与人工智能、物联网、5G等其他第四次工业革命(4IR)技术不同，尽管加密市场价值去年增长了850%，超过1.5万亿美元，但12年后区块链仍未成为主流。亚马逊、Alexa、谷歌和苹果人工智能Siri控制着我们的家——音乐、暖气、门等等。在我残疾女儿的家里，物联网驱动的机器人为她送货，她的物联网门让他们在COVID-19大流行期间保持她的安全和健康。我的5G手机同时从我的房产中播放11个高清闭路电视视频，确保我的资产安全。我们的生活越来越依赖于4IR，但如果区块链明天就消失了呢?没有,绝对没有。世界不会注意到，也没有用户依赖——它没有在我们的生活中获得牵引。只有毒品和性贩子、勒索软件商人以及那些逃避政府公众监督(税收和资本外逃)的人会哀悼它的死亡。公民、企业和治理中心(Centre for Citizenship, Enterprise and Governance)首席执行官芭芭拉·梅利什(Barbara Mellish)曾任英格兰银行(Bank of England)支付委员会支付诚信和安全主管，负责英国3850亿英镑的日常交易。她说:“区块链尚未结出任何果实，对我们的日常生活产生影响。我听到你说“比特币”，但事实上，比特币只是全球金融世界的一个舍入误差。旧的企业遗留系统充分地为我们提供了固有的严格性和稳定性。区块链技术的利大于弊吗?
开始时有很多希望。像唐·泰普斯科特(Don Tapscott)、克里斯·拉尔森(Chris Larsen)等科技巨头谈到区块链技术改变了社会结构，但到目前为止，这四种区块链发烧友中唯一的赢家是投机者，另外三种(区块链是宗教，4IR未来主义者，以及“更快、更便宜、更高效”的旅)只能寄希望于此。区块链的运动是一个数字资产从a到B,但实实在在的钱等金融资产,黄金、土地和钻石并不是唯一的资产——大流行后的已确认对我们许多人来说,软无形的非金融资产,如爱、幸福、希望和善良,的确我们的健康,有更大的价值。现在影响我们的事情，气候变化，黑人生命重要，影响我们跨境贸易的政治，LGBTQ+，健康——我们无话可说。为此，我们最近在伦敦、迪拜和新加坡新成立的“代码意识形态研究所:总价值之家”(Institute of Ideology in Code: Home of Total Value)招募了25名大学实习生。我们相信，区块链凭借其在金融和非金融价值之间进行仲裁的能力，是我们实现联合国2030年可持续发展议程的关键，该议程代表了17种意识形态，我们可以通过使用区块链技术来编纂和交易。更重要的是，我们正致力于利用区块链，为世界经济论坛(World Economic Forum)撰写2021年达斯古普塔评论，英国央行(Bank of England)前行长马克•卡尼(Mark Carney)对人类价值与金融价值的看法，以及方济各教皇(Pope Francis) 2019年对弗朗西斯科(Francesco)的经济——所有3人都认为，GDP不再是我们衡量财富和交易财富的方式。
媒体的高度关注突出了单一接触点的缺乏，以代表一种令人困惑的技术。这个行业是否需要一个“伟大而善良”的声音来回应批评、监管机构、询问等等?我们为该行业整理了一份新的尚未发布的期刊，名为《Token:加密货币、价值和价值》(the Token: Cryptocurrency, Value and Values)，以代表我们作为一个整体，而不是一个特定的行业。自2008年以来，我们为世界制定了区块链愿景(中英文版本)，包括公共、私人、公民社会和社区等各个领域，并希望有一天区块链将成为改善我们生活的世界的核心驱动力
[This debate articulated here was originally presented by webinar at The North American Bitcoin Conference by Professor Olinga Taeed on 29 January 2021. It was later published by invitation as a guest editorial on 24 March 2021 by Team Blockchain in their weekly newsletter Digital Bytes]
Unlike other 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR) Technologies such as AI, IoT, 5G – after 12 years DLT has not yet mainstreamed despite 850% crypto market value growth over the last year to more than US$ 1.5 trillion. Amazon Alexa, Google and Apple Siri AI control our homes – music, heating, doors, etc. At my disabled daughter’s home IoT driven robots deliver her shopping and her IoT door lets them keeping her safe and healthy during the Covid19 pandemic. My 5G phone simultaneously streams 11 live HD video CCTV feeds from my properties keeping my assets secure. Our lives are now increasingly dependent on 4IR but what if blockchain disappears tomorrow? Nothing, absolutely nothing. The world would not notice and there is no user dependency – it has failed to gain traction in our lives. Only drug and sex traffickers, ransomware merchants, and those avoiding public scrutiny from governments (tax and capital flight) would mourne its death. Blockchain has yet to bear any fruit and have impact on our daily lives. I hear you say “bitcoin” but even a decade ago before joining our Centre for Citizenship, Enterprise and Governance as CEO, she was Director of Payments Integrity and Security for Bank of England’s Payment Council and responsible for UK£ 385 billion of daily transactions, so BTC is just a rounding error in the global financial world. So why put up with the 95% crypto scam markets, 20% of funds hacked, when the old enterprise legacy systems adequately service us with inherent rigour and stability. Do the advantages outweigh the disadvantages?
But like any loving parent, and as the world’s first blockchain professor, I am frustrated at the growth of our blockchain child and we have been examining the barriers to traction and maturation that hampers us and the actions we need to alter the current trajectory. Here is our top 7 for your consideration – let us know if you don’t agree!
