Future Blockchain Summit Dubai
We're the new cool kids on the block - 60 million crypto wallets have been opened - sounds like a big number but it is not. It might seem crowded but it is still small
I'm the father of the podcast, which I started back in the 90s [ahem]
lets talk about real numbers and real statistics - Brock did you pull them out of your cowboy hat?
There is a lot of data that has not been collected, but with the blockchain you can extract more data with block explorers than with any other systems. We have seen $10B come in with ICOs in the last couple fo years
People think of Ethereum and Bitcoin as competitive, but they do different things - Bitcoin is the currency for the internet; Ethereum is general purpose technology that lets you build anything - what it did is standardise how to issue tokens
now there is an incentive to develop a new protocol - when TCP/IP was invented you couldn't own it, but with Eos etc you have an incentive to make new ones
I see blockchain as an evolution fo the concept of peer to peer networks - what people got excited about with wikipedia was people collaborating worldwide to make something. Blockchain gives people a financial incentive to collborate
Blockchain is an evolution of the internet - not an internet of information but an internet of value.
The internet is a data transport protocol, but it is insecure - at the time cryptography was too compute intensive; blockchain is what secures it [by making it more computationally intensive? what?]
Most people aren't going to understand how the technology works - you need use cases to show it to them
Brock, why are you dressed like a gypsy? What is this
I came straight from my flight, so I have sweatpants and a batman utility belt. In my business no-one will work with me if I wear a suit.
Bitcoin will continue to be part of this whole ecosystem, but ti won't be the only blockchain out there. Its the coin that launched a thousand ships [so it will end with a Trojan horse?]
we have a game on my podcast asking "is the token name is real or fake?"
well, thats the same as web domains int he 90s - there was s search ending called dogpile
Putting Wikipedia on the blockchain will give people an incentive to contribute. The protocol will support all kinds of encyclopedia article competing on the same topics
We're building everipedia on Eos, and there will be an IQ token launched. If you have Eos you will have some IQ tokens.
Everipedia is a superset of Wikipedia - because wikipedia is Creative commons we can fork it and edit the articles
we're not just here for the upsides - what are the issue, the holes the opportunities?
There are lots of questions: will it scale? how will it be governed? how will banks react? how will governments respond?
as AI and blockchain converge you can have autonomous entities that have economic power - how will that work out?
Theera er 3 billion people on the planet without access to financial services, and another 2 billion with limited access - being able to move money more easily with smaller fees will help them
the biggest worry for me is the amount of fraud involved - it is caveat emptor absolutely
in my experience making money for the first time doesn't make you a better human being
we need a new taxonomy for crypto assets - what are all these things, how do they fit in, how do we compare them
Name a government that is embracing this in a big way [Brock didn't name one]
the Dubai Government expects to be the Blockchain Capital by 2020 - UAE and Dubai have a Big Hairy Audacious Goal there
The next speaker isn't here so it's open mic time - what have you got?
On behalf of Smart Dubai, I want to welcome you to the future blockchain summit.
Teh Dubai Blockchain strategy rests on 3 pillars: first we will make all Government transactions on blockchain by 2020
The 2nd pillar is to provide an enabling ecosystem to empower developers - we had blockchain developers picth in 2017 and in2018 - the winning ideas will be annoucned tomorrow
the 3rd pillar is to position Dubai as a global thought leader in blockchain by hosting events like this one to encourage developments
Smart Dubai doesn't view technology as an end, but as a way to improve people's lives - we want to put technology at the service of human beings
welcome Omar bin Sultam al Olama - the first minister of AI in the world
The Prime Minister thinks that adopting Blockchain will improve the happiness of people
We have been trying out the possibilities of Blockchain for 2 years before adopting it for government
the whole world is moving to a future that is more decentralized, and we need more safety and security
we see Blockchain as the si,plest most secure way to exchange national data
the WEF sees UAE as the most efficient government on earth - Governtment efficiency is key
secondly we want to create industries based on this new tehcnology
and finally we want to be the example for otehr governements
we have 389 million government documents a year - we want 50% of them on the blockchain - saving 77 Million hours and 1.6 billion km of driving
the commitment is 50% of UAE government transactions on the blockchain by 2021 - if that succeeds we will move to 100% after that
we want ot be the most future ready government in the world.
we will implement blockchain in education, healthcare and real estate to help citizens, make government efficent in energy, identification and security, to put legislation in place to encourage this
We are going to adopt AI to make government processes more efficient
AI and Encryption complement one another - with AI you can't tell how it made a decision - blockchain can help us keep a record of how the decisions were made
Combining Blockchain with Artificial Intelligence is key - [shows this cartoon] https://marketoonist.com/2018/01/blockchain.html
We've heard from His Excellency about the UAE level, I'm going to talk about the Dubai level. If you're a blockchain expert please stand up
Yes, blockchain was not invented in Dubai, Satoshi Nakomoto is not a Dubai citizen
we want to be the blockchain capital of the world. If you have spent any time in Dubai over the last 10 years you can see that we make big promises and we deliver
The no fake news CNN has called us the Capital of Blockchain
Sheikh Al Maktoum announced that Dubai will be fully powered by Blockchain by 2020. We believe that we are the architects of the future, and so should you.
