(serene orchestral music) (plane engine purring) (wheels creaking) Hi, my name is Ian Khan. After meeting with hundreds of professionals, experts, industry influencers, and others through 2016 and '17, I found a severe need across the board to help figure out what the fuss was all about, what this new technology was all about, what Blockchain was all about. (orchestral music) Blockchain City is the true story of Blockchain and the reality of how it impacts us all, as people, our cities, our workplaces, our families, and our future. (orchestral music) Some time after the year 2008, an entity or a group of people under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto came out with the famous white paper that highlighted a new electronic form of currency that would independently change everything about money.
A new revolution had begun. Blockchain was the core technology foundation of this new currency and this revolution has now culminated into a global phenomenon where governments, private and public sector firms are embarking on creating more value, more change, and solving some of the world's biggest problems. (orchestral music) (transitions to traditional music) My journey of understanding this global movement to create more trust, secure our transactions, and create more value started in the city of Dubai. This is where the vision of tomorrow is driving an aggressive strategy of how technology can augment our capabilities.
Follow me on this journey as I embark on a quest to find the truth from those who know best where we're headed. In the middle of the Arabian Peninsula, one of the most well-known cities is Dubai. Fast-growing metropolis and the epicenter of change in The Middle East. Dubai has always been synonymous with progress, challenging the status quo, and dreaming big.
The government of Dubai, with its vision of tomorrow, powered by technology has embarked on an aggressive plan to enable a Blockchain-based government by 2020. The UAE also has a national plan to enable Blockchain across all seven emirates by the year 2030. (traditional music) Don't fear from technology.
Be smart in how to deal with these technologies. It doesn't matter of it's a Blockchain or big data or any type of technology, even our smart devices. As long as we know why we are using it.
If you don't know how to use them, go and educate yourself. Make sure that you utilize the best of these technologies for your own benefit. We need to be wise enough to understand what these technologies would add value to my life. And for me personally, as long as it will make my life much simpler and much easier, I will go for it.
(traditional music) From manufacturing to logistics, transportation, healthcare, and real estate, every sector, every industry is set to undergo a radical shift in the next few years, potentially because of Blockchain. Yet, we do not understand Blockchain to an extent where we could really be comfortable with it. To date, technology has been a domain of computer programmers, experts, and leaders alone but just like Blockchain promises democratization of technology, we need to break down the barriers to understand Blockchain itself. We must find out what Blockchain really is and more than that, how it can be defined by what value it brings.
(traditional music) (transitions to dramatic percussive music) A Blockchain is essentially a breakthrough in database technology. It's a new kind of database system that because of its architecture enables everybody on the system to trust the system. It's a tool for decentralizing relationships, contracts, and decision making so that they aren't mediated by gatekeepers of various kinds. It's a very powerful idea. If you use a little example here to make it a bit more illustrative to the viewers, you could think of a transaction which we all observe. So let's assume all the viewers here which are not watching us right now would have a little black notebook on their lap and would kind of take notes of all the transactions they are seeing.
And they are seeing right now a person here standing which maybe not they are not familiar with and that person is holding $20 in his hands. So you have super sharp eyes and you can see the ID and everything and this is a legal token, so now you see that I give this $20 to this gentleman over here which you don't know but you have seen the transaction took place. Now, you write this transaction in your little black notebook and calculate a little sum to that and you add all the subsequent transactions to that. Now, let's say in five minutes I'm saying, oh, wait a minute, that weren't $20, that were $100 and I want my $100 back. So all the people who are viewing this transaction, I would have now to convince that their transaction, which have been kind of jotted down in their little black notebooks, are not actually $20 but $100.
Now, how would I do that, right? Because I don't know how many people actually have a ledger have written down this transaction and on top of that, I would have kind of pried my way through, I have to persuade them to change the entry. Why would they do that, right? Because they don't know me, there's nothing they can gain here, and in parallel, all the other transactions which are ongoing, because more people kind of doing payments, they have to be jotted down as well. So they would be super busy and that would be prohibitively expensive for me to do so so economically it doesn't make sense. - [Ian] Despite the various explanations that Blockchain is defined as, it's still hard to sometimes comprehend the actual technology. And for that, we must understand it beyond just its architecture.
One of the most innovative and forward-thinking countries in the world is also one of the tiniest European nations, Estonia. Over the last two decades or so, Estonia has really laid the foundation of a digitally-powered nation and is now reaping its rewards. Estonia is also considered to be a leader in Blockchain, which in some ways is often a less represented fact.
