Blockchain is Freedom | Chris Miess | TEDxInnsbruck

september 1945 the end of the second world war soviet dictator joseph stalin appointed georgio desh as the head of the communist party of one of his vessel states he was later usurped by dictator josh esco these dictators committed horrible crimes to humankind they put people in jail for no reason they tortured and killed thousands of people from some families they took away everything they had and they ousted these families from the country one of these families was mine my great grandmother and my great grandfather by this time you probably think you're in the wrong talk what does all of this have to do with blockchain because blockchain is that thing about crypto and bitcoin isn't it yes it is but that's not all of it and that's why i'm here today i want to show you another site about blockchain that usually we don't consider so much because blockchain could have avoided and prevented some of the hardship and suffering that my family had to endure during that dictatorship in one sweep the dictator took away everything that my family had been building for decades and generations the communist party by force took away the factory they owned and where they employed a lot of workers and the house where they had been raised from one day to the next the dictator declared that this land shall now belong to him and his cronies and not to us anymore and he could do that because he had absolute control over the centralized land registry in that country so his will was the law and this is where blockchain comes in a blockchain is a public and decentralized database a ledger and with that decentralization in mind we could have decentralized and distributed the land registry to many computers all over the country and even the world so no single malign actor or party could have manipulated that system anymore and that is why to me blockchain is such a strong tool of democracy so if people ask me blockchain that's about crypto and bitcoin to me blockchain is about freedom this is moria a huge refugee camp on the greek island of lesbos where thousands of refugees are being kept in inhumane conditions doctors without borders even called it the worst refugee camp on earth the problem is that as a refugee you can't really escape from these camps if you cannot prove your identity and how do you prove that you are who you are without a passport and so many times these refugees have been taken away their passports by the very regimes they fled from or by the traffickers they trusted imagine if we had a digital a decentralized identity based on our biometric data that nobody can take away from us no regime no dictator no trafficker this is again where blockchain can help us with blockchain we can create this and this is again why for me blockchain is about freedom a few years ago i lived in singapore to found my first startup when i first moved there i got invited to the house of a friend over for dinner and in the course of the evening i noticed a small side room just off the main living room what i thought was a small storage cabinet was in reality the room would have made the housekeeper lived and slept a tiny room without windows her name was maria and she was an immigrant worker from the philippines she had moved to singapore to earn some money to support her family back home in the philippines whenever maria wanted to send her money to her family she had to go through various intermediaries each and every one of them such as banks money agencies and so on each and every one of them taking a cut of her hard-earned money so in the end once the money arrived with her family days sometimes weeks later only a fraction of what maria had sent would actually arrive the whole situation is aggravated by the fact that in many rural countries and many rural developing countries people don't even have access to basic financial infrastructure what i mean is they don't even have a bank account so how to even send them money again this is where blockchain comes in with blockchain maria can send directly from her cell phone in singapore to her son's cell phone in the philippines the hard-earned money directly instantly and at quasi-zero cost that way maria can spend more time with her family and has to look has has to work less again blockchain is about freedom now you might say well that's all nice but the philippines are far away and so is singapore how does that concern us we're in a safe place like austria and indeed we were lucky that we were born here in a prosperous and cozy country where we have access to clean water to food to a pension system to social security to bank bank accounts and so on but we have to realize that not everybody was born that lucky and that we are not the norm we are rather the exception not them and that is why we have a moral obligation to help them this looks a bit like a note from the board game monopoly but it's actually the currency of venezuela in this case in the denomination of 500 million bolivar the problem with with this bill is that you can barely buy a loaf of bread with it this is the product of the country's hyperinflation that has been there for years and it's been it's become so bad that if you go to work in the morning the money you earn by the time you get home on the same day that money will be worthless what has happened here again a central party has abused its power somebody printed money flooded the market with money created hyperinflation and by that created poverty and devastation in the country so that many people had to leave the country for economic reasons again blockchain could help us blockchain could decentralize away the power from one single central institution in this case the corrupt central bank that printed the money and distributed it back to the people with blockchain code is law that means whatever has been written in that code if we had written that every year there's only two percent inflation max then that is exactly what will happen again blockchain is freedom the other day i spoke to a friend of mine about organizing a kite surfing trip because we're both passionate kite surfers it was much to my surprise that in the following days i was inundated by advertisements about kite surfing on all kinds of different platforms on facebook on instagram on amazon on google everywhere it seemed that some someone was listening in on our conversations and then i realized data we produce is no longer ours the things we say the things we write the websites we use the things we like all of that now belongs to the big tech corporations they own our data and they own us we have become the product what if there was a way to re-appropriate the ownership of that data how can we get that data back again blockchain can help us with blockchain we take that control we eliminate the intermediary in this case the big tech companies and give ourselves control over our data again then we can decide who we share our data with and what we want to do with it again blockchain is about freedom many times people ask me why i decided to move into the blockchain industry and indeed since 2014 that is a when i first came across the subject since then i've been fascinated by it and sometime later i decided to leave my well-paying job in investment banking to pursue my passion full-time it was the first time i really experienced purpose and that is my advice to you always follow purpose don't be tempted by short-term financial gain don't let them lure you don't let them buy you also don't be that guy instead follow your passion and that doesn't have to be blockchain it could be any field and i'm sure you will find that field for you eventually but until then if somebody asks you oh blockchain that's about crypto and bitcoin right tell them no blockchain is freedom thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 19,478

Keywords: Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, English, Freedom, Human Rights, TEDxTalks, Technology

Id: 7ctdLdX6WCQ

Length: 10min 29sec (629 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 09 2021