Riding Donkey in the Land of Fire
In times when people start to look at blockchain with undisguised contempt, a group of projects went to Latin America to spread practical knowledge about this technology. I followed them with my camera to find out that where people are struggling with specific problems, the hopes associated with distributed ledger are the last to die.
When you make a movie, especially a documentary, you definitely have some overstated expectations about the reality surrounding you. Everything suddenly becomes a symbol and you’d like to squeeze it like a lime to the last drop of juice in search of inspiration. And so the ordinary lamp becomes a symbol of enlightenment, the street you cross becomes a symbol of the way you have to travel in your life, the tree is a symbol of family ties, and so on… — you exaggerate out of necessity: if you do not want this film to become too wordy, you will need to use symbols to speak for themselves.
CONTEMPORARY WINDMILLS
Perhaps it is thanks to this sensitizing attitude that once in a while you get blessed with a symbol that even the least sensitive person would notice and recognize as use-worthy. I found it in a small park in front of a hotel in Guarulhos, on the outskirts of São Paulo, where the whole blockchain tour started. Standing there are almost a dozen of metal sculptures welded by the local artist Gilmar Pinna. They seem to be taken out straight from the most famous novel of Cervantes, “Don Quixote”. It became obvious that if I want to conduct an interview with the organizer of Blockchain On Tour — Latin America (or BoT LatAm) I will not find a better environment than a group of erroneous knights and their squires, mounting their steeds and donkeys to defend the weakest against evil of this world. Evil created solely in their imagination, one would add. And even if we both subconsciously felt that the symbolism of this place is a bit too far-fetched, it was also too difficult to resist the temptation. Why not start with the most obvious question in that circumstances?! Does he feel like a modern Don Quixote and if he does — what are the threats he wishes to charge at, what are his contemporary wind mills? “I can clearly see threats that people in developed countries tend not to notice or undermine” — he replies, and only by saying that he naturally slips in between pages of the Spanish writer’s novel.
Bernd Lapp, Business Hive Lead at Swarm City and the originator of BoT LatAm agrees that what he does with rest of the projects that accompany him on the tour is pretty much about tilting at some very dangerous giants. And the closer you get to places like Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Columbia or Mexico the more realistic they become. There are three giants — to be specific — and in Lapp’s opinion each one of them makes Latin America a fertile ground for blockchain: badly functioning currencies, oppression and corruption and finally stifling of entrepreneurship.
OPEN ARMS
The whole tour meant to be a beginner’s guide into what blockchain can do for people, that’s why Lapp wanted to do everything to avoid talking about technological details and focus more on the practical applications of dapps. He’s chosen projects that are not ‘a white paper promise’ anymore. “They had to have working products so people could actually use them. All of them should also help to promote and provide three topics I wanted to cover for people in Latin America: how do I get cryptocurrencies, how do I use them and how do I fund or insure my own business in the cryptospace” — he lists. Interaction with these products should help understand the potential inherent in blockchain. And so, such projects as Dether, Appics, Status, Etherisc and Giveth have joined Swarm City on the mission of spreading the practical knowledge. They all formed BoT LatAm. Bernd quickly considers it appropriate to return to the symbolism surrounding us. “It’s not that we’re all proudly galloping towards a bright future on beautiful horses. I think that for now this technology is in such early stages, so inscalable, so slow, that it would be safe to compare us to Sancho Pansa who is trying to catch up on his donkey”. But regardless of whether they ride full-blooded steeds or not, riders are apparently expected here with open arms.
