Jeff Bandman on the Social Implications of Blockchain

Frederik Bussler
Nov 1 · 3 min read

From October 30th to November 1st, hundreds of blockchain professionals from industry and academia are joining forces in Athens, Greece at Decentralized 2019 to engage in workshops, talks, and networking. One prominent keynote speaker was Jeffrey Bandman, who spoke on Social Implications of Blockchain, representing Bandman Advisors.

In his talk, he discusses the problems we’re facing today, and moves towards blockchain as a potential solution:

“What is the problem today? We live in a society where there’s much prosperity, and trust gets broken. Even though technology was a tool that in some ways brought us together, it is now tearing us apart. It’s used by autocratic governments to collect all this data.

Are we moving towards a dystopian society where people are numbed by their phones and Netflix? In 2008, when the original bitcoin white paper was written, the mistrust was on big banks, but now the mistrust is on big tech.”

Rhetorically, Bandman asks:

“Can blockchain solve some of these problems? What does blockchain enable to help us live in a better world?”

Blockchain is such a wide technology, that, well, there’s a wide array of potential solutions:

“Blockchain can enable self-sovereign identity and let us control our own data. With things like Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, where data being harvested — that was built into the design.

Blockchain brings great control and greater freedom. In the birthplace of Athenian democracy, we’re in the right place to talk about these things.

There are many areas of application. In terms of supply chain and human trafficking, there are 10s of millions of people around the world in slavery. There are more slaves today than in 1860, whether it’s sex slavery, forced marriage slavery, or other kinds.

In blockchain, you can have traceability to see if products were produced by slave workers or free workers, for example in the fish industry or diamond industry.”

A running theme to these applications is inclusion. With an open, transparent, and more efficient mode of value exchange, more people can be brought into the fold:

“Blockchain is already helping in financial inclusion. With digital identities, you can designate awards directly to people and remove middlemen from government benefits distribution.

There’s a great ability of blockchain to increase people’s inclusion and freedom.

When Libra was rolled out, their goals were commercial, but it was cloaked in financial inclusion. There actually is an agreement that the unbanked can be helped by blockchain via identity and actual currencies. Is Facebook the right actor to do it? The reaction is highly skeptical.

Libra talked about how a few people dropped out, but still 2700 firms want to join.”

Clearly, inclusion is a huge case, and a number of other players are working on it out of the spotlight:

“AidCoin is tracking charity donations, so actually following the coin on a ledger. BitLand is working on the democratization of real property ownership and property registration. ID2020 is working on digital identities. ScanTrust is building greater traceability. FoodShed is working on food traceability.”

In closing, Bandman says this:

“I’m very optimistic, blockchain is still young, I’m hopeful it’ll create a better society for all of us.”

Democratizing AI.

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