How Blockchain Can Build Trust—and Reduce Government's Power: Podcast
Q&A with Alex Winter, whose new documentary, Trust Machine, explores the radical potential of blockchain to decentralize just about everything.

Blockchain, the decentralized, incorruptible ledger system that undergirds bitcoin, "gives you an actual power to affect change in the world," says hacker Lauri Love. "It's gonna scare the shit out of some very powerful people."
Love is one of the people featured in actor and filmmaker Alex Winter's new documentary, Trust Machine, which explains how blockchain works and how businesses are using it to reinvent power grids, music distribution, and even grocery stores. For today's Reason Podcast, I talk with Winter, whose previous documentaries include Downloaded, which looked at how Napster and other file-sharing services disrupted the music industry, and Deep Web, a sympathetic portrait of Silk Road and similar websites, about the potential for blockchain to change how governments—and corporations—go about their business.
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Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Party on, Winter. And keep it up with those documentaries.
OK, I admit going for the cheap joke: I wouldn't have expected "Bill" to use a big word like "hyperbole". Let alone pronounce it correctly: I would have thought something like "hyper-bowl" instead.
But (seriously) good episode.
Blockchain offers a range of valuable qualities, particularly related to tamper-evident and permanent databases and record-keeping, that can help tackle government corruption.
This technology must be paired with thoughtful legal frameworks and structures. Blockchain alone cannot prevent crimes. In this way, blockchain development can reduce the stress on government