Jun 10, 2018
One of the main reasons I got into blockchain was because I saw it’s immediate application in one of the biggest pains in my ass. Visas.
First, on a really superficial level — anyone who has gone through a visa process knows it’s a complete nightmare. Add a layer of disorganisation and you’ve got chaos.
I have a Singaporean passport — imagine those who got the short end of the citizenship straw.
In an increasingly mobile world, it only makes sense that mobility is easy. This isn’t the case.
Take the Australian partner / defacto visa for example.
In 2015 the cost increased by 50% from AUD$4627 to almost AUD$7,000 — that’s not including the luxury of a lawyer. And this has remained unchanged to date.
This price hike has been projected to bring in $373.6 million helping with the Australian government’s budget repair mission through to 2019.
Add to that the level of intrusion the process is, and it’s a right cluster-fuck. Maybe zero knowledge proofs may have applications here? That’s a deep dive for another time.
In this piece, I will challenge the notion of borders and spotlight projects building towards a decentralised world.
Let’s begin with where we are now. Here’s the lowdown on how governments are reacting to the fifth industrial revolution.
Nation states are quickly cottoning on to the fact that blockchain is here to stay.
Nations are looking to attract blockchain talent and startups
This can be seen in national policies geared in the countries like Lithuania, Singapore, Estonia, and more.
These countries are gearing tax incentives, grants and other mechanisms towards creating welcoming environments for blockchain startups.
Beyond this, they all have sandboxes that allow for businesses to test their products, working alongside regulators to ensure public safety.
Nations are looking to implement blockchain as part of their citizen services technology stack.
Why are governments investing in blockchain experimentation?
One of the key reasons that blockchain is interesting within citizen services is that it functions as a verification service — a time-stamp of sorts — as such validating the exact time and action that’s taking place.
Citizen services often involve transactions such as proof of identity, transfer of ownership of assets like land deeds, and more.
These are all admin heavy processes that create bottlenecks, are inefficient, and prone to human error.
My understanding is that most governments are looking towards centralised blockchains as a means of efficiency. This is what I find disappointing.
Private blockchains offer incredible operational efficiency, there’s no disputing that. What they don’t do is create the foundation for decentralisation, independent security and interoperability.
Decentralisation is the move from one administrative body to more locations. It is especially important when considering identity. Identity and ownership of identity must be decentralised from nation states for a more egalitarian existence. Call me a hippie if you must.
Independent security seems a no-brainer given the downward spiral of geopolitical unrest.
Interoperability is key especially as we look towards blockchain as a solution to underpin identity across the world.
If governments had interoperable identity systems, mobility would become a far less frictionless process.
Who needs borders anyway?
Government identity documents or a bank account shouldn’t be prerequisites to getting a job or living a secure life. Yet our current identities are tied to the nations we are born into, a data point that often sets the course for the access to mobility.
Digital identity is one of the primary use cases for blockchain. Why is this interesting?
It gives us an opportunity to completely rethink the governance models we are forced to subscribe to.
As someone who hates non consensus-based governance, I see borders as arbitrary lines created by governing bodies to keep their hands in my pockets, and cuffs on my wrists. Did you know that you can be considered an income tax resident of a country you don’t even have work rights in? #Truestory — How is that even possible?!
We’ve seen the giants use incorporation strategy to avoid taxes, take Apple’s £13 billion slap on the wrist.
How is it that corporations have more favourable tax conditions than humans? And why shouldn’t individual actors have that level of playroom?
If identity was tied to blockchain, governance could be tokenized and governments would no longer have a monopoly on space.
Here’s a scenario.
It’s the year 2032.
You are at the airport with just your carry on. It’s everything you own. The sharing economy has become the norm, and everything is pay per use. You are greeted by an AI that scans your biometric code.
In the holographic screen in front of you, your identity dashboard materialises. In this context, it has travel specific data. You’ve spent the last 3 months on Atlantis, a seastead off the coast of Malaysia.
“We hope you enjoyed your stay. You are being charged 22 Atlant tokens for your stay. See you soon.”
Ching.
You swipe this notification away, for the next card — your flight gate details.
What sits behind this dashboard is an interoperable ecosystem of blockchains and decentralised data storage.
While this may seem way in the future, there are several great organisations solving for various levels of this problem. Some are coming at it from a social impact angle, while others are rethinking the entire framework.
Here are some visionary projects of the present.
1. World Food Program’s — Building Blocks
WFP’s Building Blocks program combines biometric authentication software with blockchain to allow for 100,000 Syrian refugees to access food within Jordan camps.
Blockchain benefits WFP as an immutable record of every transaction processed through the retailer. This makes for far more efficient reconciliation — and a significant reduction of accounting and due diligence third party costs.
2. Alice
Built on the Ethereum blockchain, Alice is a platform bringing transparency to social funding. By combining a performance-based incentivisation model for social organisations with transparency on performance to donors, it aims to fix the broken social funding model.
Learn more about Varyon, a project by Blue Frontiers.
I met the Blue Frontiers guys during New York Blockchain Week and was like… whut next level. They’re all about seasteading — like building literal floating communities.
Varyon is going right to the root of the problem — the need for disruption of centralised government structures. Bridging the reality — technology gap, seasteading could literally be the foundations for new types of governance structures.
Supervillain-esque? Sure. But this is the future people.
“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”
— Roy Amara
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