Blockchain and the Future of Freedom | Anne Connelly | TEDxOttawa

[Music] [Music] this is Jean Francois he's a community health worker and one of my colleagues when I was working in Central African Republic we were running a pediatric malnutrition and malaria program in a very remote village one with no electricity no running water and definitely no banks and so at the end of the month when I had to pay John Kaase wah and his 200 other teammates I had to do it in cash the amount of time I spent hand counting stacks of bills was unbelievable and so a couple years later when I learned about Bitcoin I was so excited about the potential this technology was going to have on humanitarian operations to make them much more efficient we would be able to send money from our European offices directly to the cell phones of our staff in the field I was never gonna have to count another bill again but the moment I truly began to appreciate the potential of Bitcoin was when I realized it wasn't about efficiency I want you to think for a moment how do you get enough cash to pay 200 salaries to the middle of Central Africa every day humanitarian field workers carry nap sacks full of money through jungles towns military checkpoints and war zones for me bitcoin was about human lives the lives of the people who put themselves at risk of being robbed or kidnapped all to ensure that people could access the medical care that they needed wherever they needed it tonight I'm changing the narrative around Bitcoin and blockchain technology because it's not really about money it's about freedom the Universal Declaration of Human Rights States recognition of equal and an alien of freedom bitcoin is the world's most popular cryptocurrency with more than 28 million users worldwide you can kind of think about it like digital gold except it's built using cryptography and algorithms that ensure that it can't be manipulated by corrupt governments or people with undue influence Bitcoin gives individuals complete control over their money so you can send it to anyone anywhere in the world without the need to go through a central party like a bank or a money transfer service this is possible because it's built using blockchain technology a blockchain is really just a global record of transactions and there are many different block chains out there but when you look at the most basic one the Bitcoin blockchain it has three key properties to remember first its public which means that any person can verify that a transaction happened as it was supposed to second it's immutable which means that once a transaction has been made it can't be altered and third and most importantly it's decentralized which means it isn't owned or managed by anyone government or corporation asking who owns Bitcoin is kind of like asking who owns English it's owned and managed by all the people who use it every day now a copy of the blockchain is stored on thousands of individual computers all across the globe and this means that if somebody wanted to hack into this record of transactions they would have to do it on at least half of these computers at exactly the same time making a blockchain virtually impossible to hack this means that every transaction every records stored in blockchain is trustworthy without having the need for a government or an organization to provide that trust and so a blockchain is a single source of truth for every person on the plane and as the saying goes when you know the truth the truth will set you free article 23 everyone who works has the right to remuneration ensuring an existence worthy of human dignity in Venezuela right now 9 out of 10 people are living in poverty and it's not because they don't have money it's because their money isn't worth anything anymore the inflation rate has already hit more than forty thousand percent so if you had a million dollars in 2013 and you used it to buy venezuelan bolivar days today you would only have enough left for three dollars and forty cents in fact the average worker in Venezuela making the median wage will only have enough money at the end of their work day to buy 900 calories of the cheapest food available 900 calories they wanted more nutritious food they'd have enough money to buy two eggs two eggs is not an existence worthy of human dignity and their situation is about to get worse the International Monetary Fund expects that the inflation rate will hit more than a million percent by the end of the year now the people of Venezuela know what that's like in 2008 their inflation rate hit more than 86 billion percent people were seen going to the market with wheelbarrows full of cash to buy bread salaries became meaningless schools and hospitals shut down the country was in collapse the people of Venezuela aren't waiting around for that to happen bitcoin sales have exploded because for the first time ever people have the freedom to choose a financial system that isn't run by government a store of value that isn't going to be inflated away by bad monetary policy and the choice to use a currency that can be transported and used anywhere the world and that's exactly where they're taking it more than 10% of the country has already fled this year it's more than 3 million people this is quickly becoming a migration of Syrian proportions article 14 everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum or persecution I want you to imagine that you're living in Syria the fighting in your town is intensifying and you make the very difficult decision to leave your home and everything you've built to take your children and run the journey is long and you arrive with nothing but the clothes on your back to a place like this this is the zoetry refugee camp in Jordan home to more than 80,000 Syrian refugees around the world there are more than 68 million refugees and displaced people living in camps just like this one and they're living there not for days or weeks but for months years and even generations this is often because people lack the basic identity documents they need to get processed into a new home country in fact more than 70% of refugees don't have basic identity documentation leading to a crisis a crisis where millions of eligible people are left in limbo simply because they can't prove who they are and where they came from blockchain enables you as a human being to own your identity instead of being granted one by a government or a corporation instead of having your identity live in a government database or a paper file folder somewhere it's created directly on a blockchain and only you can grant access to that information now granting that access is as easy as putting your fingerprint into a phone or perhaps putting a passphrase into a phone this type of stem is going to enable refugees the freedom to seek asylum and to keep their families safe now many refugees decide to bypass the camps altogether and make the long journey to asylum on foot often with little or no support at all now sometimes 8 organizations will set up medical clinics along well-known migrant routes they're often from very different organizations and so a patient who's going from one to another will find that the clinics are very disconnected and so is the care but by linking a medical record to your decentralized ID means that you can open access to your health information to different doctors along your route ensuring that they're able to provide you with a better continuity of care and subsequently much better health outcomes now IDs and medical records are just the beginning of some of the records that refugees and other people around the world are lacking article 17 everyone has the right to own property in January of 2010 more than 200,000 people were killed in Haiti when an earthquake leveled the country several years later much of the country lay still in ruin not because there wasn't the will or the money to rebuild but many of the government buildings were also destroyed along with the land record titles that were held within them people couldn't rebuild because they couldn't prove that they owned the land that they had lived on major infrastructure projects were delayed or moved to places that had much less need more than 70% of people around the world lack a land title for the land that they rightfully owned and this is a huge issue because essentially it forces people away from some of the most basic tools that provide financial mobility things like small business loans that require collateral in Kenya the issue is different some people are forced off of their land even if they have a title because corrupt government officials will work with the cartels to create a duplicate title ensuring that people can't ever have a guarantee that they own the land that they own India Honduras and Sweden are just three of the countries that are trialing blockchain based systems because the information is stored essentially it can be accessed from anywhere in the world and can't get lost or stolen and most importantly because these records can't be duplicated people can never be kicked off of land that they rightfully own it's going to help them be less susceptible to corruption which is critically important because for most people they don't have the freedom to speak out against corruption without putting their lives at risk article 19 everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression this is Tahrir Square in Cairo Egypt in January 2011 more than 2 million people assembled to protest the actions of their government and President Mubarak they've been accused of human rights abuses corruption and trying to stop freedom of speech now coming to a public square like this is dangerous in this instant more than a thousand people were killed now the Internet has created a digital public square a place where people can voice their opinions about their government with much less risk to their physical safety in fact that protest was started by a number of online youth groups and continued through social media but countries like Turkey and Pakistan have actually tried to stop protests by shutting down social media and this is possible because the messages are sent through centralized servers organized by centralized companies now with blocked change if you had a social media site that looked and felt just the same but the messages were sent across those thousands of computers all over the world the site couldn't be shut down the government could not turn off the voice of its people now Egypt took this one step further and actually shut off the internet and this was possible because many of the on-ramps to the internet are also centralized but blockchain can help with this too as long as one individual has access to a connection possibly through satellite they can send data to and through the people around them kind of like a game of broken telephone but one where the message isn't broken anyone who supports this system by sending messages and data through will get a micro payment of cryptocurrency for their support this is a map of the legal status of Bitcoin around the world and this is a map of the global freedom index it's pretty easy to see the correlation governments that have a lot to lose by providing their citizens with freedom are trying to do anything they can to stop this technology but the good news is that this technology can't be stopped blockchain is going to give the freedom to the people whose governments refuse to allow it so tonight I'm changing the narrative around Bitcoin and blockchain technology but you can be a part of the story I'm asking you to stand in solidarity with people around the world who don't have the same access to freedom as we do here in Canada to participate in a technology that is going to transform the lives of the vast majority of people on our planet and the good news for you is it's as easy as taking out your cell phone downloading an app and buying $1 worth of Bitcoin because the reality is it's not about money or land titles or getting medical care it's about protecting the right to freedom thank you [Music] [Music] you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 68,506

