When revolutionary technologies arise from human invention, analogies are useful. We need to use the old world’s concepts to conceptualise the new. ‘Iron horse’ did its job to elegantly communicate the concept of a steam locomotive to the general population in the early 1800s. Everyone who tries to explain blockchain technology has their favourite analogy. Robert Tilt, Director of Isobar’s innovation accelerator Nowlab has a good one (albeit a little more complex than ‘iron horse’): “A group of kids are exchanging trading cards. They each have a list of who has what cards. When they trade a card, they all check their lists are identical, and make sure several kids witness the trade take place. They agree it happens, then everyone records that trade in their lists.

“A couple of kids try to cheat. One changes their list, but the others rule it invalid since it’s different to theirs. Another tries to trade cards privately, but without witnesses nobody acknowledges it. This is the basis of blockchain.”

As Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani described it in the Harvard Business Review, a blockchain is “an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way."

Nobody exactly knows who invented blockchain, but it emerged as the technology that underpins cryptocurrencies. Its originator was Satoshi Nakamoto, who wanted money with a fixed inflation rate outside the control of banks and states so he/she/they created Bitcoin (Satoshi Nakamoto is a pseudonym and the identity of the Bitcoin creator is still unknown to the public).

There are many different blockchains. Each cryptocurrency has its own, the best-known being those of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Every transaction logged on a blockchain is distributed across all the nodes within the network. And there are millions of machines sitting on that network, all trying to help verify a single transaction. These machines belong to users of the blockchain and miners, who contribute processing power to verify transactions. In return, miners will get rewarded with coins or tokens.

At this point we reach a fork in the road. We can either delve deeper into the woods of how blockchain technology works or we can start to understand the creative wonders that may emerge from this technology. For the creative industries, the latter is the most exciting part.

‘Distributed ledger’ might not sound all that creative. It’s just a place to record information. But the key values that blockchain runs on are decentralisation, verification and permanence. These are the real resources that creatives have at their fingertips if they want to play with it. And they have huge, inspirational implications for humanity.

Robert from Isobar notes that the hype cycle is past the gimmick phase for the technology now. “It’s essential for creatives to understand the 101s so they can get beyond the hype and make something interesting, but ideally something meaningful,” he says. “The mainstream fever around blockchain has subsided, and brands have already capitalised on the majority of initial PR-able value from the technology.” One example of this was Burger King Russia’s WhopperCoin, where buying a burger earned customers tokens in the brand’s very own cryptocurrency which they could later exchange for… more burgers was one. Long Island Iced Tea Corp. changed its name to Long Blockchain Corpco some months back for reasons that seem to go little beyond wanting to jump on a buzzword. These examples of the straight-up headline-grabbing stage are joined by the brokerage firm TD Ameritrade’s First Ad in the Blockchain stunt, where the brand, working with Havas New York, utilised the publicly viewable and permanent nature of the blockchain to plant TD Ameritrade’s flag on the unhackable, unchangeable digital ledger to ensure that will be remembered - and be there - forever, as a work of ASCII art. 

Beyond the hype cycle, if agencies want to tap into the power of blockchain, they will need to think big, says Robert. “I’m sceptical on how much impact we agencies can have with blockchain in the campaign space,” he says, noting that the most exciting programmes utilising the tech are using its verification to prove origin authenticity in areas such as with blood diamonds and baby formula. “Considering blockchain’s ‘back of house’ nature, the most exciting ideas will be those that can go beyond a traditional campaign and start actually transforming a business,” he says. “These conversations need to push past the CMO to less-exposed parts of the client such as the CDO/TO. If the client buys into a pilot programme from here, then that original idea has the power to not just change that particular brand, but change entire industries.”

The values of the blockchain are a key route to understanding why it’s so momentous for the creative industries - and humanity. Ben Jones, founder of innovation consultancy Bull in a China Shop and former global chief technology officer for AKQA finds the community that has emerged around the technology to be the most interesting facet of it. “The type of people in that world aren’t so much capitalists, they’re more like philanthropists,” he says. “They live in this community which is all about contribution, decentralisation, trust, honour and consensus. I think that’s a very futuristic way of looking at the world.” It’s quite an Iain M. Banks-esque utopian vision, “an open and fair planet,” he adds.