(dramatic music) Estonia kind of had Blockchain databases before the term Blockchain was coined but I would have to say that Estonia is not a Blockchain nation, so we don't run fully on Blockchain, we just happen to be in a position where we created similar databases that are now referred to as Blockchain technologies and we use that in our peoples' registry and to run our state databases and systems. - [Ian] One of the other benefits of Blockchain is also mass collaboration and the ease of sharing information to create value. The Netherlands, with its Dutch Blockchain Coalition, is spearheading efforts to create global awareness and impact. Its missing piece to support collaboration between different companies, between different governments in a supply chain, it can help you to work together and to give you as a person a better user experience and make new things possible.
- [Ian] And yet, where would we be without really addressing the need for us humans to live the life of acknowledgement, respect, dignity, and value? Maybe Blockchain can help us realize our true human potential. For me, Blockchain is gonna help me become more me. It's gonna celebrate my individuality.
I feel like the IP of who we are and our ideas will have value and meaning and I think that's gonna be a huge shift. (dramatic music) (transitions to orchestral music) The idea of Blockchain being a radical new technology that can address many different challenges we currently face as people across the world is sometimes hard to accept. How can one technology often confused with Bitcoin have so many different applications? The answer may be similar to something we faced about 30 years ago with the mass commercialization of personal computing. Skeptics back then probably asked, how could computers be used in every profession? How can they increase productivity? How can microprocessors change the world? Today, we have overcome all of those questions as time has proved the value of computing technology beyond anything we could have imagined.
(bright music) What then are some of the possibilities of Blockchain, and how can we really use it beyond just financial transactions? There's literally thousands of projects that people are building out, identity systems, reputation systems, governance tools, accounting systems. For us, it was just the kind of financial benefit and the ease of actually accessing digital services or public services that you don't have to go to the taxman and stay there for two hours and sign a piece of paper, that you could do it from your computer. It's just comfort and it saves you a lot of time.
Also, it saves you finances. When we started The Smart Dubai Initiative in 2014, we continued with this kind of research exercise to see what are the advanced technologies, emerging technologies that will take Dubai to its next level. You know that in Dubai, we started digitization of our government in 2000 so we've been into it like in now almost two decades in digitizing our infrastructure. We know today whenever anyone talked about Blockchain, they think about the financial sector but we dig deeper. What Blockchain is enabling us is doing something like social goods.
If you for example look into what The United Nations are doing or the World Wildlife Fund, using the Blockchain technology to prevent overfishing in the South Pacific or to prevent children trafficking by using Blockchain technology, then you can see that there are really societal problems which can be addressed or are currently addressed in prototypes by Blockchain imitations. From efficiency to identity management, financial transactions and more, there seems to be a vast range of applications. (bright music) We started as the publishers and we saw the print media going down.
We were trying to find the answers, where it is going, what is the immediate future. So we were thinking that we need to give all the power to the authors, those who create the media. We realized very quickly that there are so many inequalities in the world and that without giving the ownership to those who really create the value in the economy, there would be no possibility to bring back the trust and create something that will disrupt these monopolies that are controlling the entire media space now. Trust, democratization, and more. They also say that Blockchain works as a tool for accountability, recording every transaction, an immutable, unalterable and permanent record of things.
This, in fact, helps with tracking information because it's always available on Blockchain. Can the industry benefit from this? Perhaps one of the big challenges that creative artists face can be solved with Blockchain-related technologies. (bright music) So many examples of how it can change the music industry, I mean, a very simple example is if you've signed a contract for somebody for, say, a record deal or a publishing deal, it's all about percentages and it's about at this point, this happens, at this point, this happens, this person gets paid when this is recouped. Anytime any artist has ever audited a label, they've always found money so I think there's something in being able to digitize your contracts into smart contracts to help you interface with the services of the future. (bright music) One of the the biggest bugbears in the music industry that's failed time and time again is to try to create a verified authorized global database of music, of songs and repertoire.
And it's failed time and time again because it's been about ownership, it's been about this is mine, we're going to try and do this all to ourselves. But in opening that up and becoming an open database where people can author that and attribute their worth to that and potentially be a part of that, that payment in the future also makes these things possible. I feel finally, we can create a music ecosystem that is worthy of the music that we love. Content creators can now be compensated for their hard work and finally fight the war with piracy which costs the music industry billions of dollars every year. But can you and I as content creators benefit with a technology such as Blockchain as well? (bright music) We are putting the contents of Wikipedia plus an extra million articles that we've added to Wikipedia on the Blockchain. What that means is that if somebody creates a new article and adds it to the database, they actually mine by doing that some tokens.