Trade Body
Decentralized by nature and herein lies a problem to organise ourselves. There are over 1000 exchanges currently with unregulated Binance typically trading nearly US$ 30 billion alone … and yet, we don’t even have a trade body that represents the industry. No one to advocate, no one to respond to government and regulators, or journalists. There is no self-regulation so this exposes us to external over-regulation. Other, much smaller industries, have a trade association why not us? Giants like Chandler Guo and Eric Gu sit on our Advisory Board and it is to these whales we look to bring the crypto industry together to enhance credibility.
2. Social Relevancy
At the start there was a great deal of promise. Industry giants like Don Tapscott, Chris Larsen, and others talked about the technology changing the fabric of society but so far the only winners of the 4 kinds of blockchain enthusiasts have been the speculators, the other 3 (blockchain the religion, the 4IR futurists and the ‘quicker, cheaper, more efficient’ brigade) resigned to just hoping. Blockchain is the movement of a digital asset from A to B, but hard tangible financial assets like money, gold, land and diamonds are not the only kind of assets – post pandemic has confirmed for many of us that soft intangible non-financial assets such as love, happiness, hope and kindness, indeed our health, have greater value. The things that effect us right now, Climate Change, Black Lives Matter, Politics affecting our Cross-Border Trade, LGBTQ+, Health – we have nothing to say. To focus on this, we have recently recruited 25 university interns to our new ‘Institute of Ideology in Code: Home of Total Value’ to be established in London, Dubai, Singapore. We believe blockchain, with its ability to arbitrate between financial and non-financial value(s) is a key us achieving the UN SDG 2030 agenda which represents 17 ideologies which we can codify and transact through DLT. Even more germane, we are focusing on using DLT to enable the 2021 Dasgupta Review for World Economic Forum, former 2020 Bank of England’s Governor Mark Carney’s view on human values versus financial values, and Pope Francis’s 2019 Economy of Francesco – all 3 believe GDP is no longer the way we should measure wealth and transact it.
3. Standards for Interoperability
There is no TCP/IP for blockchain, again due to decentralization of blockchain there is no common standards and interoperability between blockchains. There has been some noble attempts at this with Hyperledger, our 14 open source whitepapers, etc but at present we are looking at divergence and not convergence. The landscape has become more complex and less coherent with increasing varieties of existing blockchains including fractious forks and splits and bewildering new instruments like ICO, IEO, STO, DeFi, NFT, etc which have meteoric rise and falls as the industry continuously searches for something that sticks. The fact is that we have no Google, Facebook, Amazon of blockchain – we have no raison d’etre for the technology, no Damascus experience that irrefutably demonstrate to the (wo)man in the street why we need it just as did the internet. TCP/IP was invented by my friend Vint Cerf mid 1970’s and Google was created some 15 years later in 1998. We think only time is needed here and that by 2030 we will get there if not sooner although given Satoshi Nakatomo’s 2008 paper we are scheduled to get there mid 2020’s.
4. Scaled Applications
We need to be able to point to a scaled mainstream sector application, not only to showcase to the world what we can do, but also to act as a very large high profile sandpit to pilot our blockchain ecosystems not just individual product solutions. In striving towards this we are busy creating a UK£ 210 million DLT Bank announced in December 2020 in Dubai, a 2700 consortium in supply chains and procurement organisation in Nairobi, a 5G Electric Vehicle community charging solution, and recently announced our engagement in the petroleum oil and gas industry with potentially a blockchain platform build for a company fully listed on the London Stock Market company. Please, no more small stuff, it’s not getting us anywhere but of course even these projects hardly indent their sectors in terms of commercial significance but illustrate the capability of blockchain.
5. Academic Research
Of course academics, like myself, are pedestrian in our approach, and hard to keep up with the burgeoning world of blockchain. Nevertheless, all serious sectors borrow rigour from intense academic research which are non-partisan, no agenda, and neutral with output through peer reviewed journals such as our JV Frontiers in Blockchain with 490 editors. For retail readership we will be relaunching Social Values & Intangibles Review this year which sets out to explain in simple language the benefits of blockchain in non-trivial situations. If it wasn’t for academic research the world would not be able to have responded to Covid19.
6. Institutional Partnership
Governments and major corporates are not, as often perceived, the enemies of blockchain and indeed they will be the main agent for adoption. Facebook Libra was not just a sad failure for the high profile consortium, but a failure for the industry that we did not support the first major corporate to promote the technology; it is not perfect but we all lost in that one. Not disheartened, we applaud the Chinese government digital Yuan CBDC project piloted in 2020-21 and indeed we advise the Chinese Ministry of Commerce through the ‘China E-Commerce Blockchain Committee’. As a sector we must embrace such projects if we are to drive adoption. There is a dearth of consultancies that can operate at the institutional level, our Rothbadi based in Zurich and Team Blockchain in London are rare examples but we need more serious players in the industry.
7. Global Voice
The high intensity of media attention has highlighted the absence of a single point of contact to represent a confusing technology. Does the industry needs a voice of the ‘great and the good’ to respond to criticism, regulators, enquiries, etc? We have put together a new and as yet unlaunched journal for the industry, by the industry, called The Token: Cryptocurrency, Value and Values to represent us as a whole and not a particular sector. Since 2018 we have developed a blockchain vision (in English, in Chinese) for the world which embraces all sectors – public, private, civil society and community and thus hope one day DLT will be a central driver to improve the world we live in.
The New World Order of Ideology in Code: IoT, DLT, AI and 5G
We are all searching for new paradigms. Democracy is broken, capitalism questionable and the environment a disaster. Our views used to be simple to be identified, tagged, and sold to, but social media has obliterated that. We now live in a community of one, just me. All social media feeds reinforce my views, exclude challenges to my values, and allow me to live in my own bubble in isolation without the need to consider the opinions of others. This makes democracy unworkable as there is no majority consensus. There is no one Brexit UK, one Trump USA, there are truths all around us and we want to pick and mix just like our social media communities. In the good old days if you drank chamomile tea you were probably lesbian, vegetarian and a tree hugger; now you can can love soya latte, hate immigrants, vote Brexit but still demand European travel. The world is searching for a scalable and sustainable future that can accommodate a myriad of values. One nation unity has left the room and switched the light off.
