我们要怎么处理我们的问题孩子:区块链?

作者:Olinga Taeed教授-商务部中国电子商务区块链委员会委员、专家顾问

[嘉宾字节 – DigitalBytes 28 March 2021]

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?

但是,像所有慈爱的父母一样,作为世界上第一个区块链教授,我对我们区块链孩子的成长感到沮丧,所以我们一直在研究阻碍我们成长和成熟的障碍,以及我们需要采取的行动来改变当前的轨迹。以下是7大建议,如果你不同意,请告诉我们!

  1. 贸易机构

本质上是分散的,这就存在一个组织我们自己的问题。目前有超过1000家交易所,其中Binance这样的交易所在24小时内的交易额通常接近300亿美元,但我们甚至没有一个行业代表机构。没有人支持,没有人回应政府和监管机构,或记者。中国没有自我监管,因此这可能使该行业面临外部过度监管。其他小得多的行业也有贸易协会,为什么我们没有呢?像Chandler Guo和Eric Gu这样的巨头是我们的顾问委员会成员,我们希望将这些鲸鱼聚集在一起,以提高加密行业的可信度。

2. 社会相关性

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。

3. 标准的互操作性

区块链没有TCP/IP,同样由于区块链的去中心化,区块链之间没有共同的标准和互操作性。在Hyperledger(我们的14份开源白皮书)等方面已经有了一些崇高的尝试,但目前我们看到的是分歧而不是融合。随着现有区块链种类的增加,情况变得更加复杂和不一致,包括难以捉摸的分叉和分裂,以及令人眼花缭乱的新工具,如ICO、IEO、STO、DeFi、NFT等,随着行业不断地寻找一些持久的东西,这些工具的涨落急剧上升。事实上,我们没有谷歌、Facebook、亚马逊的区块链——我们没有技术存在的理由,也没有大马士革的经验无可辩驳地向街上的人证明我们为什么需要它,就像互联网一样。TCP/IP是我的朋友Vint Cerf在70年代中期发明的,而谷歌是在大约25年后的1998年创建的。我们认为,我们只需要时间,到2030年,我们将会到达那里,如果不是更快的话,尽管根据中田聪2008年的论文,我们计划在2020年中期到达那里。

4. 扩展应用程序

我们需要能够指向一个规模化的主流行业应用,不仅要向世界展示我们可以做什么,而且要像一个非常大的高调的沙坑,来试验我们的区块链生态系统,而不仅仅是单个的产品解决方案。在英国努力这我们忙于创建一个£2.1亿DLT银行宣布在2020年12月在迪拜,2700年供应链和采购联盟组织在内罗毕,5克电动车社区充电解决方案,和最近宣布与潜在的石油和天然气行业的区块链平台建立的公司在伦敦证券市场上市。请不要再提这些小问题了,这不会让我们有任何进展,当然,即使是这些项目也很难在商业意义上缩小它们的领域,但确实证明了区块链的能力。

5. 学术研究

当然,像我这样的学者,在我们的方法中是行人,努力跟上蓬勃发展的区块链世界。然而,所有严肃的领域都借鉴了激烈的学术研究的严谨性,这些研究是不分党派的,没有议程,通过同行评审的期刊,如区块链《前沿》(Frontiers),这些期刊有490名编辑。对于零售读者,我们今年将重新推出《社会价值与无形资产评论》,以简单的语言解释区块链在非平凡情况下的好处。如果没有学术研究,世界就无法应对COVID-19。

6. 机构合作

政府和大公司并不像人们通常认为的那样是区块链的敌人,实际上他们将是采用区块链的主要代理人。Facebook Libra不仅是一个备受瞩目的联盟的失败,也是一个行业的失败,因为我们没有支持第一家推动这项技术的大公司;它并不完美,但我们都迷失在那一个。我们为中国政府在2020-21年试点的数字元CBDC项目表示赞赏,并通过“中国电子商务区块链委员会”向中国商务部提出建议。作为一个部门,如果我们要推动采用,我们必须接受这样的项目。能够在机构层面上运作的咨询公司非常缺乏,我们位于苏黎世的Rothbadi和伦敦的区块链团队就是罕见的例子,但我们需要行业中更严肃的参与者。

7. 全球的声音

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

像所有的孩子一样,他们最终会开花结果,而且很多孩子在成长过程中会经历成长的痛苦和磨难。区块链技术提供了很大的潜力,并且经过精心培养,也没有那么大肆宣传和喧闹,就像任何孩子提供的独特能力,我们才刚刚意识到。

What are we going to do with our problem child, Blockchain?

[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!

  1. 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. 

My toaster is racist, my kettle homophobic but my car my true friend

The New World Order of Ideology in Code: IoT, DLT, AI and 5G

KKK 2 TOASTER.png

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.

Olinga Ta'eed 

Blockchain as Non-Financial Currency: Reengineering our Data Consumption – #HaveMyData

Professor Olinga Taeed PhD FIoD *

Director, Centre of Citizenship, Enterprise and Governance

Council Member and Expert Advisor, Chinese Ministry of Commerce ‘China E-Commerce Blockchain Committee’

Data as a Non-Finanial Currency

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?

Tigris ART Celtic Bear

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.

dna__14_by_tigris_ta_eed__female__by_deepwarmdreaming2_dd5oifc

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

Procuring with our Values

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.

