After the Social Web, Here Comes the Trust Web

I am currently building a peer to peer finance platform and I have had the opportunity to talk to a large number of market participants. We are in the honeymoon phase of peer to peer finance (crowdfunding&#x2F;crowdinvesting) where investors are simply excited to have access to investments that were impossible at the minimum invested dollars offered today.<p>In order for the market to expand beyond early adopters, platforms will need to focus on providing transparency, risk controls and most importantly removing moral hazard where possible.<p>Moral hazard is the biggest issue right now as investors in most crowdfunded transactions have highly divergent financial goals from the people they are investing money in and the platforms facilitating those investments.<p>Solving that issue will be the biggest challenge for the industry and the one that I believe will really help it grow beyond the early adopters.

&gt; <i>To say that bitcoin and its sole blockchain hold a monopoly on the future of cryptocurrency-based implementations is like saying in 2006 that LinkedIn was the only social network needed when it was barely leading, and when Facebook, Twitter and many other social platforms were still babies.</i><p>But why would anyone (especially David Cohen?) think that LinkedIn is entirely open-source software? And why would he think that Facebook was a fork of LinkedIn&#x27;s source code? I don&#x27;t understand this analogy at all.

I own lots of Bitcoin and love the Blockchain, but the obvious cynical point is that this was written by a Techstars guy who is trying to pump the cause while its in a crisis state.<p>I really don&#x27;t think Bitcoin has uses that people care about, e.g., privacy, micropayments for digital content, yada-yada.<p>Please I&#x27;d love to be wrong. Tell me how I&#x27;m wrong. I&#x27;m actually dead serious as I don&#x27;t want to lose money and have my &quot;baby&quot; startup, Onarbor, in this space.

The reddit thread has no discussions. Here&#x27;s the link to original article: <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/18/after-the-social-web-here-comes-the-trust-web/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;01&#x2F;18&#x2F;after-the-social-web-here-c...</a>