Jonathan Johnson is the Chairman of the Board for Overstock.com. He joins us as a “Wire Insider” to talk about the use of blockchain technology in business.

“The thing Overstock has kind of grown into the last few years is focusing on blockchain technology, and that’s the technology that underlies bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Just like the internet made it much easier for us to transfer freely and frictionlessly information, we think blockchain technology is going to do that for assets. And assets can be anything from currency, to stock, to land, to your vote. Anything that when you give it, the recipient wants to know that they’re not getting a copy, but they’re getting the real thing.

So I think the implications of blockchain are that you and I are going to be able to do commerce together, without intermediary middle men in between. We’ve gotten to a place in society where most people don’t know who they’re dealing with and so we rely on trust institutions, whether it’s the government, or banks, or brokers, to allow us to trust doing business with each other. Blockchain technology allows trust through technology so that you and I can have a digital handshake that allows us to deal with one another and rehumanize commerce.”

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