Strategic responses are predictable. The Americans believe money is the currency of life, our sentiment data belongs to corporates in exchange for free services, and market forces will drive social change. The Europeans believe safety in numbers, the sanctity of legislation, treaties and GDPR’s my-data-my-way will safeguard us from bad actors. The Chinese believe in government patriarchy, they should own your data to protect you, and use 4th Industrial Revolution Technologies of Blockchain, AI and IoT to implement homogenously across all BRI nations. Corporates cling on to various positivity instruments like CSR, Impact Investment, ESG and ethical supply chains to enact their good intentions. The fact is everyone is trying to the best of their capability; even drug lords can do good. Just like people, there are no evil nations or corporates but there are shades of grey.
We have now all become used to technology being touted as the saviour. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Tencent, Alibaba …. bring joy to billions for free by tracking our alignment, value and values in order to sell us more stuff. The science of digitally measuring happiness, hope, love, aspiration, and all such non-financial soft intangible assets are now well rehearsed. What DLT has done is to allow the transaction of those assets from A to B, just like any financial tangible hard asset – money, gold, diamonds – the assets of Christmas past. Tokenisation makes real the tracking and movement of value(s), injecting life into good intentions and virtues with unprecedented granularity beyond face to face volunteering, corporate ethics and national policies. So now we can codify ideology, and transact them at scale … just like banks but this time with our feelings.
Enter stage right AI offering us the ability to nudge our behavior in any direction we care for by incentivizing good behavior and removing negative options. That of course, is the heart of the Chinese Social Credit System. Western cultures will frown on manipulation of choices based on behaviours, but that is exactly what Facebook et al already do. Only they decide what jobs we get to see, and which postings are fed to us, and how our personal AI of Alexa, Siri, Bixby, and others guide us depending on the capability of our financial shopping basket. China puts government’s paternal responsibilities of the society body corpus above those of the individual rights and freedoms including jay walking, carrying arms, or shooting children in playgrounds. Until now there has been no happy medium but with blockchain democracy you can have your cake and eat it too. Through smart contracts you can identify your alignment, be rewarded for those choices, and equally accept the limitations you have chosen in a transparent way.
But let’s go further. The world will not truly change unless every atom of our being embed our ideology – every product, process, project, organization, and people, have our values not just on our sleeves but in our things – the Internet of Things. In the immediate future what enjoins IoT to us will be our 5G phones which, as Professor Karen Pollitt-Cham eloquently puts it, layers our values into a “human centred network slice to nudge value driven behaviour”. Our phones will be a repository of our values alongside our value, already well accustomed to the Chinese WeChat Pay and AliPay. The resident AI (our ‘Ubot’) will guide us how to behave in alignment to the direction of what we hold dear, eschew things which do not conform to our wishes, and we will be able to imbue everything around us with our value(s) set.
To put it simply, our ideology can now be codified, transacted, nudged and embedded in the world around us. In a miniscule way, we started this process back in 2011 by measurement of non-financial value through the Social Earnings Ratio®, moved to transaction in 2016 through the Seratio® blockchain, visioned a world where AI Ubot would embed sentiment like love and hope into all our decisions, but to be truly adopted in time for UN SDG 2030, it needs the spread of 5G’a data slices to embed these values in everything around us so even our kettle can be driven by our values.
Naturally, there are dangers. The racist doorbell will not ring when a black man presses the button. Indeed, institutional racism is nothing but codified ideology but primitive and minute when compared to the guaranteed future ubiquity of 4IR. History advises that neither Chinese behavioural codes, nor West Coast marketing algorithms could be necessarily trusted as centralized guides arbitraging our moral compass. Herein lies the true advantage of the decentralized nature of IoT, that the pantheistic nature of small bits of ‘good’ code authored by billions of diverse contributors and embedded in trillions of devices, will safeguard the threat of dominance and control from bad actors or evil AI robots. In this pluralistic society there is no going back. DLT is conceived not only to provide us solutions to live in Hong Kong without embracing all Chinese values, or live in a frictionless trading Brexit Britain but embrace Europeanism, but also to expand our ‘me’ bubble to include everything around us.
In the future we will have a different relationship with technology which will, for the first time, industrialize doing good en masse; not a bolt on, not an afterthought, but mainstreamed and integral to our daily lives. Irrespective of whether there is higher meaning to our lives, whether there is a god metric or even a god code, what stands before us is our collective responsibility to make our society a better place for everyone regardless of values and ideology including at the extremes. This is an opportunity for universal participation paid for by the commercial interests of corporates, the blessing and regulation of governments, and our values. We pray, for the sake of mankind, that it will come soon but what is exciting for us is to finally see a pathway to a vibrant New World Order.
Director, Centre of Citizenship, Enterprise and Governance
Council Member and Expert Advisor, Chinese Ministry of Commerce ‘China E-Commerce Blockchain Committee’
This personal data thing, it’s just not working. Some claim that corporates want our data so they can sell stuff to us and governments want our data to control us. But companies retort that if you expect your commercial product to be free, and help create their jobs, economy and services to society, they must be allowed to get to know you to help (others) target you better. Like Google and their gmail, Facebook and their WhatsApp, bankers will tell you that free banking forced them to develop other more convoluted instruments that eventually ruined the world in 2008. Similarly, Sovereign States have a responsibility to protect their population and encourage positive social structures – so they see no problem with tracking our movements, rewarding good behaviours and identifying bad actors. Faced with 1.4 billion population, China openly uses a social credit system and defies ‘Land of the Free’ western ideology that hails individual rights preferring to protect the corpus not the few.
