I love the board game Monopoly®. With the roll of the dice, we work our way around the board, buying properties, building hotels, and conducting financial transactions with other players and with the bank.

The banker in Monopoly is a very powerful role. After all, the banker controls all of the money. Almost all of the financial transactions require the banker acting as intermediary.

We trust that the banker has our best interest in mind. We trust that he or she will give us the correct change in financial transactions and act with integrity and responsibility.

Sometimes however, the powerful banker violates our trust and leverages their power for ulterior motives. I have played quite a few rounds of Monopoly where money mysteriously vanishes from the bank and appears in the banker’s own account. Sometimes the banker “forgets” to give me $200 for passing Go. Sometimes a friend of the banker magically emerges from near-bankruptcy with a stack of bills followed by laughter or winks between player and banker.

The Monopoly banker is powerful, and can be generalized as any central power authority in our business or personal lives. A central power authority could be considered any person or organization who has a monopoly on one or more processes, such as settling financial transactions, grading diamonds, registering intellectual property, or selling songs. In order to participate in a process, we often interact with a central power authority. Central power authorities are everywhere—in every aspect of our work and play, from business to government to leisure.

What if we could remove the central power authority from the process? Or, at a minimum, reduce the overarching influence of that central power authority? What if we could play the board game Monopoly without the banker? What if all of the Monopoly players could share the role of banker?

We will see in the following chapter that blockchain is all about sharing responsibility and removing the monopoly on the central power authority. Our goal here is to go from a monopoly to a “blockchainopoly.”

A blockchainopoly creates shared responsibility in executing a process, as opposed to the powerful position of a central power authority. However, blockchainopoly does not always mean removing the powerful monopoly position completely from the process. Often the organization owning the monopoly still plays an important role in the blockchain application.

Blockchain changes the rules of the game.