Mary C. Lacity - Blockchain Foundations

Blockchain: An idea that has become a necessity

This is one of those rare turning points in history and Mary Lacitys enormously helpful and instructive book Blockchain Foundations for the Internet of Value is a timely one. The COVID-19 pandemic will profoundly change our behavior and society. Many institutions will come under scrutiny and, we hope, change for the better.

At the Blockchain Research Institute, were doing our part to facilitate positive change. Technologies like artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, augmented/virtual reality, and above all, blockchain, are more relevant than evernot just to business and the economy but to the future of public health and the safety of global populations. Traditional systems have failed us and its time for a new paradigm. To build on Victor Hugo, Nothing is more powerful than an idea that has become a necessity. To avoid and manage pandemics the world needs the Internet of Value. Its time for a new paradigm.

In Blockchain Revolution, Alex Tapscott and l argued this Internet of Value represents a second era of the Internet. The first era was defined by informationthe Internet of Information, a peer-to-peer mechanism for communicating information and collaborating online. While it has enabled companies to interact directly with consumers, take orders online, and deliver digital goods, services, and experiences, it has not fundamentally changed how we do business. Companies and markets are still vertically or horizontally integrated hierarchies, relatively opaque and insular, and relatively slow to change. We can say the same of public institutions.

With the Internet of Information, we have to rely on powerful intermediaries to exchange things of value. Governments, banks, digital platforms such as Amazon, eBay, and AirBnB, and universities do the work of establishing our identity, vouching for our trustworthiness, and helping us to acquire and transfer assets and settle the transactions.

Overall, they do a pretty good jobbut there are limitations. They use centralized servers, which can be hacked. They take a piece of the value for performing this servicesay 10 percent to send some money internationally. They capture our data, not just preventing us from using it for our own benefit but often undermining our privacy. These intermediaries are sometimes unreliable and often slow. They exclude two billion people who dont have enough money to justify a bank account, let alone an education. Most problematic, they are capturing the benefits of the digital age asymmetrically.

We posed the question: What if there was an Internet of valuea global, distributed, highly secure platform, ledger, or database where we could store and exchange things of value and trust each other without powerful intermediaries? That is the blockchain. Collective self-interest, hard-coded into this new native digital medium for value, would ensure the safety, security, and reliability of our exchanges online. Trust is programmed into the technology, which is why we call blockchain the Trust Protocol.

Combine AI and Machine Learning with blockchain and this represents the second era of the digital age. Every institution will change profoundly. How about the corporation, a pillar of modern capitalism? With the rise of a global peer-to-peer platform for identity, trust, reputation and transactions, we will be able to re-engineer deep structures of the firm, for innovation and shared value creation. Were talking about building 21st century companies that look more like networks rather than the vertically integrated hierarchies of the industrial age. The whole financial service industry is already being reinvented by blockchain and others will soon follow. How well does todays university prepare students for such a future?

How about the Internet of Things? In the not-too-distant future, billions of smart thingsin the physical world will be sensing; responding; communicating; sharing important data; generating, buying and selling their own electricity; and doing everything from protecting our environment to managing our health. It turns out, this Internet of Everything needs a Ledger of Everything.

One of the biggest opportunities is to free us from the grip of a troubling prosperity paradox. The economy is growing but fewer people are benefiting. Rather than trying to solve the problem of growing social inequality through redistribution alone, we can change how wealthand opportunityis predistributed in the first place, as people everywhere, from farmers to musicians, can use this technology to share more fully in the wealth they create.

Blockchain and Pandemics

Given the urgent need for global solutions to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Blockchain Research Institute convened a virtual roundtable of 30 experts from five continents. We discussed the challenges of COVID-19 and the possibilities of using blockchain in areas of need. In our special report, Blockchain Solutions in Pandemics, we developed a framework for facing pandemics together in these five areas.

1. Self-sovereign identity, health records, and shared data

Data is the most important asset in fighting pandemics. If any useful data exists now, it sits in institutional silos. We need better access to the data of entire populations and a speedy consent-based data sharing system. To accelerate discovery, the blockchain start-up, Shivom, is working on a global project to collect and share virus host data in response to a call for action from the European Unions Innovative Medicines Initiative. In Honduras, Civitasan app developed by the start-up Emergeis linking Hondurans' government-issued ID numbers with blockchain records used to track medical appointments. Doctors simply scan the app to review a patient's symptoms verified and recorded by telemedicine services. And Dr. Raphael Yahalom of MIT and Oxford-Hainan Research Institute is working on Trustup, a trust-reasoning framework that cansystematically highlight the ways in which health data recorded on a blockchain ledger is more trustworthy than data stored in conventional databases. The trade-off between privacy and public safety need not be so stark. Through self-sovereign identities where individuals own their health records and can freely volunteer it to researchers, we can achieve both.