We have become obsessed with our personal data which is in the middle of this battleground but let’s face it, GDPR has failed – nothing has changed except we inanely press more cookie policy buttons and new T&C’s daily. We are happy to be in a selfless open and more sharing society, believe in open data, open source, open banking, but don’t see the incongruency with the rather self centred #MyDataMyWay. Things are set to become even more selfcentric – in blockchain we want to track your data to reward ourselves and to withhold our data if we’re not. Last month I sat in Shanghai whilst an entrepreneur pitched me with a system to token reward contributors of their medical data to resolve long term illness. STOP – what? So you would rather people die than share your data which is of no value to you whatsoever? Even if no remedy was found, your data would have helped create jobs and bring income to their families. So why have we become so possessive with our data and isn’t it misaligned to the open sharing world we are trying to create?
I think the issue is that we mistakenly think of data as a tangible hard asset like money, gold, land … things we can lose and others gain. Actually it’s not – data shows all the hallmarks of an intangible asset, a subject which I have studied for over a decade. Like all intangible non-financial assets, data value is dependent on the holder; you can’t spend it at Starbucks but it can be invaluable in the hands of others. Data transactions are directional – I love you doesn’t mean you love me. Indeed like love, happiness and hope, it is infinitesimally replenishable – you create more data tomorrow – you haven’t lost the asset by giving it. Afterall we don’t stop smiling at a beggar because we think they’ve taken something from us? By smiling we have given them information about ouirselves – we have told them something about how we feel, the Holy Grail of personal data. We are happy to share with others on social media all about us, our inner beliefs, our core values, and then we’re upset that companies, governments, and others use it to understand or manipulate more efficiently? Doesn’t that happen every day with colleagues, friends, family when we share ourselves with them? What is it that we have lost?
If the dollar is the currency of financial value, I have wanted to know what is the currency of non-financial value. For years I promoted sentiment as the new currency of the millennium but in reality it has become impossible with current technology to come to a consensus on how to measure it. And if you can’t measure, you can’t bill it so all attempts to improve the world based on impact have hitherto failed. In the UK Social Value 2012, UK Slavery Act 2015, 2% CSR Laws in India, Indonesia and Mauritius, most United Nations MDG (and now SDG) initiatives, etc … the world is no better place; data is manipulated to be compliant, with honesty, integrity and compassion the ultimate loser. Data, however, is indeed universally measurable and thus a much better proxy to our intentions. What if we dispense with the misnomer that we can hold back the personal data ocean, and focus on the data transaction. I would be happy for my data to be used by governments, by corporates, by anyone if in exchange they agree to donate their upside (profits, tax, revenues, whatever) to civil society and undertake not to harm anyone in the process, including myself. To do this we would need an immutable ledger to track the use of our data – to tokenise not for personal gain but for societal gain. If you don’t want to surrender your information (which you cannot use in any case) then that is also fine … but don’t expect to receive the upside from the public and private interventions. Only blockchain can do this and provide the transparency for challenges.
A key differentiator of non-financial transaction is the basis on a social contract – eg in a relationship “you can have my love IF you make me happy, do not harm me or my children” – what we would call a smart contract with social dependencies. Intellectual Property, another intangible, has developed systems like Creative Commons which depend on simple attributes to safeguard the use; something very similar could be developed for our data. Permission to use our data, like a donor card, can be tokenized and withdrawn retrospectively demonstrating our alignment to corporate policy or government strategy, something we define as a Microshare Token. Making data consumption measurable, whether by corporates, governments or NGO’s makes the impact actionable.
So in straight forward terms, what am I saying? Here is my data, please use it to get to know me. Try not to harm me … and if you promise to use it for good, then I trust you with my data, my thoughts, my life, my hopes and my ambitions. I don’t wish to build a Mexican Wall of my life to repel all those seeking to know me whether for good or not. It’s not my data, I will share it with you freely as I share my love, my happiness and my thoughts. Because I share it doesn’t mean I’ve lost it – I have new data tomorrow representing the new me. It is ever lasting, tomorrow I will generate more love, more happiness and more data. It does not belong to me, I give my IP to you freely to make the world better. Yes you made money by knowing me, or knowing me will make me more vulnerable to political influence. I’m happy for you. I hope it makes the world a better place. So don’t pay me, pay society… give them the money you would have given me for my data to others who need it. That is why data and blockchain are a perfect mixture. It’s a trustless system where we can share our data, transparently track it, contributing to a decentralized collective responsibility to be distributed to whoever needs it.
So let us put our data on the blockchain, not always insist on payment or recognition, but whomsoever uses the big data agrees by the principles of honesty, integrity, and respect of all those who put it there. And on our behalf, they agree to pay a percentage of the value they create from it to others … a social tax, a CSR, … and this we can track … through the blockchain, and permissioned through a token. Then it is a matter of compliance and not of ownership of our data. Companies decide which charities they pay, say 19% of their profits, and governments can give us 19% tax relief for using our data. Will this work and does anyone care? A straw poll of my children has swayed from my daughter Tigris’s condemnation of what I’m proposing, to my son Vien and spouse Elizabeth who use data to make their life seamless so find data intrusion of benefit in specific situations, to my partner’s daughter Alayna ambivalence “I don’t really care”. A blockchain data system could accommodate these broad spectrum of views.
* Opinions in this article are strictly my own. Art work by Tigris Ta’eed
8th Annual Session of Global Forum on Human Settlements
(30-31 October 2018, United Nations, Bangkok)
Blockchain as a technology has the potential to become one of the most pivotal routes to change for our societies.