We call them IQ tokens. What that means is that you become a co-owner, you have a financial stake in the creation and equality of knowledge. - [Ian] It seems like challenges within government, banking, finance, and even real estate could now have an answer to create a higher rate of return on efforts, work, and productivity in general.
One of our projects is to add efficiency in our reconciliation system between bank accounts. Normally, this kind of transaction take almost 45 days. And we thought by implementing Blockchain, it will add 30 to 40% efficiency but it gave us 100%! It dropped that time from 45 days to zero, so why not transferring this experience to the rest transactions in the government, whether it be internally, in our, for instance, HR transactions, procurement transaction, but also the transaction for the users. Why I should wait for days or months to buy a house? Why it's not only a matter of pressing a button? Just imagine how complicated bureaucracies are, right? And translating that into code which is what's required by putting those operations on the Blockchain sounds like a very tall order.
There is natural tension actually between government operations in general and the Blockchain because what the Blockchain is is dis-intermediating relationships between individuals. (bright music) (transitions to tense drum music) Distributed dis-intermediated relationships, a distributed ledger, so many ways in which Blockchain is defined today. But at the epicenter of every industry, services, products, and a profession is a pivotal need, something that forms the foundation of everything that we all and advertently have a need for, trust. And when it comes to the complex workings of governments across the world, the need for consensus. (traditional music) First, you have to find the trust in your citizens that they trust the government with their data, so it's a psychological thing to actually earn the trust, and then you have to have a very rigid system of infrastructure with these databases that we can actually access different data and put it together.
I think these are the first steps. It's definitely not an easy journey but to stay competitive, I do think it's necessary. In Dubai, we didn't take every sector individually. We took it from an experience perspective. So when we launched this strategy, we focused on three elements.
The first element is to transfer the applicable government services to be 100% to be run on top of a Blockchain. The second component, to support building a Blockchain industry in Dubai by attracting startups and entrepreneurs in this industry. And the third component to be a global thought leader was come to again the Blockchain industry. When it's come to transferring the government services, we managed to bring almost 60 different bodies, whether be government or non-government, and we came up with 20 use cases that by 2020 will be transferred to be run on top of Blockchain. One of them is the real estate but other is having health records on top of Blockchain, educational records on top Blockchain, and so forth.
And by bringing all these government agencies and non-government agencies in the same room, this by itself was a huge success because the main challenge in any government not only in Dubai but even globally is the silos happen between government entities. They don't talk to each other. At The European Blockchain Center, we do workshops with politicians where we discuss what needs to be done and where to start. One very important building block is how you deal with responsibility and accountability, how do you regulate Blockchain startups as they are virtual and decentralized and distributed in these autonomous organizations? So it's really difficult to say how to regulate them and where they are creating value. So it's important for these governments and for these political decision-makers to understand how their system work and how they can contribute to growth and value creation in those countries.
(traditional music) (transitions to lively music) From some of the largest cities to small towns, everyone seems to be driven with this need for change and the story of one small town on the outskirts of Zurich, Switzerland, to become an outlier is an inspirational story. The municipality of Zug is the first in the world to experiment with cryptocurrency payments for governments, and also to enable voting over Blockchain. While this may mean nothing for established democracies in the modern world, this could have a deep impact on countries where equality, transparency, and true democracy is just a notion. How did this small town, also referred to as Crypto Valley, start with an idea so profound that it could have a worldwide impact? (lively music) The City Council of Zug, five persons from five different parties, we wanted to know what's the difference for example between Blockchain and Bitcoin and so we invited a young student who explained us this difference.
We didn't understand everything. (laughs) We decided we accept Bitcoin for payments of certain fees of our city and administration, not taxpaying. This would have been a little bit too risky and we didn't ask any experts about this. We said, just do it, let's try it, and it was really the first time I think in world history that a city administration, that public administration accepted a cryptocurrency and I think it's a good and an easy story to explain people about what Blockchain could be and what use cases exist about Blockchain. (lively music) (transitions to percussive music) Collaboration, working together, and creating an ecosystem all seemed to be the right approach, from creating think tanks to councils that help drive the mission. (uplifting music) We've seen already many cities and even private sector approaching us to take lessons learned but sometime also taking the same implementation to be implemented in their cities.
Working very closely with the Estonian Government. Working very closely with the Indian Government, the Maltese Government to share these experiences. Actually having the the largest Blockchain summit run here in Dubai and attracting more than 100 speakers and more than 6,000 attendees, this by itself is a success story by how we shared our experiences here in Dubai and transforming it to the world by having this kind of a platform. (traditional music) A lot of cities are working on smart cities.