“We live in a world where blockchain can offer these things that humans have always wanted. Reciprocal altruism is an evolutionary trait of humans - if I scratch your back you’ll scratch mine. That kind of world has gone and it’s take, take, take from these very large companies - these centralised platforms. People are fed up of being taken from by the greed of capitalism and we can start to live in a nice world where we look after each other in this network - or the network looks after us.”

The blockchain values community over hierarchy due to its decentralised nature. Because the information stored on it is distributed rather than centralised, power structures that exist in the real world hold no sway there. One effect of this is the bypassing of official state structures. The World Food Programme is trialing blockchain in refugee camps to store both refugee’s currency (so they can buy food), but also their very identities - removing the need for passwords and government documentation. 

Bypassing official structures is also open to brands, as NORD DDB recently demonstrated for its client Björn Borg in a project called Marriage Unblocked. In this age where brands are keen to demonstrate their compassion and human values, there are exciting opportunities to achieve this via blockchain technology. “Our client Björn Borg has always fought for equal rights for the LGBTQ community,” says Tove Andersson, who was as an art director at NORD DDB when the idea began. “We talked about how it is unfair that in 87% of the countries around the world same-sex couples have no possibility of getting married. Then we thought about blockchain and said hey, if Bitcoin can provide money on the blockchain couldn’t we also provide marriage for all? And so we did. We worked hard, used all of the expertise in the NORD DDB house and found some great developers that could help us with the developing part of the project - Winter and Superblocks - and had the platform ready in no time.”

Couples can enter their vows at MarriageUnblocked.com and these will be entered and stored in a new block added to the already existing Ethereum blockchain. The Ethereum blockchain is not owned by anyone, it is a peer-to-peer system that anyone can use and maintain. “The community of users together manage and make the decisions regarding the blockchain in a democratic manner,” says Tove. “Since there is no single entity controlling the system and the users are spread all over the world, it creates a parallel digital system or community that exists outside the control of any state or company.”

Once the vows are entered to this blockchain, due to the decentralised nature of it, they can never be altered or changed. “They will stay there untouchable forever,” she says. “Or at least for as long as the Ethereum blockchain is alive, which most likely is for as long as computers will continue to exist.”

Blockchain is a registry, so could potentially revolutionise the way other vital information is stored. One powerful idea is that with the lack of state control there, the blockchain might be the perfect place to register votes. With its inherent transparency and immutability, voter fraud could be eliminated. The UN is looking into this and a startup called Horizon State is working to create a platform for voting on the blockchain, which Robert notes “could be a way to bring the theoretical ‘direct democracy’ to life.”

Corruption is also in the sights of the blockchain community. “The old world was a centralised, single spreadsheet and everyone kept all their transactions and audits on this one database,” says Ben. “In a normal business model and it was a hub and spoke model - all the people in the world were the spokes and there was a central hub, which worked for certain things and still will work for certain things tomorrow. But if you look at the web, that is a single point to verify, a single point to corrupt, a single place to manipulate data in a positive or a negative way. You’re starting to see a lot of things come out of these massive companies like Facebook owning all your data, manipulating the people - the spokes on that hub - using us as the currency within their own domain. And people are starting to get very frustrated with that.” 

In the decentralised world of the blockchain, relying on many points of verification, there is no hub from which to corrupt. “There are millions of these machines out there with all the transactions distributed, so it becomes completely traceable, immutable in many ways - you can’t hack it. It starts to become a new era of trust,” says Ben.

The internet age hasn’t brought the democratisation that it promised. Look at how much it takes to make a living as a musician or visual artist now digital creative assets can be shared so easily. The disruption of streaming companies and intermediaries, from Spotify to Netflix to Facebook, has centralised power in the hands of these tech companies and disempowered individuals. 

Tove notes that these new power-brokers of the internet should be concerned about the rise of blockchain. “With blockchain technology we can create peer-to-peer systems where all the users together share the wealth and no single person or party owns or controls the system,” she says. “Any intermediary company, and especially digital ones, could be disrupted by new user-based blockchain systems that are more efficient, transparent and safe thanks to the new possibilities of blockchain. Especially our recent disruptors like Uber should be careful that they are not themselves disrupted by fully automated user-based blockchain systems providing the same service more efficiently and without the intermediary company.”

