As Keynes wrote, “the difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds”. [lxiii] In the face of structural changes and big transitions, history may not be a good guide to the future.
This requires a secure system or protocol to transfer assets (the rails), protection against assets being transferred twice (the so-called double spend problem), and an immutable record of asset ownership that can be automatically and securely updated (the ledger). The tokenization of digital assets can facilitate the transfer process.