Por uma democracia de confiança

A revolução digital só agora começou

As bolhas das dívidas soberanas e o mercado especulativo de derivados financeiros são a coisa mais extraordinária que o Capitalismo conheceu em toda a sua história, exceção feita, talvez, das duas grandes guerras mundiais que permitiram a sua expansão exponencial.

O que agora parece estar em causa, por efeito da exaustão dos recursos à superfície da crosta terrestre, a começar pelo fim da energia barata, é mesmo o fim do crescimento. A procura agregada mundial deixou de crescer a um ritmo capaz de repor o capital gasto na busca de matérias primas como o petróleo, o carvão e o gás natural, minérios de ferro, terras aráveis, água potável, etc., e ainda no cumprimento das obrigações contraídas perante os clientes dos bancos, companhias de seguros e da segurança social. Mais, a taxa de crescimento demográfico mundial atingiu o seu máximo em 1964. Ora sem demografia não há crescimento de nenhuma espécie, salvo o das bolhas especulativas que proliferam. Resta-nos, pois, regressar ao crescimento zero (na realidade, entre 0 e 1%) que foi a regra desde o princípio da humanidade até meados do século 19. Esta é a próxima revolução global, que porventura já começou!

Dois sinais: o colapso do sistema financeiro assente em bancos e bancos centrais, mais os seus sistemas de certificação, parece estar definitivamente em curso. Prova disso é a fuga cada vez mais visível da riquza mundial para as chamadas cripto-moedas. Outro sinal são os movimentos sociais que exigem, com cada vez mais veemência e conhecimento, uma DEMOCRACIA DE CONFIANÇA, assente em protocolos de transparência, registo e cooperação eletrónica à escala global. Por um lado, a economia global veio para ficar, por outro, exige-se para todos o chamado Rendimento Básico Incondicional e um sistema de trocas e de pagamentos livre da corrupção e especulação político-financeiras.

Blockchains for social good could revolutionize democracy and politics at large. I think Distributed Ledger Technology with Democracy Maps can be a paradigm shift to present populism plaguing most democracies around the world, and force bureaucratic authoritarian regimes to adapt to individual freedom and real democracy.
This EU initiative is more than welcome. Let’s work on this beautiful challenge!

António Cerveira Pinto in Second City

Blockchains for Social Good 

This prize [€5 million] aims to develop solutions to social innovation challenges using distribute ledger technology. 

The challenge to solve 

The challenge is to develop scalable, efficient and high-impact decentralised solutions to social innovation challenges leveraging Distributed Ledger Technology (DLTs), such as the one used in blockchains. 

DLT in its public, open and permissionless forms is widely considered as a ground-breaking digital technology supporting decentralised methods for consensus reaching as well as sharing, storing and securing transactions and other data with fewer to no central intermediaries 

In the wake of the widespread public attention for Bitcoin, several financial applications based on blockchains are already under development. 

However, the potential of DLTs to generate positive social change by decentralising and disintermediating processes related to local or global sustainability challenges is still largely untapped. 

in “Blockchains for social good”. IEIC Horizon Prize

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Distributed Ledger Technology 

Algorithms that enable the creation of distributed ledgers are powerful, disruptive innovations that could transform the delivery of public and private services and enhance productivity through a wide range of applications. 

Ledgers have been at the heart of commerce since ancient times and are used to record many things, most commonly assets such as money and property. They have moved from being recorded on clay tablets to papyrus, vellum and paper. However, in all this time the only notable innovation has been computerisation, which initially was simply a transfer from paper to bytes. Now, for the first time algorithms enable the collaborative creation of digital distributed ledgers with properties and capabilities that go far beyond traditional paper-based ledgers. 

A distributed ledger is essentially an asset database that can be shared across a network of multiple sites, geographies or institutions. All participants within a network can have their own identical copy of the ledger. Any changes to the ledger are reflected in all copies in minutes, or in some cases, seconds. The assets can be financial, legal, physical or electronic. The security and accuracy of the assets stored in the ledger are maintained cryptographically through the use of ‘keys’ and signatures to control who can do what within the shared ledger. Entries can also be updated by one, some or all of the participants, according to rules agreed by the network. 

Underlying this technology is the ‘block chain’, which was invented to create the peer-to-peer digital cash Bitcoin in 2008. Block chain algorithms enable Bitcoin transactions to be aggregated in ‘blocks’ and these are added to a ‘chain’ of existing blocks using a cryptographic signature. The Bitcoin ledger is constructed in a distributed and ‘permissionless’ fashion, so that anyone can add a block of transactions if they can solve a new cryptographic puzzle to add each new block. The incentive for doing this is that there is currently a reward in the form of twenty five Bitcoins awarded to the solver of the puzzle for each ‘block’. Anyone with access to the internet and the computing power to solve the cryptographic puzzles can add to the ledger and they are known as ‘Bitcoin miners’. The mining analogy is apt because the process of mining Bitcoin is energy intensive as it requires very large computing power. It has been estimated that the energy requirements to run Bitcoin are in excess of 1GW and may be comparable to the electricity usage of Ireland.  

in “Distributed Ledger Technology: beyond block chain. A Report by the UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser”.

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Democracy Maps by António Cerveira Pinto on Scribd