The blockchain has entered the field of view of ordinary people, maybe it is the hype of Bitcoin price, maybe it is the ransomware that requires people to use digital currency to pay the ransom to restore the computer content, maybe it is the transaction of buying drugs on the dark web as seen in the news. In conclusion, in the past two years, blockchain technology has begun to be quickly heard by the general public. As an emerging technology, it even overtakes the corners and overtakes the limelight of the emerging artificial intelligence and big data. Countries around the world have begun to encourage and support the development and application of blockchain technology on a large scale. Everyone expects that 2018 will become the "first year" for the widespread application of blockchain technology.
I'm not going to spend too much time explaining the technology itself of blockchain. Simply put, the basis of blockchain technology is to build an immutable ledger transaction database, which can be seen as a decentralized supercomputer that can create trust. At present, some developers, enterprises, banks, and even musicians have applied blockchain technology to voting, product tracking in supply chains, equity transactions, currency payments, and musicians' "creative passports". A year ago, Guillaume Chapron, an ecologist at the Swedish Agricultural University, published an article in Nature Weekly, "The environment needs cryptogovernance," discussing how blockchain technology can be used to help save our environment. On the day the paper was published, a Science Weekly reporter interviewed Guillaume Chapron to discuss the future of money, government, and trust. This article is based on this article and interview transcripts.
1. Use computers to build trust
The advantage of blockchain technology is how it approaches trust. Rather than checking the trustworthiness of each party, the system assumes that everyone will behave selfishly. But no matter how greedy the traders are, the blockchain will always maintain integrity, even if the parties cannot, they can be trusted. If humans always fail to build trust, perhaps computer algorithms should replace them.
In fact, the growing environmental crisis is caused by a lack of trust. The growing distance between multiple players unknown to each other, from corporations and governments to individual consumers, creates many opportunities for fraudulent and failed policies. The environmental crisis is in the process of transmission, which has to go through many media, and it has to go through the qualitative evaluation of a third party or an authoritative organization, such a centrally controlled system. For example, the supply chain of fish sold in supermarkets is very long, and even supermarkets do not know where it comes from in the end. Therefore, some environmentally unsustainable commodities have many opportunities to enter the supply chain. And if this is a blockchain-based supply chain, it will mean that when a consumer is buying fish, he knows every step of the supply chain, and this chain cannot be counterfeited. For example, London-based technology platform Provenance, which is developing blockchain-based protocols to track resources and raw materials, has partnered with Indonesian fishing companies to track sustainably caught fish in supply chains. Minerals, wood or food can also refer to this method. Customs officers can spot illegally traded animal parts or plants by using portable DNA barcode scanners.
If the Ecological Footprint is connected to the Internet of Things, other commodities can have their Ecological Footprint tagged on the blockchain, with sensors recording the environmental impact of the manufacturing process. For example, Walmart is tracking its pork supply chain by recording information such as farm origin and storage temperature on the blockchain. Companies can also track the water, energy or raw materials they use. The overall environmental impact of a business or consumer can be recorded on the blockchain and sustainable behaviors that can be rewarded through incentives such as tax rebates. It is conceivable that establishing such a commodity lifecycle record would also be very helpful in developing a circular economy.
2. The event of the smart contract assurance plan must occur
In the era of blockchain-powered "crypto governance", laws can be replaced by "smart contracts" written in computer code, and trust, law, and enforcement can be completely outsourced to computer code. Smart contracts built with blockchain technology can guarantee that planned events must happen. The advantages of smart contracts are obvious, their execution is independent of the wishes, approvals or actions of the parties involved, no exit is possible, they do not require a trusted third party or escrow to manage, and they are cheap. In other words, smart contracts help users exchange money, property, shares, or anything of value in a transparent and conflict-free way, while avoiding the involvement of middlemen. For example, invoices are automatically paid when goods arrive, which is done by enacting business logic "smart contracts" written in computer code. The code uses a programming extension of Ethereum implemented on the blockchain, and smart contracts execute automatically when certain conditions are met. Therefore, some people say that smart contracts will replace the role of lawyers in the future.
Indeed, computer codes are not as ambiguous as human natural language, they are independent of existing regulations or institutions. Smart contracts can fully be used to establish autonomous digital entities to manage natural resources. For example, we can use satellites to monitor biodiversity remotely, and if we achieve a certain amount of biodiversity in an area, the incentives to the local community established in the contract will be implemented immediately. This natural resource will be stamped with a sustainability certificate, allowing the community to enter the market for these certified products. Communities with ownership of natural resources can directly access ecosystem services or achieve conservation goals through Bitcoin. In this way, healthy ecosystems can replace other forms of capital storage. The community can conduct renewable energy transactions through the blockchain, fast and reliable, without the need for third-party control.
