cyber ecosystems seem colorful and might appear rather farfetched. However, when placed in the context of the current states of the economy and technological development, one realizes that the new concepts are rather persuasive. This is because the technological innovation that is about to start is very unique in the long history of technological advancement since the First Industrial Revolution.
Today, we are witnessing the introduction of a new type of productive resource into our economy—data. Data is a new productive resource that had no economic value in the past. Until a few years ago, there was no way to gather large volumes of data that could capture daily life accurately, nor were there any computing technologies that made it possible to analyze an extremely large volume of data to explain complicated human interactions on both production and consumption sides of an economy. This has changed all of a sudden. Many productive resources,such as coal and oil,suddenly became valuable during past industrial revolutions. However, they merely replaced already existing resources. Coal replaced firewood and charcoal; oil replaced coal. Data, in contrast, does not replace any existing resources but is born as a completely new type of productive resource.
In short, industrial revolution in the past meant destroying existing resources and replacing them with new resources. Sitting in the middle of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, in contrast, data does not replace any existing resources.
From an economic viewpoint, this difference between past industrial revolution sand the Fourth Industrial Revolution is large. Previously, the ownership of oil was assigned to the owner of the land containing the oil, just as the ownership of coal was assigned before oil was utilized as a major energy source. In the case of data,we have not established a clear agreement on who owns the data. As Nobel laureate Ronald Coase (1910–2013) pointed out, the assignment of proper ownership rights is a prerequisite for the formation of a market.
In these circumstances, blockchain technology opens important avenues to make efficient and fair use of data. In a broader sense, this technology is also referred to as a “decentralized ledger,” which can involve a large number of unspecified people to contribute to the effective and fair use of data in a decentralized manner.
In summary, blockchain is expected to play an important role in connecting information technology and technologies such as AI, IoT, and big data with our lives. From this point of view, this book investigates the roles that blockchain plays in a virtual ecosystem from various angles, in particular, from the following three viewpoints:(1) data ownership, (2) data transactions, and (3) data industry.
