CCEG SOCIAL VALUE & INTANGIBLES REVIEW by saying how the possibility of ‘Total Value’ exchange will revolutionise the financial as well as social sectors. Total Value = Financial Value + Non-Financial Value. It captures brand value, provenance, supply chain slavery, personal value, sentiment and other non-financial assets.
Our values have value ‘Blockchain enables us to transact value based on our values’ Barbara explained. ‘Our values have value. We can now digitise that worth and will soon be able to transact it.’ Wherever there is a community with a common belief or purpose, or shared values, the opportunity exists to unite them, articulated through their own currency. For example, religions, cities, environmental groups etc. will be able to exchange financial value in a way that clearly demonstrates individual preferences for social issues and causes, i.e. for social value. Dr. Haley Beer, CCEG’s Head of R&D explained how blockchain can take ‘social value metrics mainstream’. In the same way that the internet revolutionised the transfer of information, blockchain can revolutionise the transfer of value. Traditional financial systems, with their narrow focus on money and wealth, create asset bubbles and extremes of wealth and poverty. Recognising social value in transactions, however, would give transparent value to the change in condition of society and people - in terms of knowledge, health, wellbeing etc. – arising from the transaction. The ground-breaking conceptual thinking and mechanisms behind this were explained by Maryam Taghiyeva, CCEG’s Senior Development Analyst in her address to the conference.
Bringing purpose to Bitcoin Chandler Guo, on this, his first visit to the UK, discussed his Bitbank mining approach. Bitbank is one of the biggest Bitcoin miners in the world, generating up to US$8m in digital currency per year, according to the BBC. Before the conference, Chandler admitted he did not see clearly how Bitcoin would evolve, but following the presentation by CCEG’s Maryam Taghiyeva, he stated that ‘this is going to be bigger than Bitcoin’ adding that he felt it was offering a whole new direction of travel for, and a purpose to, the Bitcoin movement.
In similar vein, Shaykh Siddiqi, who speaks for the community of 1.5 billion Muslims around the world, shared with the audience that the Blockchain Alliance for Good was one of the most exciting and far-reaching initiatives with which he has been involved.
The concept of an Islamic crypto-currency that conveys good Islamic values in transactions offered the prospect of a powerful mechanism to change the world for the better.
Revolutionising higher education One organisation with a clear mission is the UK’s Open University (OU) the largest university in the UK who make quality education available to all through distance learning, easily accessible by all in terms of flexible learning and pricing. One of the OU’s more recent initiatives is OpenLearn, bringing free knowledge resources to 45 million learners around the world. Prof. John Domingue, Director of the OU’s Knowledge Media Institute, is leading an impressive team responsible for blockchain development at the Open University. He is tasked with making blockchain central to the OU’s operations, and runs the 2nd largest blockchain laboratory in the UK. This sits alongside MIT in the US at the vanguard of blockchain in higher education. John explained how he was building a distributed ledger foundation for course content, grading, accreditation and validation in a way that students can develop and display their academic records, where they are the owners of their personal data and profile. Quoting examples from around the world, including Sony’s Global Education Programme, he showed how frameworks are being created for the sharing of academic proficiency and progress, in ways that will revolutionise job search, career development and recruitment through greater transparency and security and lower processing costs. This gives scope for greater collaboration between educational institutions and the prospect of a significant change in the higher education sector through disaggregation and disintermediation.
February 2017
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