The movement away from the centralised model of control which is the basis of almost everything we do, where we relying on a trusted centre. Blockchain gives us the mechanism to de-centralise, to build organically, to create new structures of control and engagement.
This is a fundamental shift in how we structure ourselves in society.
With so much media attention on blockchain has focused mostly on the rise (and falls) of crypto currency valuations, it is easy to lose sight of the wider picture of the blockchain opportunity.
Add to that the uncoordinated nature of the non-centralised model, the slower approach that organics growth brings and the growing number of scams and mismanagement scandals and the result becomes a very fragmented environment.
We all intuitively know that an appropriate use of Blockchain technology does have real potential to make a change to how we operate cross-border and within societal groups, bypassing middle layers and removing the trusted centre, but we are yet to see mass adoption of real-world examples of this in practice.
And so, the really big questions are how far can Blockchain go? How will it evolve? What is required to create a step change in the way we live and operate? What are the next steps?
My organisation, the Centre for Citizenship Enterprise and Governance, or “CCEG”, is a Think Tank that has had more than six years in the research and application of the movement of non-financial values, and over two years research and application of those research findings using blockchain technology. We specialise in the tracking of the movement of emotional value, the things that give society well-being, contentment, happiness. That is those values that create engagement and good citizenship within communities.
This work is highly relevant to cities and human settlements. As we understand, track and monitor the value sets of communities and individuals we become enabled to focused investment and channel our resources to materially to improve the well-being and contentment of citizens.
As we build the cities of the future, as we look to make significant change to those urban settlements that are not working, it is simply not enough to just create infrastructure and transportation links. We need to create cities that inspire and generate high quality living, a healthy community and arguably, most importantly a content and happy society.
The blockchain technology can be used as a tool to engage the communities, to give people a voice and a vote. It can be used to delegate power and authority to empower community groups and organisations. Through the use of Distributed autonomous organisations and/or foundations, blockchain can we used to develop the structures on which the cities operate and crucially the mechanisms for change and improvement.
Imagine a city where constant quality feedback from the millions of users of services and facilities are being utilised to adjust, refine and perfect city services for the benefit of the whole. A city where the inhabitants are the owners, and the controllers of the core of the infrastructure, the architects of the future changes and the shapers of their own eco-system. By their nature the citizens and not just engaged, they direct, drive and own the whole settlement.
These will be the cities of the future to which all others will aspire to replicate.
In our daily lives we procure not with money, but with our values. We buy cars that bring us ‘joy’, purchase clothes that ‘empower’, acquire services that make us ‘happy’ … and reject offers that do not match our ‘hopes’. Institutional procurement is moving in the same direction – we no longer decide only on price, speed and quality … but factor in sustainability, modern slavery, and social value. The brands we represent can no longer afford to associate with brands that are not aligned to our values; because of the transparency afforded by social media these intangible assets can decimate our tangible assets in a heartbeat.
The decision metric of procurement is not the just the dollar, but how aligned we are to those we procure from and with. When we decide to cut 3% from or budgets to increase shareholder value, the likelihood is that a community suffers, and worst still across multiple layers in the global supply chain others enter into slavery conditions. Because of you, some will end their lives in abject poverty, and others will celebrate life. Your decisions can lead to the ultimate sacrifice – in your hands is the power that someone lives or dies.
Whether the tender is for stationary or a billion dollar bridge, the future of procurement is changing. Governments already recognise that it is the single greatest instrument to achieve national objectives, enacting laws to align their suppliers with their values. It is surely time for procurement professionals to break away from the equivalence to the mundane world of accountants, auditors and actuaries, but to take our place at the top table in driving world change.
The 4th industrial revolution has provided us with a single instrument called Blockchain that can simultaneously measure, transact and delivery both financial and non-financial value transparently and at scale. This digital technology enables us to establish structures for good by making our financial decisions contingent on our institution’s alignment to a set of non-financial values. If we are being brave, we could involve AI to direct our decisions or to even fully automate the process, bypassing unfair or corrupt procurement which is prevalent wherever scale is involved. Furthermore, through tokenisation every single product, process, project, organisation or even person which is part of procurement can be fully aligned to all the stakeholders in our organisation – shareholders, customers, suppliers, government, environment, staff and the communities we serve.
The Seratio Ecosystem is aided by AI to assess the complex analytical data available and to steer consumers, becoming their online friend and guide
Hyper-Reality by Keiichi Matsuda
Two important trends are making corporates re-think their strategies and relevance in our future economies.
Transparency
The hallmark of this decade has been the growth of transparency as an instrument to openly display governance in our public offices, demonstrate corporate intentions, reflect the goodness within our products and even prove our own values to each other.
The public sharing of our actions and decisions is rapidly accelerating, particularly with the under 35’s. Social media and mobile apps bring our lives under closer scrutiny, for many now on a daily basis. The things we like, where we socialise what we eat are all commonly shared on social media. But what about the transparency of information to consumers? Whilst price comparison sites and convenient middlemen layers have become commonplace, we remain sadly lacking in coherent, simple signposting for most of the goods and services we buy. To navigate our often intricate lives we readily embrace any kind of ‘Go-NoGo’ filters that allow decisions to be guided with least effort.
Arguably, consumer data, the value sets and preferences may become the most valued asset. As the trend for transparency continues, the analytics behind those choices and preference will shape the retail market push. As important the trend of information to consumers will shape the markets, just as comparison sites have influenced and taken ownership of consumers in the insurance space, information and data providers of the provenance of goods have the same opportunity, to guide, advise and own the relationship with those consumers. Have goods been manufactured with slavery within their supply chain? Are the suppliers and supply chain manufacturing those goods adding value to the world or detracting total value by stealing from their supply chain, or stealing from the environment?
