A Global Experiment in Wealth Creation via Connectivity & Blockchain
The Internet is sometimes described as a global brain, a network connecting the thoughts and ideas of humanity. But it falls short in one obvious way: only about half of the world is online.
Consider Luis:
“Luis is a studious young man who was taking a course in systems engineering, but decided to withdraw because it was an online course and he didn’t like this style of presentation. He would rather take the courses face-to-face. At 24 years of age, he is a grown man and as such needs to contribute to the household.
For this reason, he wants to ask for a loan to start an internet cafe business, offering an opportunity to young people of limited means to have access to this global tool. He has pinned his hopes on getting ahead with this business: it will be his chance to pay for tuition to a university. With the loan, he will be able to buy computers and a glass showcase with which he can formally start up his business.
This was the description that led me to lend a small amount to Luis Carlos with a Kiva loan back in 2014. It reads like many of the other projects that I choose to support: entrepreneurs, needing a help up, involving connectivity, from an emerging market.
I have been a big supporter of Kiva over the years; however, I think there is an even better way to change life outcomes. You see, I have been researching the economic and technological obstacles to connectivity for many years, really since we first established an office for Left out in Bangladesh back in 2010.
Over the past few years as we started work on our mesh connectivity platform (RightMesh.io), I reached the following conclusion: we can expand the Internet to being a truly global brain while transforming entire economies — all without spending a dime, without international aid, without philanthropy, and without wealth redistribution.
Sound impossible? Maybe. But I think historians are going to look back on these next few years and say, this was the tipping point. This is the period when we networked humanity.
Before we get into the heart of this theory and away from some of the hyperbole, we need to get a grasp of the facts. What is the situation in the here and now? Here are the key numbers:
- Four billion users in the world lack connectivity. Half of them are in just five countries.[i]
- There will be 6 billion smart phones on the planet by the year 2020.[ii]
- Connecting everyone to the Internet ‘would add $6.7 trillion to the global economy and raise 500 million people out of poverty (PwC)
- For 66% of the world, a 500MB data plan costs more than 5% of their monthly income (PwC)
- 94% of people in developing countries live within range of a mobile data signal (Facebook’s 2017 State of Connectivity Report)
- Affordability is the biggest barrier to connectivity (McKinsey)
With these numbers fresh in your mind, consider this:
Digitization of Everything
The smartphone is the world’s most important digitization device. It has a near-magical ability to transform the physical into digital, into a collection of 1s and 0s that can communicate any concept. A phone can create a 3D model of a physical object and send it at light-speed across borders, to any corner of the globe, where it can be printed.
Any data, once digitized, can be stored and recreated in perpetuity. This is true of music, art, books, film, and more. And with technical advancements of virtual and augmented reality, that object doesn’t even need to be physically produced to ‘place’ it in your environment.
The acceleration of sensor technology is allowing us to upload the physical environment around the device and turn it into a digital form, further erasing the line between digital and physical.
And once you have digitization, then you get connectivity.
Mesh Connectivity — A World Connected
At RightMesh, we are betting we can help the world connect: first to each other, and then to the world itself. Today, connectivity is costly because of the infrastructure required to service the ever-denser urban environments and the ever-increasing data demands of the devices themselves. This digitization of everything is putting so much strain on the infrastructure that it cannot keep up.
Uber made personal limousine services much cheaper by launching under-utilized hardware (cars) onto the market. RightMesh is going to do the same for smartphones and other devices. There is so much under-utilized capacity on a device — connectivity, storage, processing power, sensor data — that this hardware, these soon-to-be 6 billion smartphones and 20 billion IoT devices, can dramatically impact the market economics.
We believe if someone has a smartphone, they have all the infrastructure they need to be connected for free, or at least at a lower cost than the value created by being connected. In the ultimate physical analysis, an Internet connection is just a wave travelling to a receiver. Nothing is required but a device capable of producing and receiving a signal, an almost negligible amount of energy, and the right incentive. The first two of these requirements has been filled in dense urban environments by the proliferation of the modern smartphone. RightMesh provides the missing piece of the puzzle: an incentive for people to transmit Internet and share their device’s resources.
But connectivity is nothing without trust.
Creating, Storing, and Transferring Capital
The world wide web allowed information to be digitized, democratized, and shared freely. The blockchain, being the first viable form of digital money, is doing that for capital. As Don Tapscott put it: “the genie is out of the bottle.”[iii]
Economic value can now be created, digitized, and shared as easily as cat memes.
Capital is one giant, fungible, transferable pool of dollars, cents, pounds, yen, and gold. Digitizing it to make it global and programmable was tricky (the 1990s saw some failed attempts like e-gold and DigiCash), but it wasn’t until the dawn of the blockchain and someone (or some people) managed to pull it off and change the financial world forever. Now, crypto-currencies — from Bitcoin, to Ethereum, to the thousands of alternative tokens that can be created with a simple fork of some code — ensure value can be secured, trusted, and traded efficiently without middlemen.
This brings me to where we are today.
I believe we sit at the intersection of a Venn diagram of connectivity, digitization, and capital creation. Because of this, we have created an unstoppable dynamo that will transform the very fabric of society.