Further blockchain related reading:

GENERAL (transparency)

TECHNICAL (english) (chinese)

Seratio生态圈

一段旅程的终点,即是新征程的起点

总览

在2018年第三季度末,非营利性组织“公民、企业和治理研究中心(CCEG)”的Seratio生态系统将达成其MVP(最小可行产品)阶段,并准备于第四季度开始和来自世界不同城市、地区和国家的重要合作伙伴进行试运营。自2011年5月起至今,我们砥砺前行已7年之久,为(推动社会中的)“正面价值”构建基础,藉此我们可以秉承内心深处的信念,在人生旅途中将其作为指引。通过创造一种可以代表无形价值的数字资产,我们可以实现用手机端的AI(人工智能)机器人来协助我们与组织、产品、流程甚至人之间的互动,这一切将取决于它们的溯源结果以及它们与我们自身价值观的相符程度。商家将可以针对不同的社会群体采用不同程度的激励办法来吸引与自身的企业价值最为契合的社会群体。(注:例如,星巴克目前希望让自己的企业形象更趋于亲非洲裔社群;在美国,相当一部分企业曾支持NRA(美国步枪协会),而今它们希望与其保持距离)。我们还将能够用我们的非金融价值通证工具与具备金融价值的资产进行交易。

在全球市场范围内与各公共事业、私营企业、民间组织和社会群体的合作与整合过程中,Seratio生态系统将由其参与者们通过一个分布式自治基金(DAF)来进行管理,它将引入其它可代表非政府组织(NGOs)的DAO(组织)架构,不论规模大小。我们是一个拥有超过12万名参与者的国际化社群,已有来日可期的愿景,而下一步计划是关于市场需求、可扩展性应用以及职业运营交付,以便让我们去实现我们的共同目标:建立这样一个立足于可持续性社会影响力的世界、一个可以基于整体价值优化进行交易的世界,在其间金融和非金融价值将同等重要,并由个体和集体价值观共同驱动。

漫漫征程(2011-2018)

这段旅程始于2011年5月,我们创建了影响力数字化的测量方法,社会收益比率(S/E Ratio),它成为了“世界上普及速度最快的社会影响力分析指标”(梵蒂冈,2014)。S/E Ratio,作为代表金融性价值的市盈率(P/E Ratio)理论的推论,它将非金融价值转化为数字、将情绪转化为非金融价值,并通过快数据(Fast Data)在10秒以内实现这一过程。在成功地将其应用于社会价值法案2012、现代奴隶制法案2015欧盟项目以及一系列学术项目委托之后,CCEG成为了横跨许多行业的SaaS(软件即服务)平台的主要提供者,并拥有自己的期刊《社会价值和无形资产》。

2016年初,我们从单纯地测量价值转向了对价值流动的研究,通过了区块链添加了对价值进行交易的能力。我们现在下设一个CCEG区块链UN实验室——它于2017年10月在英国金融行为监管局(FCA)的指导下进行了英国本土的第一次代币发行;一个面向机构的区块链咨询顾问服务机构Rothbadi & Co;一个大型的、关于知识产权的分布式账本技术联盟CyberFutures;以及一个大学教育价值论坛(高校资质)www.EfficiencyExchange.ac.uk

建立坚实的理论架构 #goodistrending 

我们的目标一直是为社会带来开源的、结构性的正面变革,为此我们调研并发布了12本白皮书、一个名为Blockchain Alliance for Good的会员制区块链联盟 Frontiers in Blockchain,并与一家主流学术出版商共同发布了世界上第一本同行评审学术期刊《区块链前沿》。

开发周期

CN seratio ecosystem v2

Seratio生态圈中集成的组件如上图所示,下面是一些简单易读的非技术性指南便于您帮助理解其间的联系:

现状

Seratio Ecosystem - circles

目前整个系统已经完成了85%(上图中绿色的部分),预计2018年10月100%完成。由于在项目开发期间添加了DAF和交易所的部分,导致原计划于2018年7月完成的目标延后了2-3个月。其中金融通证交易所(上图中黄色的)尚需等瑞士金融市场监管局(FINMA)颁发许可,由于市面上有很多其它我们可以使用的选择,因此该金融性数字资产交易所的需求尚不迫切。

与合作伙伴携手向前

在愿景和研发即将结束之际,随着我们即将进入对Seratio系统MVP(最小可行产品)的试运营阶段来对其进行测试和改进,我们迎来了新的挑战。我们已经和一个英国品牌Mencap达成共识进行试运行,该计划由于对方的财政紧缩被推迟至2018年12月,还将与英富曼集团(富时指数前100)分别于2018年11月在阿姆斯特丹以及2019年6月在哥本哈根进行数个演示和发布,同时还有在台州(2018年8月)、义乌(2018年10月)计划进行的城市发布,以及威尔士(2018年8月)和摩尔多瓦(2018年11月)进行的全国发布;还有更多的合作方在积极洽谈中。

=> United Nations Sustainable Goals (SDG) 2030

如果您想成为我们的合作伙伴,请尽管联系我们:blockchain.lab@cceg.org.uk

ENGLISH

The Seratio EcoSphere

End of a Journey, Beginning of a New

 

Summary

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

Our aim remains to enable open source structural change for good,  having researched 12 Whitepapers, a membership association for Blockchain Alliance for Good, and the world’s first peer reviewed academic journal Frontiers in Blockchain, jointly launched with a mainstream academic publisher.

Development Cycle

Seratio Ecosytem final image

The integrated components of the Seratio EcoSphere are described above with the following easy to read non-technical guides to understand the linkages:

Current Status

Seratio Ecosystem - circles

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.

If you wish to be a partner please feel free to contact us at blockchain.lab@cceg.org.uk

CHINESE