The world is an increasingly complex place and consumers crave simplicity and convenience. For this they are willing to sacrifice, security, privacy and price. At the same time, expectations of free services has never been greater. The traditional model of “Make it Pay” has been turned upside down by the media giants of the last two decades as they offer an app for our lives for free.
So it is somewhat surprising that the consumer “values” data space remains largely untapped. What is not just in our wallet but rather in our heads, our thoughts and our hearts remains opaque to retailers and suppliers as they seek greater levels of optimisation.
Decentralisation
The antidote to centralisation is perhaps an even greater challenge to a traditional corporate organisation to navigate. How to remain relevant as a central player and controller in the non-centralised world the new public seem to crave. The traditional model of central controller is broken down in the de-centralised world of the blockchain. This gives rise to new models, new expectations and new philosophies.
The inside out model, fails completely when one tries to implement a blockchain solution with a focus on one key stakeholder. Distributed Ledger Technology ‘DLT’ was created for a peer to peer environment, deliberately to eliminate the need for a central controller. Whilst blockchain is hailed as the next revolution and an even bigger impact than the internet, the largely centralised corporate world is still struggling to create meaningful, viable, value added applications as the models strike at the very heart of its operations.
Solution
The Seratio Ecosystem has brought together a model which addresses these two key challenges.
The original start point for the ecosystem was born from academic research into the movement of non-financial value and the understanding of a total value model, taking into account social, environmental and governance measures to assess the impact of a person, project, organisation, city, region or country. As with any measurement system, once metrics were established, agreed, recognised and used, then focus and improvements may follow. The DLT of blockchain technology presented an ideal opportunity to move from the measurement of non-financial value to the transaction of non-financial value.
Communities of people who share common values and share a trading economy have already formed their own currencies, outside of the traditional boundaries of government and regulation and without any central controllers; organic growth. Value sets are recognised, shared and transacted. Community members prefer to seek out those with aligned values, those who share the currency and demonstrate their value sets. This has led to crypto-currencies imbued with values, carrying the attributes of the communities that created them making it more transparent both to those who prefer to operate within these large cohesive, vibrant and transactable communities as well as those who wish to supply and target them with loyalty and rewards programmes.
Recognising the value sets or ‘provenance’ of individuals the Seratio Ecosystem also builds in the provenance of goods and services. The complex system is filtered down to a simple score to direct and guide buyers. In essence, to enable them to buy the things they value, which may be pro a particular value set, for example women or students whilst being steered away from those goods and services which fall outside of their individual values, for example anti-slavery or environmental.
The Seratio Ecosystem is aided by AI to assess the complex analytical data available and to steer consumers, becoming their online friend and guide. By directing purchases in the online space and on the high street value aligned purchases can be easily delivered, with no effort on the part of the consumer.
The use of blockchain and cryptocurrency record and give transparency to the value choices. In the same way that social media has a positive ground-up impact and empowerment, the blockchain has a similar effect demonstrating aligned values and for the first time linking that to the economic activity those values support.
Number by Robert Hloz
Next Steps
To scale the models, we need to build systems and put into practice the ecosystem platforms within a mass market. We welcome new partners who are interested in transforming their impacts and become a key player in this brave new world.
Who will step up and become the Google of the Blockchain World?
Core values are the fundamental beliefs of a person or organization. They act as a guiding principle that help people right or wrong. While walking through a commercial street, have you ever wondered about an app that will notify you of discounts in your preferred retailer, or a product, that align with your values? This is one of the featured functions of the new Seratio AI Bot. On the other hand, it could also help the retailer identify the customers who align with their values and incentivize.
AI Bot
The main objective of the AI bot to help its users make informed decisions based on their values. By building predictive models and using AI algorithms, AI bot will be able to learn user’s preferences and behaviour. This will help the bot identify their next course of action and provide suggestions.
AI Bot receives the required data from multiple core segments of the seratio ecosystem. They are as follows
SAPI
Seratio API is the software that implements impact assessment & tracking (non-financial value analysis). It is responsible for S/E scores calculation, S/E certificate awards, and has a build-in S/E translator enabling engagement and use of all other non-financial metrics.
From a corporate point of view it can process and combine different data sets, including monitoring product provenance, modern slavery conditions checks, Proof-of-[…] metrics, and convert them all into a single-number non-financial attribute – S/E score.
2. Seratio Platform Wallet
Anonymity, the fundamental idea behind blockchain. Although it provides high security, it breaks trust in blockchain. CCEG’s solution to the problem is to maintain the anonymity while bringing in non-financial intangible attribution (social Value) of each transaction. the fundamental functionality of the platform is to add an extra layer of value to every transaction
Here every user has the option to enter their basic, financial and social information, that helps in generating the S/E (Social Earnings Ratio) certificate through SAPI.
The details which are used to calculate the SE Ratio of an individual include:
• Country
• Number of people dependent on the individual
• Value of asset
• Environmental considerate decisions
• Amount spent to help others
• Raised/Helped Raising Amount to help others
• Number of people positively influenced by the individual
In the wallet we can set the SER preferences to do/restrict transactions or interactions with organisations, products, projects and people. Which means, the individual can initiate a transaction only if they satisfy the SE Ratio cut-off threshold mentioned by the Individual.
3. Provenance
The Provenance Monitoring is an S/E based complex analytical tool which allows tracking provenance of products, companies, services etc. In terms of product provenance, the platform will track both financial as well as non-financial attributes at every stage of the supply chain. This information is then submitted to blockchain through smart contract. Here it integrates with seratio blockchain platform. When the product moves from one part of the supply chain to another, the information is carried forward and verified with the corresponding information in blockchain. This creates a secure, shared record of exchange for each product along with specific product information.