Raul León, an economist and a host for the BoT meet-up in St. Miguel de Allende in Mexico can already think of use cases for each of the tour’s project in his town. “The magic of Swarm City is the infrastructure it provides for people from all walks of life to start a community based commerce. When it comes to onboarding people to buy cryptocurrencies Dether is a very practical way — the fact that you have mobile units exchanging fiat to crypto makes it all much easier and closer to people. Appics — it is incredible what you can do with it in social media. It is actually inverting the pyramid of how money can be allocated or distributed to different people only by interacting in social media, through producing content and receiving crypto for likes. With Etherisc you can insure small farmers. People can take advantage of smaller fees and for the first time in their life be able to pay for insurance. Imagine how important this is on a continent torn by natural disasters. Status — whenever you exchange comments or interact with this platform you know it’s safe because it’s decentralized, so you’re not manipulated by a central authority. And finally — Giveth, I really fell in love with that concept of how we can direct help for people who are in need. All of these use cases are game changers here in St. Miguel de Allende and the rest of Latin America” — he says. For him everything starts with education. “If we don’t educate folks that this is something real, something they can use today, and it is actually to their benefit, it is not going to get anywhere” — claims León. “People who are using blockchain are very technological, educated in a tech world.” In his opinion, the whole crypto space must learn how to transfer this knowledge to masses and that’s where BoT LatAm proofs its usefulness.
LACK OF TRUST
But there are great examples of local influencers all around Latin America who are already doing just that on their local scale. One of them is Gustavo Figueroa, BoT Latam’s host in São Paulo. His knowledge of the situation in Brazil does not come only from studying textbooks and keeping track of current statistics. He infiltrates the society from the side to which many would be afraid to even approach. Together with his project Social Blocks, Gustavo enters the favelas to find talented youth and teach them coding in a blockchain-environment programming languages. “We want to transfer this knowledge and make it accessible for underprivileged, for the unbanked, for people who are below the line of poverty. To enable them to sell their coding services abroad. We have three million potential students in Brazil so there is still a long journey ahead of us, but it’s worth entering it for sure”.
The journey for BoT LatAm projects started in a market place in an older part of São Paulo. Gustavo took the group there because he knew that for one particular reason this place is like a laboratory drop for rest of Brazil and Latin America. “This is an informal market. You can pay with cash over here” — he says. “Half of Brazil’s over 200 million population and almost all of the people you can see here are unbanked. They are out of the compliance system, so they don’t have access to bank accounts, credit or debit cards, it’s not possible for them to just come to regular market and buy something with their cards”. Figueroa thinks that if you could pay with crypto it would give more people a chance to buy things; “you could make a bigger purchase in instalments with, say, a credit card based in crypto assets” — he specifies. But it’s not only finances. It is a fertile ground for blockchain also because of one of its basic properties — transparency. “When you have a distributed technology enabling everybody to start trusting each other then a lot of things can happen much easier. Many deals don’t happen in Brazil because of lack of trust. And you always have to put an intermediary who takes a big part of the transaction. Blockchain seems to a be necessary tool to avoid that”.
INSPIRING HARD CORE PEOPLE
BoT LatAm’s intention was to pass that message in five cities visited on their over-a-week-long tour. Besides São Paulo and St. Miguel de Allende it was Lima in Peru, Guayaquil in Ecuador and Barranquilla in Colombia. The rooms in all the meet-up locations were at most half-filled, with two exceptions — São Paulo and Guayaquil. In the first case, the turnout might have been positively influenced by the location — Cubo Network is located in the modern business center of Brazil’s largest city. In the second — the university authorities took care of attendance, inviting a large group of students to the meeting. But for Griff Green of Giveth.io not a quantity, but the quality of attendees is what matters the most these times. “People who care about crypto in this bear market, they are really committed, they are into it and they’re going to be into it in ten years, at least a large percentage of them” — says the co-founder of the blockchain-based charity platform — “if this was a bull market we would get hundreds of people who would be coming to this meet-ups to make a quick buck and we would be in a lot more trouble with this ethical dilemma saying ‘Yeah, it’s going to change the world! Invest and support these projects!’. But right here, people who are still around after everything lost 90% of its value, those guys are hard core! Inspiring them and giving them connections and trying to bring them into our network is something particularly valuable since we came here to Latin America to plant seeds”. In each of the cities visited BoT LatAm met similar influencers, real energy volcanoes who want to talk about blockchain despite the logs constantly thrown at their feet. Other hosts of BoT LatAm — Rodolfo Pozo in Lima and Xavier Ituralde in Guayaquil are great examples of such energy.
