I saw this diagram many years ago. It shows all the many big companies that emerged each of which tackled just one small segment of what Craig’s List did. You could go with the phrase Unbundling Craig’s List. Craig Newmark never bothered with a Craig’s List 2.0. The first version is still chugging along. It is still in business.

When I look at the Blockchain, I see something like this, only much, much larger. Google is not your local library digitized. When you digitize a service, you birth a whole new animal. Because you can add intelligence every which way.

In a way, it is just money on the Blockchain. But then it is not because it is digital and intelligent. Governments around the world are all geared to make the mistake of thinking it is just money, just digitized. And so let’s introduce the digital dollar, the digital yuan, the digital rupee. But a fundamental element of the Bitcoin is that there are going to be only so many. Governments on the other hand like to conjure up new money out of thin air. They want to be in charge. They want to increase the money supply.

It is obvious that numerous large companies are going to be built along the way as the Blockchain promise is realized. There are going to be a ton of trillion-dollar companies. Old industries stand to be upended. But entirely new industries will be created.

The beauty is that it is going to be bottom-up this time. The Blockchain is going to eat up Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Alibaba, and Tencent. It is going to eat up the Chinese Communist Party, yet another Big Data monolith waiting to be broken up.

I have met Craig Newmark, by the way. The guy has a Version 1 feel about him, very much so.