If I read the whitepaper and project correctly, more or less what I understand is that INS could be the new amazon. Am I right?
We are different from Amazon. The most successful marketplaces such as Amazon or eBay came to life because they managed to remove middleman entities, that were mostly brick and mortar operations, and replaced them with an automated piece of software accessible over the Internet.
There’s one important aspect to highlight though. The model is often explained as “removing the middleman” without emphasizing that what actually happens is not a complete removal of the broker in the middle, but rather a replacement of the old broker with a new kind of broker. A much better type of broker, built around a software platform, but still a middleman entity between the supply and demand sides. That centralized software architecture is how online marketplaces are able to capture value and is the critical building block of their business model. For almost two decades, nothing seemed to disturb that position. There wasn’t any other technology that could be more efficient than an automated central software to handle the relationship between the supply and demand sides.
However, in the past few years, something interesting started to happen, in a totally different domain. The blockchain architecture allows peer-to-peer transactions to take place in a secure way without the need for any central entities. Blockchain and smart contracts provide the tools and framework to create a new generation of marketplaces where supply and demand sides can engage in trusted trading transactions, according to various business rules, without the need of a central brokerage entity.
Consequently, the same way online marketplaces disrupted many traditional brick and mortar businesses, blockchain and smart contracts will give birth to a new kind of peer-to-peer marketplaces that will unsettle the current ones. It’s not a matter of “if” but rather “when” the new decentralized structure will take over as the technology keeps maturing and improving. The peer-to-peer structure is the perfect fit for the decentralized nature of the Internet and has the benefit of handing over the power back to the people participating in the ecosystem.