When the product is complete, the collective information is processed by SAPI and will be able to provide it aggregate social value along with its other tangible information.
4. Rewarding Body
Rewarding body functionality supports organisation to create social value by earning tokens through impact that users make through their personal beliefs or social activity. When paid staffs are rewarded with normal currencies, the social currencies can be distributed to its unpaid supporters/helpers. May it be a reward for referral made by valued customers or for the volunteering for a social cause, rewards can be given to thank the other. Users are rewarded with specified tokens for their social activities based on the rewarding policy set by rewarding body. The Rewarding body will then transfer the tokens to the user directly using user’s QR code.
5. Microshare exchange and Retail
The MICROSHARE is a unit of non-financial, intangible value gained by people through many activities their personal beliefs or social activity (volunteering, charity, carers, etc). The first batch of the microshares are the SER microshares, which was distributed to all who contributed to the ICO. The other altcoins will receive their microshares as well. At this point, microshares will be tradable for another microshare at the microshare exchange.
Soon users will be able to acquire microshares from rewarding body and will be able to buy discount vouchers from retailers. These retailers will empower the community and their values, that they believe in, through discount policies. The discount policy will contain
• Minimum SER value needed to avail discount
• Type of microshare
• Amount of microshare
• Discount offered
Users would be able to purchase the discount in advance and produce it at the retail shop or pay at the counter.
Key outcomes for regular users:
The AI Bot can give suggestions or predictions based on individual’s SE Ratio preferences.
Depending on the user’s values and behavioural patterns, some of the model prediction scenarios are as follows:
• If an individual wants to buy a product, AI Bot can suggest a list of companies, which are providing that product based on the SE score preferred by the individual.
• If an individual wants to improve his SER value, AI Bot can suggest a list of NGOs or Rewarding policies based on their values.
• AI Bot can suggest the available offers and discounts. These offers can be availed using Microshares.
• It should also suggest ways to earn Microshares by integrating itself with rewarding body features in Seratio platform. This should also depend on proximity and preferences of the Customer.
• Different purchase patterns can be generated by the AI Bot, based on previous purchase history details and can suggest the possible future buying nature and other related activities by the individual.
Key outcomes for Organisation/Company:
Similarly, the AI Bot can give suggestions or predictions based on an organization’s preferences and values. Some of the key suggestions could be seen below.
• If a company wants to launch a product and they want to sell it at a targeted volume of customers, then our AI Bot can suggest the SER value that company should hold to reach the targeted volume of customers.
• Also, if a company want to improve their SER value, our AI Bot can suggest the areas where that company’s activities can be rectified or corrected to switch over from a low SER to a preferable SER value.
For example: Our Bot can suggest improving the wages, if currently one of the reason for that company’s low SER value falls in Modern Slavery category.
• For a manufacturing company, looking to improve their SER value, our AI Bot can suggest the list of suppliers whose SER value is higher with whom the company should associate and a list of suppliers with whom the company should not associate at any stages of product manufacturing.
• To improve their CSR activities, the Bot would be able to provide a list of NGO’s or rewarding body and provide insights into their current and historic social activity. The companies could then either collaborate with these organizations or they could conduct their own activities.
Building Predictive Models – Our Approach
Predictive models predict the future behaviour of a user. Predictive modelling is a group of statistical algorithms, which when applied on provided data, outputs a mathematical function/equation/a logical program that helps to predict the outcomes. To understand our approach, a sample steps taken are provided below
Stages of building a Predictive Model:
A. Data Cleaning:
This stage includes the process of detecting, correcting or removing the inaccurate records from the given data source. This is important to maintain the quality of data.
This stage includes:
• Various kind of data importing scenarios like importing various kind of datasets (.csv, .txt), different kind of delimiters (comma, tab, pipe), and different methods (read_csv, read_table)
• Getting the very basic information, such as dimensions, column names, and statistics summary
• Getting basic data cleaning done by removing NAs and blank spaces, imputing values to missing data points, changing a variable type etc.
• Creating dummy variables in various scenarios to help modelling
• Generating simple plots like scatter plots, bar charts, histograms, box plots etc.
B. Data Wrangling:
This is the process of transforming and mapping data from ‘raw data’ form into a desired format using merging, grouping, concatenating etc. for better decision making and analytics.
C. Explore the data with Python
In this step the data which is saved in database from the given datasource, is loaded to Python for further processing. At this stage the data is converted to dataframe, another data structure using a Python package named Pandas.
The following is an illustrative representation of a dataframe with details of a user for the calculation of SE Score.
After this, we will access the required columns from the dataframe by removing the unwanted ones.
D. Creating and training a model
This is the step where the Model is created and trained. For prediction, first we have to find a Function/Model that best describes the dependency between the variables in our dataset, known as Correlation.
We use Linear Regression Algorithm to create the model if the output to be predicted is a continuous variable. Whereas we use Logistic Regression Algorithm if the output variable is a binary or categorical variable.
After this, the dataset is split into training and testing datasets for the purpose of Training the Model.
• The training dataset is the one on which the model is built. This is the one on which the calculations are performed and the model equations and parameters are created.
• The testing dataset is used to check the accuracy of the model. The model equations and parameters are used to calculate the output based on the inputs from the testing datasets. These outputs are used to compare the model efficiency.
Training the model means fitting the created model to the training set of data. At this stage, we have created a model which is trained with the training dataset and is ready to handle to test dataset.
E. Prediction
This is the stage where the prediction process happens. The trained predictive model will be ready to give the result/prediction using the test dataset we created in the previous step. The default function predict() in Python is used to predict the result we expect.