Blockchain can ensure that protection and development funds are used as intended. Funds can be tracked, attached to a specific purpose, have a due date or be automatically released when conditions are met in the project timeline. This way, funds cannot be sucked away because the middleman is cut off. Blockchain can make it easier to collect insurance against wildlife damage to crops, and payments are executed immediately, which reduces delays or corruption.
3. Proof of ownership of natural resources and assets
Blockchain can prove the existence and ownership of anything that can be digitized. Blockchain can prove with certainty that a piece of recorded information (a piece of data, file, transaction, certificate, event or identity) existed at a specific time. If an asset can be assigned a unique numerical identifier (such as a barcode), then it can be included in it. The identifier is run through a cryptographic function that converts it into a unique string of numbers and letters, called a hash, that is stored on the blockchain. The hash function only works in one direction - the hash value is not allowed to go back and get the original document that generated it, and the user cannot guess which document will give him a specific hash value, which means that such a certificate cannot be forged. The hash can be recomputed later to prove that the asset existed at a particular time without revealing the asset itself. Similarly, there are land registers, diploma certificates, scientific data or medical data. Of course, blockchain cannot attest to the authenticity of incoming system data or documents, but it can be assessed by other means. For example, the identity and reputation of evaluators can be ensured using a cryptographic key infrastructure, meaning that only certified and reputable evaluators can enter data. That is to say, the record of the evaluator's identity and reputation is itself a blockchain. Understandably, data that is automatically generated by sensors, such as RFID chips, temperature, water quality, and various sensors, can be hashed directly into the blockchain.
4. Increase public accountability for environmental decision-making
Blockchain can also influence decision-making. Blockchain voting is a very cheap and secure way to organize elections. In the current way, if you want to organize a vote on how to manage natural resources, whether it's forests or fisheries, you need to plan infrastructure, you need to set up ballot boxes, you need to tell people when to vote. This takes a lot of time and human and material resources. Ultimately, people may not yet believe in the end result. With the blockchain, it is possible to vote with a smartphone and password authentication with strong security. In this way, a public, shared and immutable registry of assets and transactions can help the public monitor politicians to truly hold them accountable.
Voting can also be considered a transaction. For example, blockchain voting is already being used by the Korean community government for local budget voting; internal elections for Danish political parties and shareholders of Nasdaq-listed companies listed on the Tallinn Stock Exchange are also being implemented; Australia Post is considering its use for universities and civic elections; the city of Moscow is exploring the application of blockchain to circumvent voting fraud. Local communities are fully empowered to manage natural resources through temporary voting authorizations. For example, fish can only be traded on the platform if they have a catch quota approved by a community-based democratic process.
Issues and Challenges
Of course, blockchain technology also encounters some obstacles to development. Bitcoin transactions, for example, are slow, limited to seven transactions per second, while the Visa credit card network averages 2,000 transactions per second. To run and check its complex algorithms, Bitcoin requires a network of highly computationally-powered dedicated "mining farms" that use a considerable amount of electricity across the city. Bitcoin consumes about 10.4 terawatt-hours of electricity per year, almost double what Google uses as a company (5.7 terawatt-hours), so we need to develop a more energy-efficient algorithm. Like any emerging technology, blockchain will take time and encouragement to be gradually adopted. The benefits and risks of Bitcoin are still difficult for people to understand because the technology is so complex.
Blockchain law, in the form of a computer language "if-then-other", is a new legal system. The nuances of human legal language must be explained by trained lawyers; while programming languages consist of explicit machine instructions, it is unlikely that courts will understand computer code, and programmers may not understand their code in the real world meaning.
Blockchain technology has entered the economic field and has become an important part of it, and sustainable development is also one of them. Sustainability scientists and blockchain developers should perhaps come face-to-face to discuss problems and solutions. When Science reporter asked "Are there many ecologists interested in the blockchain approach"? Guillaume Chapron replied: I don't know yet if there are academic papers linking blockchain technology to solving environmental problems, we need more development... We have cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, I propose Explore cryptography-dependent environmental governance through voting and contracts. As people learn more and more about what the blockchain can do, they will generate more and more new ideas that we cannot currently imagine. My dissertation is designed to stimulate thinking.