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Technology, Bitcoin, Computers, Democracy, Freedom, Future, Global issues

Id: 0ZmcZiH0F28

Length: 15min 39sec (939 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 18 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/rylanchan]

This woman really kills it with this Tedx talk.
I honestly think this is a great speech to share with everyone, perfect real life examples.

Edited: Still a good talk ;)

[u/Sirius-AB]

Only the future of freedom if it's decentralized, the opposite is the future of slavery.

[u/guywith_noname]

Love TED talks

[u/[deleted]]

Really enjoyed this video Long live Blockchain

[u/StrangerDangerBeware]

She couldn't pay her 3rd world humanitarian aid workers via bank transfer because these people don't even have banks. Instead, she had to pay them in cold hard cash, something that they could luckily spend instantly everywhere.

But she didn't like doing that. Lots of work and getting the money there is also a difficult task. This is a legit problem.

So instead she plans on paying them with BitCoin. She plans on paying people in bitcoin that don't even have bank accounts. Because the shops these people frequent will surely accept bitcoin. So presumably, she is going to give them all the equipment that they need. Phones(?) with chargers, internet and the necessary software. All the shops need the equipment and software to handle bitcoin transactions as well. Schooling on the hardware and software will presumably also be supplied by her.

Absolutely does not sound like a super over-engineered solution for a simple problem.

Can't speak to the rest of the video, the start was so bad that I kind of tuned out.

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[u/receiptcoin]

We always see people talking about the benefits of blockchain, but actually implementing it for things like medical records or proof of ownership is not easy. Many speakers tend to assume these problems have been solved, but most of them have not. Proof of ownership has been solved and has easy to use apps. Medical records however have not been solved because it involves some sort of one time use encryption and then there is the problem of having your identity stolen.