This enthusiasm for technology, not dependent on the current market condition, was particularly noticeable in Colombia. Although the least numerous in terms of the meet-up attendees, it distinguished itself by the lively blockchain community that can talk about this technology and its use cases even in the intervals between fiery and sensual salsa dance sessions. All of it despite obstacles, quite hard to overcome. “The press in Colombia is completely against it, the bank lobby is trying to stop it; it is hard to convince professors at the university that it is the future; they say normal people shouldn’t use it and those who use it are most likely criminals; it’s risky, they will rob you, they will target you — that’s what people hear about blockchain in my country” — says Jose Vicente who organized Bot LatAm meet-up in the campus auditorium of Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla. “But meet-ups like that provide change. I even saw one of my professors listening to the projects. One might not seem as something significant but for me it’s still more than I expected. He could see that it is something tangible, that you can use it in a very practical, useful way”.
Sometimes also not fully consistent with the law…
WHO BLAMES THE KNIFE?
With poverty there comes crime — this rule works not only for Latin America, although image of this continent created by the number of popular tv-series seems to make it a promised land especially for all kinds of wrong-doers. One of the Barranquilla meet-up participants approached Bernd Lapp right after his speech and asked frankly whether anyone could sell anything on the decentralized market that Swarm City creates. “Of course! I answered” — Lapp recapitulates the conversation. “Even illegal things?” — the guy continued. — “It is your responsibility what you do with provided tool”.
This very dilemma is very important for us in the film crew producing “Decent” documentary. We keep asking ourselves and the interviewees encountered on the course of the film production what makes this technology decent. Should we treat it merely as a tool, like a knife that you can use to slice a bread or kill a person? It would make no sense to blame the knife’s producer for somebody’s death. But is blockchain really just a tool? The way crypto space builds discussion around blockchain, the mere fact that “blockchain for good” expression appears, makes the subject matter of these discussions more important. We give it almost human features, we expect it to change the world, we add a great deal of moral aspect into it so should we stop at assigning responsibility to the user? Hamid Benyahia, Dether’s co-founder points out that blockchain would not only be an instrument of a potential crime, but also its environment. And one in which it is extremely difficult to hide the traces of the felony. “Therefore, you have to be really unreasonable to believe that you can hide something in blockchain. Criminals in particular should have no doubt that their actions will be tracked sooner or later” — he says.
UNLEASH YOURSELF FROM PARANOIA
Similar discussions can inflate to the limits and pull in completely, but in Latin America there is a nation that today would recognize them as pure entertainment. Not because they are irrelevant, but because from their perspective there are bigger problems. BoT LatAm didn’t visit Venezuela but there were Venezuelans met on the road, especially in Colombia and Ecuador. In the crowded hall of Universidad de Especialidades Espíritu Santo in Guayaquil I met Sergio Suarez, a student who escaped Venezuela several months ago with his immediate family. “The situation over there becomes worse and worse. People who had stable jobs two or three years ago found themselves rummaging through trash to survive. People are dying from hunger, from awful sanitary situations. 20 to 30 percent of the economy is sustained on the money people send from overseas to their families, so it’s not a sustainable model at all. It’s the worst social and economic crisis in a century. Another issue is security. You can’t really walk at night and feel safe. You have to be home by 6 or 7 pm or you’ll risk getting an encounter with criminals. My dad almost lost his life two years ago when he was robbed on the street. The government doesn’t care about people, they only care about enriching themselves. Also with power — there is no check and balances, they control judiciary system” — he describes the situation in his country. He heard about blockchain before, he also has an opinion about cryptocurrencies. “I believe they can be an escape for many people in situation as precarious as this one in Venezuela. It is something you can use to unleash yourself from this paranoiac government, to alleviate the economical part of the issue. If this technology is being adopted and used by masses, no one would need to rely on corrupted central governments anymore. Thanks to BoT LatAm meet-up here I already know I can easily send money to my family using Dether. With Swarm City students there can offer themselves some small services and get crypto in return”. Although this brief conversation about technology evokes a thrill in him, and in his eyes a kind of hope is drawn, it is difficult for him to be optimistic. “How worse can it get for the economy? How much more can the government steal? Have we reached the bottom yet? And if they use all the oil, if they run down the economy completely, what will happen to the people?”