Imagine a person with a smartphone. That phone is broadcasting and receiving signals as they move around in their daily life. In their travels, a few things happen:
- They pass by an IoT sensor that is collecting information on behalf of an NGO studying climate change. This information is passed securely (autonomously) to their device. The person returns to a connectivity zone, and their phone relays the message to someone else, then someone else, then into the cloud, where the NGO receives it. The initial collector is paid (autonomously) for their role in delivering the data. (Estimated earning: $0.50 USD)
- While walking around, their smartphone communicates with that of a peer, and the phones conclude that one has an out-of-date app. (Maybe a security hole in an email app has been patched, or a game has added a monetization feature.) Phone A updates Phone B with the new version. In exchange for delivering the update, the app creator compensates the distributor. (Estimated earning: $0.25 USD per app update)[iv]
- While connected to their home WiFi network, a passerby a hundred meters away requests connectivity. The user has pre-set their WiFi router to sell excess capacity. The passerby gets connectivity, negotiated autonomously, through several intermediary nodes. The seller is compensated for sharing their data. (Estimated earning: $0.50 USD per 100MB)
- A neighbour receives a new phone and, in the process of becoming a first-time smartphone user, asks for app recommendations. Our user makes apps stored on their own device available for the new user to download. The app publisher compensates the distributor $0.50 per app they recommend and their neighbour installs.
- Throughout the day, their smartphone is used (all autonomously) to store cached content and media for easy dissemination: news, videos, ads, and so on. In exchange for giving up battery, processing, sensor, or connectivity resources, the user earns another $0.25.
And I could go on. It is reasonable to see how a user could earn several dollars per day simply by going along their daily path. And we haven’t even begun to explore about the active contribution of work: selling thoughts and digital output. We have only looked at passive elements here.
When The Jetsons first appeared on TV back in the Sixties, people predicted that the first robots to have an impact on everyday life would come in humanoid form (like Rosie the maid). A lot has been written about autonomous vehicles and a future where your car, which is idle 95% of the time, is put to work ferrying people to and from as a robotic Uber driver in its downtime.[v]
We have often joked in the office about creating an army of personal drones that are equipped with transmitters that we would dispatch with some algorithms and the instructions, “Go make us money delivering connectivity where it is needed.”
What is happening here, we believe, is an exchange of value: the buyer needs a valuable service and pays a fair price for it being provided autonomously, while the seller sets the price that they deem appropriate.
Going back to the sensor example, imagine that there is an environmental data sensor on a remote mountain top, and the only way to get there is a multi-day, treacherous expedition to its summit… what would the value of that data be? The answer is: it is worth whatever the person who goes to retrieve the data and the person who wants the data agree on — maybe $100, maybe $200, maybe more, maybe less.
This autonomous work is creating new value. It is not replacing dollars being spent elsewhere. New capital is being manufactured out of that thin mountain air to deliver value to all participants. Once this value is created, thanks to digitization and connectivity, it can be shared instantaneously — regardless of physical borders.
The above are all examples of passive work, but what about active work? What about the bilingual user who, for a few dollars, will translate a document into their native language? There are entire marketplaces that already exist for tasks and jobs like this. Millions of sellers are willing to provide services to the world in exchange for fair compensation. This is the digitization of work, as the output can be delivered electronically to anywhere in the world.
The implications are huge. No longer is work being done down the street, in the same town, or even in the same country. Work can be done wherever a person with a smartphone exists, so long as they have connectivity.
If a person can earn a mere $1 per day from autonomous mobile work, imagine the impact that this would have on their livelihood? This is an easy exercise in practice. In a paper published in The Economic Journal, E. Glen Weyl concluded that giving one dollar to a truly poor individual is worth the same as giving about $66 to the average American.[vi]
Every day.
And as GiveDirectly has noted, “If you’d earn $60,000 after tax salary and donated $30,000 and thus forgo the doubling of your wellbeing, you could effectively double the well-being of over 300 people in Madagascar ($30,000/$383 * 4 (adjusting for PPP).”[vii]
If giving one dollar has this impact, does that mean that generating $1 worth of new capital that is spendable by the recipient have the same impact? I hypothesize that it might. But the cost of this experiment is the best part. Through digitization, connectivity, and capital creation (as protected by cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies) — there is zero cost to try it and see.
So, what do you think? Can we lift the world out of poverty by providing connectivity to existing smartphones + blockchain-backed value creation? We think it is an experiment worth trying.
Let me know in the comments or reach out at john [at] rightmesh [.] io
[i] Source: http://bit.ly/1T68UJQ
[ii] Source: http://bit.ly/2jKEZbG
[iii] Source: http://bit.ly/2bTqEWt
[iv] The average cost per install via Google Play (Android) for Asian app users is $0.74/install and is increasing YoY. BusinessOfApps, How Much Does it Cost to Get an App Install?, April 2016, (Source: http://bit.ly/2tL7CuV)
[v] Source: http://bit.ly/2w5jtDt
[vi] Source: http://bit.ly/2ez3jvP
[vii] Source: http://bit.ly/2wEqmis
