3 Things I Learned from Listening to the Blockchain [R]evolution Panel
Sometimes listening to a panel is a better experience than speaking on one
Much has been written about the conferences, meetups, workshops, parties and other social events during Blockchain Week NYC 2018. It was a week to network, learn about trends and what to expect from the Crypto landscape, as well as to hear opinions from leading experts in the field.
In particular I was attracted to events (one of which I participated as a panel member), who brought attention to leading companies building real crypto-solutions with social impact for the world. Even though I was familiar with most projects beforehand, I must admit that while sitting on the panel I learned three new things.
- The healthcare sector has double the initiatives than any other sector leveraging blockchain to drive social impact
- Trust, more than anything else is the disruptive force behind blockchain
- Beyond Blockchain, decentralization and democracy lies Holochain (agent-centric P2P platform), self-centralization and Holacracy (decentralized governance of self-organizing teams)
#1. The healthcare sector has double the initiatives than any other sector to drive social impact
Among over 200 organizations, initiatives and projects using blockchain to drive social impact in 2018, 25% were focused on health, which is nearly twice as much as the next leading sector, financial inclusion (13%). Energy, Climate, and Environment (12%) and Philanthropy, Aid, and Donors (11%) were the next highest (below). This is not surprising since Healthcare systems around the world are multi-stakeholder, highly regulated, complex, friction-full, poorly-aligned ecosystems that can benefit from new business models driven by a decentralized economy.
Also, even though we are still in the early days of Blockchain for Good, their impact is close and among these projects, 55% are estimated to affect their beneficiaries by early 2019.
Finally, I have posted earlier why Healthcare is a near-perfect fit for distributed ledger technology. However it is worth noting that beyond companies developing blockchain-based platforms for medical records, pharmaceutical supply chain and medical equipment asset management (mostly for developed markets), other important solutions are emerging such as: digital identity for refugees (ID2020), results-based disbursement of aid and philanthropic funding (Alice), universal access to financing (Kiva, OmiseGo) and supply chain transparency for food (OriginTrail), to allow people living in low-resource environments to live healthier lives.
#2. Trust, more than anything else is the disruptive force behind blockchain
In 2018 Edelman’s Global Trust Barometer Report, the US has experienced the most extreme loss of trust in government, businesses, media and NGOs in the world.
It is therefore not surprising that the potential of blockchain to solve mistrust lies within its transparency (anyone with access to the network can view a history of transactions in real time); immutability (blockchains protect data from tampering; no one entity is able to change past data without alerting the network); P2P transaction (blockchains allow anyone to send money or data to anyone without an expensive or corrupt intermediary); security (blockchains create and manage identities through digital signature technology, which gives people a public key [similar to an account number] and a private key [similar to a password]).
Thus it is expected that governments, businesses, media and NGOs will use Blockchain technology to regain trust through crypto -identity, -ownership and -verification solutions following key performance indicators (KPIs), as shown below.
#3. Beyond Blockchain, decentralization and democracy lies Holochain, self-centralization and Holacracy
Much has been written about the importance of decentralization that blockchain technology brings. The main reasons for its use are that decentralized systems are less likely to fail accidentally (fault tolerance); they are more expensive to attack, destroy or manipulate because they lack a central point of attack (attack resistance); and they are much harder for participants to coordinate in ways that benefit themselves at the expense of others (collusion resistance). These systems encourage an interdependence that align incentives through majority consensus mechanisms (censorship resistance).
Although some see decentralization simply as a historical evolution of the democratization of knowledge through the internet (web 3.0), others believe that there is no such thing as truly decentralized permissionless value networks and that every non-trivial governance decision is political and therefore centralized in nature.
With that in mind I found Matthew Schutte’s discussion at the panel about Holochain riveting.
Just as Hashgraph made a partial mind-shift from data-centric to agent-centric algorithms by using median time gossip signatures, Holochain has built an agent-centric P2P scalable platform with the intent to enable application developers to solve problems such as value creation, privacy and connectivity using self-developed consensi.
The philosophical framework behind this is the premise that in a centralized world we (our identity, data, decisions) are decentralized, whereas in a decentralized world we are agent-centralized and self-sovereign.
This reminds me of Holacracy, where in a decentralized management and organizational governance, authority and decision-making are distributed throughout a holarchy of self-organizing teams (agents) rather than by a vested management hierarchy. Thus similarly, Holochain developed a platform that enables any device to have its own chain based ledger system that can function independently and only requires synchronization of data when necessary, or agreed upon by users (agents).
Although I am not sure I agree with Matthew that “Blockchain is the past and Holochain is the post-blockchain future”, I do think that concentrating on people (and not dApps), interacting, collaborating and disengaging at will, might eventually bring us to true community engagement, not through traditional or digital currency but rather through a post-monetary system based on a proof of service value.
We can only hope…
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