Blockchain: The Good, The Bad and How to tell The Difference | Julia Evelyn Larsen | TEDxOdenseWomen

[Music] there's a TED talk I watched the 15 very concise minutes about how one little word can potentially influence our economy our politics and ultimately our entire social systems and that little word was blockchain and I was hooked technology and politics used to be very separate domains but that is clearly no longer the case the line between where blockchain ends and society begins is comparable to if someone had created an app which could make music and it was later discovered that the same app if used differently has the potential for communication with aliens the beauty of new technology and why I'm so fascinated by it is that anyone can make something happen create and launch it without needing permission from some higher power or needing any fancy tools or spaces to work in in the case of blockchain this someone was an anonymous cryptographer who in 2008 sent the code of Bitcoin to a friend launching the first ever peer-to-peer economically logical self-sustainable an open forum of digital cache the foundations of blockchain the definition of blockchain Marianne Webster defines blockchain as a digital database containing information such as transactions financial transactions that can be simultaneously used and shared with a large decentralized publicly accessible network this does not mean that the centralized is that each piece of information is split into smaller pieces and shared fall over but rather that a copy of everything that happens is shared with everyone on the network this allows for things to not only be extremely transparent but also really safe and secure and it's through this combination of safety and transparency that blockchain allows for the elimination of the middlemen banks courts or any of the institutions that we rely on for handling lack of trust we have when dealing with strangers but it wasn't actually until 2014 that the underlying technology of Bitcoin blockchain was discovered and this mainly by the banks since then a broad range of industries have dipped their toes from storing music and pictures to on a blockchain to decentralized energy grids but so far not a lot is known on a more general level about the technology and why should we want to know about it well beyond it being a story of fascinating development it's also the story of how new technology gets hyped and what that hype brings with it both good and bad that is currently blockchain is still thought of as an infrastructure challenging the entire way that operations are run which requires both the technology providers and the people using the technology to be able to understand if it has any potential benefits to be able to know if it's worth it the Gartner hype cycle is a graph that shows the trajectory of most emergent technologies on a hype Avenue and it looks like this you have hype and you have time and then you have a curve that goes like this and blockchain is somewhere around here at the moment just emerging from the peak of the hype meaning it's being looked at with more critical eyes blockchain as any new technology has undergone several stages of attention from anarchists believing it to rattle the financial sector to associations with criminal activity and in roughly the past four years it has gained buzzword status when it comes to solving all of our problems but despite this hype a current lack of scalability and the complex nature of the technology obscures understandings for organizations which could truly benefit from adoption the actual benefits get drowned in a pool of fragmented opinion blockchain is in dire need of a review and that's exactly what I set out to do when I started researching for my master's thesis in early 2019 I I have quite literally been able to read through all the most relevant research and information on a topic of blockchain for social good since the conception of Bitcoin which was in 2008 I was inspired to take a more critical stance from its use in humanitarian aid and I wanted to look into how to best implement the technology for social impact work but looking into best practice I realized that there was no framework there was no road map for how to best use the technology by far the most existent examples came from the realm of for-profit business and within that by far word from the most or from the financial sector one case of non-financial implementation with high social impact is land ownership land right registration here it might not be useful to talk about blockchain or no blockchain but rather which level of blockchain integration a system has a case I also used for my own research where the Land Registry efforts in Ghana in Ghana as many countries riddled with corruption it can be hard to prove ownership of land which means the people sometimes have to do things like this people literally run the risk of someone else putting their house up for sale because these others have bribed authorities to say that it's now there's an American Ghanaian initiative started a collaboration with the state of Ghana and related banks to put land right land transactions on a blockchain the land or house is geometrically recorded and attached to a unique serial number the real estate transactions happen on a closed network of known computers but the processing happens on a public blockchain network allowing anyone to verify it sensitive information remains encrypted but access can be granted for legal purposes this then lays the foundations for lawful negotiation in court the land / home owner receives a passcode proving their ownership and this without knowing that it's happening through blockchain whatsoever on a blockchain complexity scale if we have 10 here and 0 here it's somewhere around here not very complex all successful blockchain projects are unnoticed this is a case where blockchain can do really good social impacts but unfortunately single cases are not enough we need a framework in order for to demonstrate the effect of blockchain for an NGO NPO or the like they need to have some sort of framework to follow and I had been in the space for more than two years when I started researching for my master's thesis and I had heard the technology we described in so many different ways that I had lost track of what it could really do so what I decided to do was to use a framework called pestle commonly used in business to assess the potential success of a new product or service in order to assess the landscape around a technology this way I was quieting the loud voices in the blockchain space in order to see what the rest of the world had to say it gave me a 360-degree view of the current situation and allowed me to look at things from a more broader perspective rather than just the classic financial economic perspective and here are some things that I found I found that the mantra more decentralisation is better completely neglects the facet of governance the more decentralized units you have the more autonomous each becomes and the more governance each actually needs something which can be really difficult to tackle for an NGO which often lacks the technical know-how to set up and upkeep a new global IT infrastructure something else that I found was that most of these projects were actually