We are enabling government services and setting up the regulatory environment to encourage a blockchain ecosystem for startups and businesses here
we are using blockchain to make city transactions more efficient and settle quickly, including renting and buying property. We're putting all the commercial registries on one blockchain
some of these things haven't been done before - we believe Dubai is the testbed for this technology.
This hasn't been easy - it hasn't all been roses and flowers
What we learned: You need buy in from top leadership. Don't focus on the technology, but start with customer experience. Map out the pain points, and then design a future state.
There will be technical challenges, and blockchain brings many parties involved by default.
Put into your plan that there will be 20-30% reworking during the project. If you can use Blockchain as a service, that will simplify things.
we want to make Dubai the happiest city on earth
I'm working on everipedia - it's been a long time since I cofounded wikipedia, and I joined everipedia more recently
I have a PhD in philosophy, specialising in the theory of knowledge. Knowledge is much harder than we think it is.
We have taken care of the quantity problem of information - we can now answer any question in a few clicks, but the quality of the answer is not great
I look at wikipedia and think we can do better - I see it as a missed opportunity.
we could have articles about every proper noun. We could rate articles. We could have multiple competing articles and have the ratings decide which was best
for example, everipedia is open to everything. To prove this to myself I made an article about my left thumb
one of the reasons more people aren't contributing to wikipedia is that it is hard to contribute - you need to learn a markup language
What if we were to collect all the encyclopedia articles in the world and have people rate them I think it would be more interesting
We will build everipedia's IQ tokens on Eos, which launches in June. If you edit an article you will be mining tokens for yourself. This will mean you contribute to the governance of everipedia
In phase 2, we want to bring other publishers onto everipedia's network - making the Greater Wiki possible - by putting the world's encyclopaedias on the blockchain, the content will have a chance to rise to the top
go to https://everipedia.org/ and get an account
Salvador Anglada is the chief business officer of Etisalat
Dubai is a disruptive model, just as companies have disrupted industries
Blockchain is only 10 years old, and it has not had any significant success, but ti comes with the promise of transparency
The content creators have suffered so much on the internet because they could not control their copyrights
at Etisalat we have been disrupted once, and we don't want it to happen again
I work for CNN on business and technology, which means I talk more and more about blockchain these days.
it's kinds of s contradiction that we are talking about the regulatory framework when blockchain is supposed to end that
when I talk to regulators it's less about how to control blockchain than how it can help them
Technologists in general don't like the word regulation - but governements are adopting technology at a very fast rate.
what we decided to do in Malta was to look at the technologies first, and once they are approved pass them on to the other regulators - we have looked at Distributed Ledger Technologies first
if they want to build financial systems on top of them, then they need to talk to the financial regualtors too.
with regulation comes a lot of burden and wastage. What we are tyring to do is eliminate the wastage but keeping the regualtor intact wiht a view of the trusted system
we need a neutral party to enforce a use case, and the regualtor can play that role
we're told that North Korea has been the biggest beneficiary of Bitcoin, so South Korea has regulated it more - don't we need to be careful of money going to rogue regimes?
We need to rethink the realationship between the private and public sectors - governments don't completely understand how this will affect things - we want to work to see how it can hlpe
you're never going to see the underlying money laundering regulation go away. Blockchain is a friend of regulators in that it keeps a record of transactions that we can inspect - it helps us do our job
what countries are taking the right approach to blockchain?
UAE is taking a strong stance, Outside Dubai, the monetary authority of Singapore is trying to make sense of blockchain, not stop it or hinder it
do you have to customize for each country?
A company can be part of many use cases - a Know Your Customer rule can be translated into a smart contract
Malta was inspired by what is happening here in Dubai- I'm not just saying that because I am here
We are keeping the money laundering regulations intact, but we are requiring any DLT based out of Malta to have traceability built in
a DLT can have a legal personality in Malta, so that liability for transactions is attached
are there industries that could be revolutionised? College Transcripts?
The shipping and transportation industry, which matters to Denmark, could use a blockchain
we tried using blockchain to transfer Aid to a developing country, but found that we could not make it work
Public sector can act as an enabler wiht lande records tax records and so on
government is one, but anywhere you have a supply chain - shipping containers, food etc
Blockchain transforms Identity
There is a saying: the riches are in the niches - David Kravitz is here to talk scalable hybrids
is a built-in cryptocurrency required for permissioned blockchains? No - the incentives are different
extending cryptocurrency-baed blockchains to life or death situations is a bad idea
Vint Cerf: blockchain "has become a kind of magic pixie dust" but if "the parties involved in the system are known, then they can be evaluated…for trustworthiness"
there is a danger with ledgers like IOTA that all nodes have to see all others transaction
I don't want your toaster giving me the update code for my pacemaker
to trust transactions we need provenance for them, so we sign the blockchain keys with standard public key certificates
The Dubai Real Estate blockchain is creating a digital original title deed in the system, and using blockchain to secure it
in october 2017 we launched he Dubai Real Estate blockchain - it hosts 500,000 title deeds and has 150 transactions a day, and connect 1.5 million entities
owners can now verify their ownership on the blockchain
We are adding a Listing service to allow people to buy and sell property online using smart contracts online
we are documenting how developers, banks and other government departments can have access to the apis of the land registry blockchain