What if you could be rewarded for your low energy consumption habits by discounted interest rates on your mortgage?
What if the consequences of global climate agreements were automated by smart contracts in a fully transparent, immutable way with complete consensus from all parties?
What if you could accurately price carbon storage in soils and forests, with fully traceable, global accounting?
Well, it just might be happening right now - all thanks to blockchain, or more accurately, distributed ledger technologies.
DLTs have the potential to revolutionise the storage of data and more importantly, how we think about consensus and value.
The last great change in ledger technology was the double-entry ledger created in the 15th century, which revolutionised commerce.
Now, a new distributed ledger promises to do the same once more.
Imagine a database that is decentralised across thousands of machines, instead of just one, the contents or which are verifiable and open to all, are tied to automatic smart contracts and are immutable.
Such a technology has the potential to destroy established business models based on centralisation and middle-men.
All of a sudden the need for brokers and central banks falls away.
Citizens of countries without the infrastructure to provide safe banking and finance suddenly only need a smartphone to get banked and start trading across the globe.
Tickets and passports are replaced with NFTs.
And, most interestingly for those seeking to change the economy, a whole new decentralised financial system becomes possible.
Anyone can trade with anyone. Value can be packaged and exchanged in countless different ways - as long as it is stored on the ledger for all to see you can create any promise, record it and trade it.
The whole notion of money changes as crypto-currencies grow in validity.
Money and value are transformed. People are connected, central authorities are no longer necessary hubs and validators of consensus.
Power shifts as finance becomes democratised.
It’s an interesting example of one of the most powerful concepts in permaculture, which is to reframe the problem as the solution.
Our financial systems, our money and whole sense of value is tied to our linear, extractive economic model - the business as usual practices that have us chained to our own unravelling. But as the vision behind the system falters, finance, money and value all come into question.
Suddenly, the threat becomes an opportunity, the obstacle a positive encounter.
What if by changing the notions of value, money and how they are created and exchanged we could free ourselves from the dead weight of 20th century economic thought and create an economy fit for purpose in the years ahead?
With this in mind, I wrote a long list of questions and had the great pleasure of asking them of Dr Pedro Baiz, a data scientist and entrepreneur at the Blockchain and Climate Institute with links to Imperial College and several startups and scale-ups.
He’s advised businesses and governments on emerging tech and climate change mitigation and holds great hope in the application of AI, IoT and Blockchain to changing the world for the better.
To listen to our conversation, check out Episode 1 of The Pathfinders Collective Podcast at https://thepathfindersco.substack.com/archive