Ben’s enthusiasm is similar, but tempered. “They will work alongside each other. The world wide web is not going to go away,” he says. “The blockchain will add value to certain areas where the internet has raped and pillaged and become problematic for us. What the decentralised model allows us to do in many ways is cut out the middleman, which is where the creators of the world have fundamentally suffered.”

The peer-to-peer nature of blockchain offers promise for the individual creative, as does its immutability. Just as refugees may be able to prove their rights as people by registering on the blockchain, creators could use it to assert their inalienable intellectual property rights. “If you make a big change in this world, at the moment all the big boys are holding onto their revenue streams,” says Ben. “But imagine when Adobe takes Photoshop and all its stock photos and directly integrates it into the blockchain. It would absolutely smash a large percentage of revenue coming through for the Getty Images of the world. You could create an asset, press a button, it goes into this world.”

Although on the fringes now, blockchain communities are building a parallel world of registered information that could offer a fairer way for humans to interact. “Björn Borg wanted equal rights to marriage for same-sex couples all over the world, so we created a parallel blockchain-based application or DApp for this,” says Tove. “The possibilities are endless and the opportunity to create new user based systems brings the prospect of a more decentralised and equal distribution of wealth. A world with real shared economy and less companies functioning as intermediaries.”

This could change how creative people work, making the gig economy a reality without the exploitative insertion of tech companies creaming off the top. In the advertising industry, Ben points out that “large percentages of great people who used to exist in agencies have gone freelance. Imagine when those people can self-assimilate the best team really quickly for an agency or a client. Or a client can skip the agencies, essentially, say ‘I want this team,’ go to the blockchain and all of those people start working together.”

Another thing the blockchain can potentially offer is reputation management. If briefs and contracts are made on the blockchain then whether someone delivered on that is also there forever, based on consensus. “All of a sudden these massive companies, agencies or clients themselves, can create a brief [on the blockchain], now that brief then self-assimilates the right team, and all of a sudden those people get paid by the blockchain as well,” enthuses Ben. 

“Imagine a world where there was no more ‘that was my idea’, when ideas themselves go onto the blockchain. It’s a utopian world,” says Ben. “The creative industry is driven by wonderful ideas and delivering those ideas. The blockchain can solve the delivery and protection of ideas, the distribution of those ideas and payment for those ideas. And how those ideas are created, which is the village able to self-assimilate teams and then pay those teams depending on the value that they create. So there’s a wonderful new world there.”

It’s these utopian concepts that creatives need to understand to make use of blockchain, and it doesn’t take long to understand why these values are inherently baked into the technology. “A lot of people feel that blockchain is a complex technology and that it might feel hard to know where to even begin,” admits Tove, “but as a creative all you really need to know is that it provides a way to store information immutably, publicly and forever. Like a time capsule, It is suitable for any kind of public registry and especially the registry of value: who owns what, love declarations, digital cash, votes. As a creative I would would go from there and see what ideas that could be built from this feature.”

You don’t need to know how to code or even have a techy background in order to understand and create projects on the blockchain. There are endless possibilities for new DApps and truly innovative marketing and communication - ready-made tools creatives can pick up and use, systems for smart contracts and frameworks for self-executing transactions that people can pick up and play with.

Tove’s life has been changed by her encounters with blockchain. “The more I learned about this new tech the more excited I got,” she says. “In the end I couldn't stay on the sidelines and after the Marriage Unblocked project I decided to join Superblocks, the blockchain startup that helped us in building the platform, as their new CMO. We provide tools for developers that want to build applications or DApps on the blockchain in order to empower all people with exciting new ideas for blockchain innovation. I am thrilled to see what new innovation will spring to life through blockchain!”

She’s a true evangelist for the technology and the community. “Personally I try to engage more people and especially women and non techies to look into the possibilities of blockchain technology that holds immense potential. It is up to us what we decide to create with this new tech and today the sphere is highly male dominated. Less than 10% of the people invested in or working with blockchain are women. I fear that if women do not engage more in new tech, we will lose some of the equality we have fought for in generations. Because the future is digital.”

As ever, the fundamentals remain the same. “However clever and useful the blockchain is and is promising to be, creativity has always been the most valuable currency,” concludes Ben, who will be explaining to a room of advertising people 'WTF is Blockchain?' in his talk at Kinsale Sharks in a few weeks. “However many coins and tokens out there, creativity will always be priceless.”