Despite Sergio’s pessimism, it seems that his approach to the BoT LatAm’s projects he saw and heard about meets the hope of Bernd Lapp. He spoke about it while wandering between the sculptures of Gilmar Pinna. “I do hope that people that come out of these meetings are becoming multipliers, that they will talk about this, that they will take one of these six products and tell their friends and family about it. And spread the word. And really spark other people to look into this”.
DONKISZOTERIA
Lapp devotes himself completely to this goal. Perhaps he used to approach his earlier work in the same passionate way. On behalf of the NFL, he popularized American football in Europe. He was successful as a coach, but the American organization finally recognized the superiority of soccer on the Old Continent and rolled up the sails. It seems that the task was right from the beginning as hopeless as promoting blockchain in this bleeding market. Nevertheless, the originator of BoT LatAm believes in his mission, which many would use a Polish expression taken from Cervantes’ novel donkiszoteria to describe — a life attitude characterized by dreaming, a lack of reason to judge people and situations, a desire to fight for unrealistic goals, unreasonable enthusiasm in making unattainable tasks and fight against imaginary opponents. But if so, this donkiszoteria is shared by other personas of the space who would likely join the donkey ride with BoT. In our interview with Vitalik Buterin, conducted during DevCon 4 in Prague, he reminded about reasons for his twitterstorm posted exactly a year ago when the whole crypto market cap reached $0.5T. The situation on the market has changed dramatically since then, but not Vitalik’s approach. “The point of the crypto space was to do all these things like bring people freedom, create more open equal access systems, bank the unbanked all these other kinds of nice goals. Have we actually done that? Is there any evidence that we are actually close to achieving that? And if there isn’t, we should be careful not get overexcited until we are and try to figure out what it is that we are not achieving our goals, what it is that we are doing wrong, and what it is that we can do better” — asks the Ethereum’s founder.
Lapp may have found one of the best answers we all could give at the moment. Getting out there, understanding people’s needs and trying to return with working technological answers. He is not the only one. A few months ago, we had the opportunity to observe with our camera another blockchain enthusiast, John Lyotier of Right Mesh project, who with a group of his friends, co-workers and developers infiltrated the poorest communities in Bangladesh. It was one of the most unusual hackathons I’ve ever witnessed. And even if John’s faith in the power of technology to change the world has been weakened a bit when he entered the world’s largest refugee camp, it is this need to be as close to people as possible, which is a force that should and will push the blockchain further.
We want to talk about such a need and about such people in our film. That’s why I am extremely happy that I could accompany this group on its journey through Latin America. From the very beginning it was clear that the few days we had to spend visiting five countries were definitely not enough to get to know their residents’ problems in depth. But I feel that this time has been used to the maximum anyway. I know that I have to go back with my team to show Gustavo’s work in the Brazilian favelas, to explore the problems of Venezuelans and to look at other countries in this Land of Fire that are sliding down in a similar direction and try to understand what role blockchain can play in these processes. As filmmakers we jump on this donkey with growing curiosity, eager to learn if and when it will turn into a real stallion and take us to at least a bit better world. Why don’t you do the same?
Don Quixotes of all countries, unite!
Marek Osiecimski*
- Marek Osiecimski is the CEO and Founder of Refugium Foundation, a non-for-profit which is created to promote usage of decentralized technologies through films, visual arts, conferences and workshops. Its first project is a feature-length documentary called “Decent. Can Blockchain Change the World?”. Thanks to a community of decentralization enthusiasts — projects and individual donors, the foundation was able to finish ¾ of the footage. It is still raising funds to be able to return to Latin America to finish shooting about the financial exclusion, especially in Venezuela and to start the postproduction. To check how you can become part of this documentary visit their landing page decentdocumentary.com