You can use Blockchain to build real smart cities instead of only talking about it so focus on the topics which are already important in your city. For example, streetlights with a sensor in it and then the street light is broken, the sensor triggers a smart contract and the smart contract sends out a micro deal and then a certified repairman has fixed the streetlights, then he gets paid immediately. You can't only read about Blockchain. You must also start these small experiments and the technology is good enough to run those experiments to understand better what will be the opportunities and also the challenges of Blockchain for your own city.
(uplifting music) Blockchain technology is often called an enabler for trust but what does this really mean? Does it mean that everything stored on Blockchain is accurate? Does it mean that Blockchain will correct any inaccuracies in the information? Or does it just mean that Blockchain has a way to account for information every single time? In my understanding, technology is a big factor for creating trust, just as we are sure that airplanes fly and cars can drive, that electricity will light up in a room at the flick of a button. If it's not trust that technology enables, then what is it? How would the distributed computing of things such as voting rights enable trust? There are many questions that still need to be answered. (uplifting music) It's really kinda something which is interesting because the discussion around trust is something which is kind of rooted deep in human beings.
And maybe you trust institutions but essentially, they are also human beings. Now, with the promise of Blockchain, many people argue that there is no need for trusting anymore because there is certainty. Well, of course, there is still a need for trust because now we have to trust the technology. But the piece which technology takes care of, namely the visibility of the transactions which are now transparent in the open daylight, that is something which creates trust that that transaction is secure, right? But still the trust element is still here but it's kind of improving the certainty in a transaction. There are these fundamental, kinda psychological boundaries in older societies, I would say, people who don't trust their governments at all because they've just had a very bad history of data breaches and the government using their data in a non-efficient way. In Estonia, I can say that we have a very tough data privacy laws.
Once your data is given to the state, they can't really use your data if they don't have a ground for it. This is a very serious offense if someone looks at your data and they don't have a reason to look at their data. And we also try to ask the data only once so if you have given your data to the government, there's no reason why you should do it again. Blockchain technology will profoundly transform economic, social, and political systems. It is a new trust architecture and we're gonna be able to take essentially thousands of years of technology that we've built up to this point and place it on top of a more sound foundation, a more equitable foundation also. That said, it's gonna take time for this brand new technology to ramify.
It requires greater scalability on the public side of things. You don't have a lot of scalability and you don't have a lot of privacy and confidentiality. You can do that in some ways but we need more robust mechanisms for privacy and confidentiality.
We made an app for the transportation of toxic waste and when you transport toxic waste, there's a lot of administrative burden. Almost every truck with waste will cross a border but if the truck can only use this application and tell the border it doesn't make sense at all, you must work together with the other countries the truck is passing. So it was immediately clear for us, we must work together with Belgium, with Germany. So we must collaborate with governments worldwide to share prototype, to share knowledge, and to make decisions. You can also learn faster working together.
(traditional music) Usually, in Switzerland, trust in government is high. That's a good place for making tests with such a system. I think it's a better system than for example the e-voting systems we already have but they are on a centralized computer, the best advantage this system has is you can always check, is my vote, my ballot. This could be also a measure against corrupt states, maybe. Okay, the dictator would have to accept this system.
I think that could be a problem. You also can be a little bit critical. I think that's necessary. That's not stupid not to be enthusiastic.
You must be open for this new technology. Yeah, I think so you get trust with daily experience, with simple use cases, with good stories to tell to the people. I think storytelling is the most important thing here. The future of many ambitious projects and solutions of problems is on the horizon and Blockchain could save the day. However, how far is this mass adoption and what would it take for the world as we know it to run on Blockchain? Is there an unrealistic expectation mixed with hype that is somehow diluting the real message of Blockchain? How would Blockchain work with some of the upcoming technologies including artificial intelligence, a revolutionary way of self-learning robots and machines being able to make decisions on our behalf? Or the Internet of Things, the technology behind autonomous cars, connected homes, and beyond.