In this stage the error between our test predictions and the actual values are calculated for checking the efficiency of our created model.
Explaining the approach using an example:
We are considering a scenario where we want to predict the number of sales a retailer will have on a future date depending upon certain previous factors such as offer/discounts on particular category of products provided for customers who will buy using Microshares.
A. Data Cleaning
The provided data is prepared by removing/updating the inaccurate entries to maintain the quality of data.
B. Data Wrangling
In this stage, we will merge/group/concatenate the data if needed for our requirement when analysing our data source.
• Create a Database in MongoDB
• Create a collection named sales_data
• Save the sample data to sales_data
C. Explore the data with Python
• Load data from database to Python
• Import data source and convert to pandas dataframe
• Get the required columns from dataframe by avoiding the unwanted ones.
D. Creating and training a model
We use Linear Regression Algorithm to create the model as described in the scenario. For creating the model, we will follow the below steps:
• Store a variable SalesCount, we will be predicting value of
• Generate the training set, train
• Select anything not in the training set and put it in the testing set, test
• Print the shapes of both sets
• Initialise the model class, linear_model
• Fit the model to the training data
Now we have trained a Linear Regression Model named linear_model.
E. Prediction
At this stage, we can use the trained linear_model to predict the required output/results using the test set test.
• Generate our predictions, linear_predictions for the test set
• Compute error between our test predictions, linear_predictions and the actual values, test
Now, in this stage, we have created a model named linear_model with Python which can predict the Sales Count of a retailer in a future day, by analysing various factors. For example, if there is an offer/discount on a particular ‘Category’ (Clothing, Sports Accessories etc.) on that day or whether the customer will be using ‘Microshares’ to buy and so on.
Conclusion:
This Predictive Model can be used by our AI Bot to help the retailers predict the future Sales Count depending upon the various factors mentioned. Likewise, by building different prediction models in our AI Bot, the main objectives like helping users make informed decisions based on their values can be fulfilled.
At the end of Q3 2018 the not-for-profit foundation Centre for Citizenship, Enterprise and Governance (CCEG) will have completed the Seratio Ecosystem to MVP (minimum viable product) level ready to start implementation in Q4 trials with significant partners in cities, regions and countries around the world. This has been a 7 year journey, started in May 2011, to create structures for good that allows us to travel through our lives guided by the beliefs we hold dear to our hearts. By establishing a digital currency of intangible value, we can use AI (Artificial Intelligence) Bots on our mobiles to navigate our interactions with organisations, products, projects, processes and even people based on their provenance and how aligned they are to our own values. Retailers will be able to incentivise and target to differing degrees whole communities that match most closely their corporate values. We will be able to exchange our token instruments of non-financial value with assets of financial value.
Now moving to engagement and integration within global markets across public, private, civil society and community sectors, the Seratio EcoSystem will be governed by its participants through a Distributed Autonomous Foundation (DAF) which itself will integrate with other DAO (organisations) structures representing the Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO’s) both small and big. We are an international community of over 120,000 with a vision which are ready to deliver, but the next phase is about market need, scalable adoption, and professional operational delivery to give us a world based on sustainable social impact. Our common goal is to form a world transacting on the optimisation of Total Value where both Financial and Non-Financial Value are of equal importance and driven by our individual and collective Values.
The Journey (2011-2018)
We started our journey in May 2011 and created digital impact measurement, the Social Earnings Ratio, which became the “fastest adopted social impact analysis metric in the world” (The Vatican, 2014). The S/E Ratio, a corollary to the financial P/E Ratio, digitises non-financial value, turns sentiment into financial value, and does it through Fast Data in under 10 seconds. Applied successfully to Social Value Act 2012, Modern Slavery Act 2015, EU Commissions, etc and a plethora of academic commissions, CCEG became the leading provider of SaaS platforms across many sectors, with its own journal Social Value & Intangibles Review.
In early 2016 we moved from just the measurement of value to the movement of value, adding a transaction of value capability through blockchain. We now have a CCEG Blockchain UN Lab which conducted UK’s first Initial Coin Offering in October 2017 with UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) guidance, an institutional blockchain consultancy and advisory service Rothbadi & Co, a large IP DLT consortium CyberFutures, and a university educational value forum www.EfficiencyExchange.ac.uk.
Justas Structuras Creare (Creating Just Structures) #goodistrending
The integrated components of the Seratio EcoSphere are described above with the following easy to read non-technical guides to understand the linkages:
The system as a whole is 85% complete (green shaded above) at present moment with 100% expected by October 2018. Originally expected to complete by July 2018, the additions of the DAF and Exchanges has extended the timescales a further 2-3 months. Although the securities financial exchange (yellow shaded above) will take further still with Swiss FINMA approval required, the security asset exchange is not an immediate requirement for day one as many others exist which we can use.
Moving Forward with Partners
With the end of the visioning and development cycle, comes a new challenge as we move into pilots and trials of our MVP to test and improve the Seratio system. We have in place already one pilot with a UK brand Mencap which has been delayed now to December 2018 due to their financial constraints, several demo’s and launches in November 2018 in Amsterdam and June 2019 in Copenhagen with Informa Plc (FTSE 100), as well as city launches in Taizhou (August 2018), Yiwu (October 2018), and country launches in Wales (August 2018) and Moldova (November 2018); other partners are now in discussion.
The Seratio Ecosystem is aided by AI to assess the complex analytical data available and to transparently steer consumers becoming their online friend. Similarly for public sector institutions, private sector corporates, civil society NGO’s – and their leaders – to become their values driven guide
As with all the work at CCEG, the Seratio EcoSphere is open source, and part of our contribution towards the United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
