Dutch hackathons, pilots and projects are building new applications based on blockchains.
Dutch expertise and level-headedness could help broaden the use of blockchain within the finance sector and into a wider range of business and government organisations.
It has been three years since IT venture capitalist Marc Andreessen wrote about the promising future for bitcoin and its base technology, blockchain. The pioneer, who built the first broadly available web browser, said in his New York Times article that blockchain was then in a comparable state to that of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s.
In some industries and areas, the impact of the internet has been disruptive and even destructive. Use of postage stamps is increasingly rare, while the music industry and retail have been transformed. A recent example of the latter in the Netherlands is the demise of store giant Vroom & Dreesman (May 1887-December 2015).
Now it is blockchain’s turn. “A mysterious new technology emerges, seemingly out of nowhere, but actually the result of two decades of intense research and development by almost anonymous researchers,” Andreessen wrote in 2014.
