Blockchain: Societal Impact

0:05I think non-financial use cases of blockchain are just emerging. The biggest such application currently are NFTs or non-fungible tokens, which represent unique assets, things like collectibles primarily today. But there's been an explosion of representing other types of assets, things like carbon credits, real estate securities and those kinds of things.

0:24Fundamentally, you can think of blockchain as creating more efficient usage or exchanges in almost any arena. One way to use blockchain is to track energy and how it's used throughout a grid and being able to then help people figure out how to use it much more efficiently.

0:45Any time where there's like a contract, the participants they need some level of trust, right? And usually we bring in lawyers to do that, and that's great. Lawyers are an awesome solution to that. They're also an expensive solution to that. Blockchains can create situations.

0:57They can't solve every problem, but they can create situations where we don't necessarily need a lawyer to be involved because things that the lawyer would take care of can happen on the blockchain in a way that everyone can trust. Currently, when we upload photos or videos, we don't actually have ownership over that data.

1:13So there's a huge opportunity in terms of how do we communicate with people that we love, but also how do we create online? What excites me most about blockchain is the opportunity to deal with the wealth gap. Blockchain enables opportunity because in this space we get to de-identify ourselves and now I'm able to interact with people anonymously or pseudo anonymously, just as a series of numbers.

1:37My public key and I can participate in any type of use cases that I want without having that regulation preventing me simply because I'm of a particular demographic or a particular gender. My hope for the future of blockchain is that we find ways to solve problems that we haven't been very good at solving.

1:59Financial inclusion’s an obvious one blockchain technology either by itself will solve this problem or it will push governments to put in more sensible regulation, to have more sensible policies on access that will solve the problem. The thing that keeps me up at night that I'm really worried about is that we will wind up, whether accidentally or deliberately, rebuilding the same biases that we have in our existing system.

2:31There definitely are environmental impacts when it comes to blockchain technology. With Bitcoin, it's proof of work, and proof of work requires energy consumption. But the value that Bitcoin brings is much higher than that energy consumption. The environmental impacts are disastrous.

2:47In the case of the proof of work technologies, that’s bitcoin as an example. So proof of stake is another form of consensus system. We have stakeholders that stake on a on a blockchain to say that this block is valid. So using proof of stake, we're actually not expanding any electricity usage.

3:06A lot of people believe that it's less decentralized. So I think you're going to see blockchain reducing its own carbon footprint. Meanwhile, providing technologies and abilities that will help improve things outside of the blockchain space. I believe that cryptocurrency and blockchain are going to continue to grow and be widely adopted.

3:24It's true that it goes through cycles. Sometimes we'll see a massive run up and then a correction. But if you zoom out over these from one cycle to the next, it continues to grow at a really rapid pace. My biggest concern with blockchain technology is that it's developing very fast, but the regulators and governments don't really understand it.

3:42They don't know how to regulate it. They will eventually, but short term, they don't. And it's important to agree across countries, not just in one country. It's already become a an underlying layer for lots of systems and applications worldwide. And so it's pretty difficult to, at this point, stop using blockchains.

4:02Do I think decentralized, permissionless open networks are here to stay? I certainly hope so. And I think Bitcoin's demonstrated that they are at least at what seems to be over a decade in existence. Will the new ones survive? It's really anybody's guess. It's impossible to know. For any new thing we need a lot of evidence to believe that it's really going to be the next big thing.

4:22And in the case of blockchain, we just don't have that evidence yet. Blockchain's Helping push the technology. It's pushing ideas, it's pushing competition. But sometimes the first mover isn't the one who wins.