 Because the blockchain is a secure system that enables a trusted network, it's often described as a value exchange protocol. In this respect, people often say that what the web did for the exchange of information, the blockchain will do for the exchange of value. Just as the web revolutionized the use and exchange of information within society, disrupting whole industries based upon the centralization of information, so too the blockchain is set to do the same for the recording and exchanging of all forms of quantifiable value. This idea of value lies at the heart of the blockchain. If there is no value involved in the process, then there is no need for trust and no need to use the blockchain. The vision of the Internet of Value is for any quantum of value to be exchanged as quickly and as fluidly as multimedia is today on the web. Although multimedia can move around the world almost instantaneously, a single payment from one country to another is slow, expensive and unreliable, often taking days and involving numerous intermediary third parties to validate and process transactions at a significant cost. Thus it is no accident that the first widespread use of the blockchain was for currencies because it is the most immediate and obvious source of quantified value within society. However, to truly understand the revolutionary potential of this technology is to appreciate how value and its exchange influences and regulates almost all aspects of human affairs. As a consequence the control of how value gets defined, measured and exchanged, is a key source of power and control within society and has been since the origins of civilization. Today value of almost any kind is defined, quantified and regulated by centralized organizations, whether this is a national government creating their own currency or one's role within a hierarchy defining one's economic status or the branded clothing that we wear to signal to others our social status and value in society. However, the move into the network society shifts the locus of organization from closed institutions to individuals and networks. Blockchain technology is a key element enabling this process by creating a shared ledger where people can own their own data. It also enables a shift in the locus of value within economy to the individual in networks. In a world of limited connectivity, limited transparency and limited peer-to-peer trust, it was necessary to have third party institutions to define, quantify and authenticate sources of value within society and economy. But in a world of pervasive peer-to-peer connectivity, transparency and trusted low cost automated networks, value can be defined through a negotiation between peers within distributed networks. The rise of digital currencies are but one such example of this. The surprising thing for a lot of people is that most major currencies like the dollar, yen and euro aren't backed by anything, they're just pieces of metal, paper and entries in a bank account that get their value from everyone simply believing that they have value and accepting them as a medium of exchange and that's all that's really necessary. Currencies and money work a little bit like languages. They are subject to network effects to give them value. The more people who agree to and understand a language, the more valuable that that specific language has as a form of communications. Dollars, RMMB, euros and bitcoins have no intrinsic value. They're all social protocols and they merely represent a way of supporting the value flows between individuals. In the past, because of low levels of trusted peer connectivity, we required centralized institutions like governments and banks to get these value exchange networks started, to support them, regulate them and maintain them and this gave those organizations a lot of power. This is a critical aspect that the internet and the blockchain are changing. The blockchain enables us to create trusted and automated peer networks of exchange, which greatly strengthens the capacities of people to negotiate and define value via direct peer-to-peer exchanges. People can now set up their own currencies with the value of the currency depending simply on what others are willing to pay for it via an automated peer-to-peer network exchange. But the internet of value is more than just currencies because value is of course a much broader concept than just pure economic utility. In talking about the internet of value, it's important to recognize that on a societal level, we're moving into a post-industrial services economy. The traditional conception of what society values is being revisited as a new set of societal and environmental factors re-enter the equation. People are less and less content with the traditional concept of GDP as a sole metric for how well they're doing and more and more demanding actual quality of life, which of course engenders a broader spectrum of values beyond economic utility. Over the past decades, we've increasingly begun the process of tracking and accounting for different forms of value, whether this is green bonds, social impact bonds, company loyalty schemes, carbon accounting, or a multiplicity of other forms. But simply the erosion and loss of social and environmental capital that occurred during the industrial age is generating a recognition and growing awareness to their value. Metrics for how well a society is doing increasingly take account of many more environmental and social parameters in combination with GDP. Along with this recognition to the importance of different forms of value comes also the technical means to quantify and exchange them. Through the process of datification, information technology lets us measure, track and exchange ever more types of value at ever smaller increments, likes on Facebook, people's attention, carbon emissions, etc. With the rise of big data and IoT, we'll be quantifying and ascribing value to almost everything and the blockchain will provide the networked infrastructure for tracking and exchanging all these micro and macro quanta of value. This shift from the narrow form of economic value that dominated in the industrial age to a broader spectrum of values that emerges within a post-industrial society is enabled by the distributed edger system that supports what we call token economies wherein we can define a token as a measure of any form of value and then build an economy around that. Token economies and the internet of value build upon the current expansion of digital markets brought about by the rise of the platform economy. Over the past decades with Web 2.0 we've begun the process of expanding markets to more and more spheres of life that were previously organised via centralized coordination. After only 10 years or so of this process the biggest accommodation service in the world is no longer a centralized organisation like the Hilton it's now an online market. The same is true for the taxi industry, the same is true for commerce. With 10 million merchants and 440 million active users the Alibaba network is now reported as the largest retailer in the world after just 19 years of existence. Markets are complex, they typically require the aggregation of large amounts of information and peer-to-peer interactions. Without the technology it is much more viable to achieve coordination via a centralized hierarchical model. But as we come to quantify and account for more and more areas of life blockchain-based networks will expand the capacities of plug-and-play markets to all spheres of activity, social, economic, technological and environmental. The internet of value will function as the infrastructure to the emergence of the services economy which is currently taking place within post-industrial economies. The move into a services economy results in the conversion of industrial age products into services whereas the product-based economic paradigm was about the production and consumption of more products as measured by GDP. A services economy is about value delivered. A service is an exchange of value. You don't get the product, you just get its function and the value that it delivers. As such all spheres of economy become redefined away from the static conception of units of products towards the more fluid exchange of value. You don't buy a lift to put in your office building. You get it as a service, paying only for the functional value it delivers. In some offices now they don't even buy the carpets on the floor. The function of the carpet is delivered as a service and they pay only for the value that's exchanged. The blockchain is a key infrastructure enabling this services economy as it requires a very fluid, dynamic and automatic tracking and exchange of value. Smart property and smart contracts will form the technological infrastructure powering the services economy as they operate within large peer networks automatically allocating resources and processing the financial debits and credits of value exchanges behind the scenes. This huge shift in our economy lets us reconceptualize every industry to really question what is the actual value that it delivers and then reconstruct it by building token markets around that value where anyone can participate in the delivery of the service. With Web 2.0 and the platform economy we extended the capacities of markets so that many more people could participate as exemplified by Uber enabling anyone to operate as a driver. However these markets were centralized around the platform operators and they were dependent on traditional currency systems and the financial system for processing transactions. In Web 3.0 blockchain applications will function as distributed automatic plug-and-play markets where extremely small increments of value can be exchanged directly peer-to-peer with very high levels of fluidity. When this is coupled with IoT and data analytics we'll be able to track the real value that things deliver which will help us to make the much needed move from our product-based economies to an outcomes economy that better reflects the underlying value being created and exchanged.