private and permissioned meaning their close network of interaction much like a usual data this is not exactly very decentralized and it also says a lot about the maturity of the technology that NGOs NPOs and the like are not too happy putting their data onto systems that they can't oversee it also says something about how the technology is developing as per blockchain most of the monetary value is stored in the protocol layer and not in the application which is kind of the opposite of how the internet works where most of the monetary value is stored in the application this means that for blockchain most of investment has been flowing into creating more foundational systems rather than user centric apps and what good is a technology if it's not widely used on a topic of overcrowding with new foundational systems I entered the field exactly during the boom of cryptocurrencies as you might remember when people discovered that they can do their own crowdfunding for doing their own coins and own closed systems for using these coins back in 2017 there were 1300 coins on a coin market cap of which only 300 have survived this says a lot about the thought that people put into making these coins and the consequences of which time seems to be the only judge the conversation around blockchain followed a similar trajectory to cryptocurrencies as banks started hyping the technology back in 2014 and then it became a story of pure fear of missing out and here's that fear of missing out as I've experienced it normal solution finding Prosis goes what's the problem what kind of solution is needed what tools should we use FOMA solution panic process goes we want to do something with blockchain what can we do with blockchain here's a problem that seems like we can apply function to it yeah beyond the fact that the technologies they're not spreading into the normal masses this overflow of new systems has also led to that the applications that do are created cannot communicate with each other this technology that was created in the spirit of accessibility to all is now been appropriated by big banks big tech and big business and in that process inclusion has slowly been swept aside while we weren't looking or perhaps well we were just trying to sound hip using all the blockchain buzzwords instead of asking people to come and collaborate who are busy sounding hip and we're creating this closed-in crowd this exclusive tech caste system that we really want to be in on because we're so aware of the danger of being on the outside of this particular story isn't it however more damaging to keep everyone else out it's because of this last point that my co-founders and I founded crypto women Copenhagen we saw twofold problem he was a field with huge potential and too few women and it was hard to navigate the field for anyone without being too political about it we wanted to create a space where women who were curious could come forward ask questions learn and engage with blockchain and the mix was great both in terms of age educational background and level of understanding our job was to include and communicate I have a friend who teaches programming and she always says the best way to learn is the best way to become skillful is to teach and damn that I learn a lot we advised masters theses journalists and even the United Nations the fact that all three of us founders came from social science backgrounds helped us maintain a more critical perspective and it seemed like the more humanistic sectors such as academia journalism and the humanitarian had been needing it in his book 21 lessons for the 21st century author Laval Noah Harari says philosophers are very patient people but engineers are far less patient and investors are the least patient of all this idea is stuck with me because I've been on a journey from the end of social science into the startup world into business school and into the tech space and on my journey I have experience the radically different ways in which these worlds sink relate to money make decisions and approach human values I experienced the speeding up of decision making and the narrowing of contemplation at first it felt liberating and energizing but after a while it had me questioned my values in the process for me entering the blockchain space was a way to express my values again as a space the newness of the space made it open to critique my story of working with blockchain takes place at the convergence of a wish to help technical curiosity and a business mindset it's also the story of how new technology teaches us to look at old problems with new eyes or even things that we didn't believe to be problems in first place like for example how inclusive tech culture really is after all the whole idea of blockchain was not only to decentralize but also to democratize technology and as it is right now only very few organizations use it in a way that is true to its initial purpose so who is responsible for fostering technological inclusion well it's hard to say as this field unlike how the internet was developed by a few people in one place is developing at such a speed and in so many different places at once that it's hard to create a framework around it but the first thing we can do is step up and that goes for all of us so here's what we can do number one question it look at what part of operations a company or organization is using blockchain for and let that guide you to whether or not it's a good project are they using it to truly become more transparent in that they're showing parts of themselves to the outside world or other organizations or are they more using it as a gimmick to make customers and stakeholders believe that they're being innovative then question it again number two if the words trust transparency immutability decentralization are to mean anything one question to ask is whether blockchain is truly better than other systems available when it comes to trust transparency mutability and decentralisation finally question it again if you work with blockchain in any way contribute to true open source and contribute your skills and your enthusiasm to organizations which try to promote actual adoption of the technology and not just another cool techie solution again what good is a technology without its users if you work in big tech don't spend all your time promoting your own company but leave some energy for the rest of the ecosystem too and invite as many as diverse people in techies and non-techies alike generally speaking instead of trying to understand how blockchain works what is more important for an inclusive culture is that we look into who's using the technology and for what purpose after all most people don't really care how a car engine works they just want to drive right so ultimately the story of blockchain is the story of all new technology it teaches us to look at things anew and the future of blockchain for social impacts will depend on how inclusive the culture will become it's an evolution not a revolution and I invite you all to explore it thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 40,431

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Technology, Community, Nonprofit, Social Change

Id: 0HppDzMemjE

Length: 17min 36sec (1056 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 07 2020