Author: David Ezell (NACS: National Association for Convenience and Petroleum Retailing)
Thanks for considering me to attend the workshop. As co-chair of the Web Payments Interest Group, and as Advisory Committee representative for NACS, I support the idea of future work - specifically at W3C - that will help move "blockchain on the web" forward and make it useful for a wide range of uses.
From my perspective as Web Payments IG co-chair: the importance of blockchain in support of payments (value exchange) is pretty obvious. What is not obvious is how the technology can be made more general and accessible to people. As one of its selected activities, the IG has supported the formation of the InterLedger Protocol CG, which is discussing technology that is intended to support a set of ledgers - many or all of those being blockchain ledgers - in order to enable value exchanges in a "composable" way.
From my perspective as AC representative for NACS: blockchain as a technology for supporting "true statements" has potentially endless applications for the 165,000 retail outlets that NACS represents. Everything from payments (above), to control (one-time use) of coupons, to tax auditing, to doing background checks on employees. We believe blockchain could improve countless activities in the fuel and convenience retailing space.