MBR_ISSUE 40_Lowres

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Malta Business Review BLOCKCHAIN BLOCKCHAIN’S APPLICATIONS REACH FURTHER THAN YOU THINK - THE SUPPLY CHAIN, FOOD DISTRIBUTION, AND ENERGY WILL ALL BE AFFECTED. - By Rebecca Linke Why is blockchain a "truth machine"? The truth we are talking about is one we take for granted: the consensus of facts. This goes back to the idea that human beings have built constructive civilizations because we have the capacity to arrive at consensus. And then, with that agreed notion, we can enter into economic exchanges and build things collectively. This is an interesting way of thinking about what's going on here, because the blockchain is a machine that allows us to arrive at that sort of truth. Previously, we had to rely on centralised institutions to deliver us their truth. We might audit Apple's quarterly results every three months, but with this assumption that their record is truth. And then we built everything on top of that. But the blockchain is a decentralized mechanism for arriving at that, removing the capacity of these big gatekeepers to set what that truth is. Why is this decentralisation so important? Decentralization is valuable for resolving what I call "the cost of trust." The world is burdened with enormous costs because people can't trust each other. Skyscrapers are filled with accountants who are constantly reconciling their ledger with the ledger of the other company they're working with. This results in multiple, centralized ledgers that have to be reconciled because people don't trust each other, and that reconciliation process is incredibly timeconsuming and costly. Anything that talks about a common shared record might be expensive from a computational perspective, because you need multiple computers within the same ledger — but because it starts to attack this heavy cost of trust you start to see how this solution, expensive as it may be, could well be worth it. If we get to this point where the record of transactions is universally recognized at any given time to be absolutely accurate, and we have real-time accurate data, you don't need audits. You don't need quarterly reports. I think this is potentially the most disruptive technology we've encountered in a while. We could effectively move to what might be a digital barter world, where assets and relationships and community values can become tokenized In the book you discuss that the World Food Program is using blockchain to track food distribution. How are they doing that? The challenges of keeping track of people and their transactions have real-world implications that we don't think of naturally. More than 30,000 Syrian refugees live in the Azraq refugee camp in the Jordanian dessert. For these people, if there's some error in the system — either because one of the merchants hasn't updated their information or their ID recorded payment for food that wasn’t distributed — they can get shut out of the system. And then they can't get food. The World Food Program is running a pilot program for 10,000 of these refugees using blockchain to look at every single transaction. It gives them assurances, so people who are desperate are able to come back and — if there ever was a challenge to them receiving food — audit the record and say it's all there. I paid or I didn't pay. One of the main benefits is the sheer efficiency of it. The World Food Program has millions of clients around the world. They're now able to have a single source of data around that. They're able to stitch together multiple sources of information into one coherent thing and use that without having to do these heavy, time-consuming reconciliation processes. What other applications are there for blockchain? Supply chains are a huge use because you have the problem of mistrust. There's a series of entities along a chain. They have a common goal, but they have mistrust because every buyer wants to buy low and every seller wants to sell high. The idea is that, if we created a common set of records that shows the system’s transactions, people could be more open with the information they share. It could also have a huge impact on efficiency. If everybody along a supply chain is able to keep track of information, they can plan how much they need to buy of something without being wasteful. And waste is as much of a contributor Continued on page 10 8
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