(percussive music) (transitions to orchestral music) The next few years will be a very short time to tell but when we talk about five plus, 10 plus years, the Internet of Things will definitely have an effect in the next five years, connected by some kind of identity. So I do believe that there has to be a global form of identity if people are in different societies and they want to be connected with each other. Blockchain technology will play a major role there to connect these different databases. If you look at the convergence of different technologies right now as Blockchain, AI and even other things, then it's interesting to see that exactly there, you see topics like Industry 4.0
or autonomous vehicles, autonomous cars and if you think about those kind of machines, the smart machines packed with sensors driving over the street with the need to coordinate with other vehicles on the street, then you have sensors, you have the Internet of Things, you have decision-making which is based on probabilistic and probably some AI elements. And on top of that, you need to have a communication layer, an inter-organizational, or in this regard, a system, an operating system across the different vehicles which makes the transaction secure and certain so that you can know with certainty how those cars communicate in order to maneuver through the traffic. But it's still very immature and the more projects around with Blockchain technology, the more aware you are of imperfections at these moments and the more we study on the security part or the legal parts, the more I understand how much work there is to do to understand better and to regulate. I think it's very promising that a lot of governments are taking the leads.
This goes much faster than with the rise of the internet and I don't think that's a bad thing. I think it's normal because we've learned so much from the internet revolution. It's normal that it goes faster this time.
A future driven by a technology that has not been with us for many decades, and the rate at which Blockchain has matured is incredible! Is this all a high-risk value proposition that can potentially have a fatal result? Do we need to be able to create certain maturity milestones before we can truly adopt technology at a mass scale? Perhaps the way we have traditionally adopted technology is also under disruption. What should we as regular people expect from the future and how should we accept tomorrow as it's driven by the convergence of Blockchain, AI, and the Internet of Things? (orchestral music) Many of my other city managers, colleagues globally asking me, don't you fear that Blockchain will disrupt your role as a government? When talking about government, we have main two elements or roles: to authenticate transactions and make sure that this transaction is secure. Blockchain will allow us to even take these two roles to its next level to make sure when there is an authentication component, it's happened faster and even safer. For normal people, I don't think they should worry about Blockchain or AI or IOT.
They're never gonna use a Blockchain. They may use cryptocurrencies, they may use applications that software developers build on Blockchains but they don't really use the World Wide Web protocols right now. They just use applications that software developers have hopefully configured into compelling elegant user interfaces where you can essentially have greater agency in your professional life, greater agency in your social, political interactions so you will be more in control of what you're doing and in greater ownership. If you think about having in the future control over your digital traces, for now, we know Facebook and the like, they have all the data and we have no control over them even though this data belongs to me. If you think about using your mobile phone or your credit card or your Facebook account, we grew up with this notion of in order to be part of the digital world, we have to pay and we pay with our data and we sort of bought into this argument. That is not a given.
We can think of systems which are designed in a way that you stay in control of your digital traces. That is important for people to understand that this is potentially the paradigm shift. There could be something like Facebook on Blockchain where you are always in control of your data but it also means that you have to have a digital mindset which allows you actually to be able to manage your digital persona, your digital representation, and that is something we also have to learn. As we accept and know that we are responsible for our body, that we are also responsible and accountable for our digital person in the digital sphere. This technology is really working and it's really easy to use this technology. You only need a cellphone and not much more and that's something even people in Africa, they have it.
They can do it. It's a chance for people to have more democracy in the world and the real goal is to make the world better. It's not making money, first. Maybe after that but the first step is to improve this world and here, technology can help. (orchestral music) I feel like the things that you want to do in life, the things that you're passionate about, what helps you to be good for yourself or to your friends and to the planet, that combination is where I feel this Blockchain is beginning to help us be the combination of that, AI and Internet of Things. That combination, that intersection of those things, and the people being able to follow their dreams, ultimately, we want to live in harmony with our planet and we want to live in harmony with each other.
(orchestral music) (somber music) Tomorrow is not here yet and despite that fact, we are actively building the future with our actions. Whether it is Blockchain or any other technology, perhaps something that has not even been invented yet, what is the path for us as a race, as humans on this planet to make this world a better place? It may seem unreasonable but our ability to question things and create paths to do things differently has always led us to change the status quo. Whether you are someone who is working within an industry or striving to be a professional, whether you are a bystander to this revolution of a technology-driven world or an active participant in creating this change, you cannot avoid being part of the space through which humanity is currently going through. (orchestral music) This is perhaps one of the most incredible times we have ever seen because the amount of change that has happened over the last 30 years and that potentially will happen in the next two decades will redefine us as change-makers and dreamers.
(orchestral music) For now, the dream of changing the world one town and one city at a time is slowly becoming a reality through the trailblazing efforts of early adopters who questioned convention and break stereotypes. This is the right time to join the race, no matter what your pace is. This is the best possible environment to start learning about how the world is changing.
This is a unique opportunity to be part of something where all of us can create value together and turn the dream of happiness, fulfillment, and positive change into reality. So say yes to positive change and accepting that change is the only constant. (orchestral music) (transitions to percussive music) (transitions to orchestral music)
2021-11-30