A Paperless World
The world is changing albeit very slowly. Sometimes you think we are in the digital age but then have to second guess yourself.
I returned from NYC this week and although I sit at my desk 12-hours a day working I have had a small stack of receipts and other paperwork from my trip at the edge of my desk that I have been afraid to rip into. I use a Neat desktop scanner that scans all my receipts to my Neat Cloud account so that I can save and access them. I also scan documents that I want to retain using the Neat scanner directly into Dropbox.
The first thing I did when I arrived back was check my physical mailbox in the lobby of my building. Of course it was stuffed with junk mail, coupons, flyers and other meaningless notices. Comcast even mails me offers for their internet service even though they are physically unable to do installs in our building. I have gone to various websites to submit my name and address to try and stop the madness but no matter how hard I try the paper keeps coming?
Every time someone hands me a business card or a big corporation tries to give me a folder of marketing materials, which I know will end up in the trash, I think about the overall effect this has on society at large. I always try politely to refrain from taking it. The world population has grown from 2.7 Billion in 1955 to almost 7.5 Billion people today. To accommodate all of these additional bodies we continue to cut down rainforests basically raping and pillaging the planet. It is sad to think that the air we breathe every day is getting worse because of this nonsensical waste. In a quick review to write this post I even found one article, called “Rainforest destruction threatens to KILL US ALL, shock research finds”, that stated that deforestation is unearthing new and weird strains of infectious diseases which human beings have no way of fighting, including flesh eating diseases and even the Zika virus.
At GLX we have recently been organizing our shareholder records into a new database. This new database will be directly connected to member’s profiles in the GLX network within the near future for our beta launch. I was responding to an email from one of our biggest and most supportive shareholders about a couple of missing printed certificates. My first response was to write him that if he wanted the missing certs printed we would order them from our transfer agent immediately and have them physically delivered to him, which of course we will do. But then, as always, I stopped to think about how many processes in the global capital markets are dysfunctional and broken and how GLX can fix them.
I thought about a better way of making someone feel secure about their position while providing total transparency for record keeping. We have a Bitcoin trading account with Gemini. This is the Winklevoss twins regulated cryptocurrency exchange. We are going through our audits now and our CFO had requested statements for that account. I logged in and realized that no statements were available. Only the ability to export all of your detailed transaction history to a spreadsheet file. At first this seemed a little unorthodox and bit annoying then I gave it some further thought. The simplicity of it is brilliant. We live in a world where we still get over sized envelopes with quarterly statements, from dormant brokerage accounts with zero equity, in the mail likely because some regulator says they have to mail them to comply. Gemini has simply removed all the nonsense. You can log in anytime to view and export the history of your entire account.
GLX has already begun a strategic relationship to create a digital wallet, based on the blockchain. The wallet will be available on all devices as well as in a member’s profile when logged into our website. From here an investor will be able to view and export their entire transaction history.
If you Google the oldest stock certificate in existance you will find that it was a share of the Dutch East India Company in 1606 also that it looks similar to many stock certificates today, including GLX’s. GLX is going to redesign a futuristic stock certificate so that with one click an investor can download and save, or print, a PDF file certificate representing that particular ledger entry.
No more transfer agent’s, no more envelopes, no more stamps, no more lost time and lost mailings, who needs all that nonsense?
It has already been stated that the Blockchain is as profound an invention as the internet itself. Also that financial technologies and the Blockchain will dramatically change the capital markets, commercial banking and other industries as we know them today. When you have an extra 15-minutes here is a great video on living paperless – How living paperless could change your life | Dominic Stühler | TEDxBerlin.
I look forward to showing everyone how GLX will embrace and lead many of these changes.
