We reap massive benefits from working together. But since the early days of our societies, trust boundaries between individuals, businesses, institutions and governments prevent us from collaborating and dealing freely with each other. In order for such economic actors to engage in economic activity with each other, they must cross these trust boundaries – invisible boundaries stemming from the risk that interests of actors that do not otherwise know each other are not aligned which are often prohibitively expensive to cross.

The blockchain can be seen as the core of a trust machine that people can use cheaply to replace the human and labor intensive processes we have employed so far in order to overcome trust boundaries.

In this talk we will discuss how and why blockchain works so well and show how it can be generalised well beyond its existing well known domains like payments, to allow many new and exciting types of distributed collaboration.