Is Dubai Making Things Worse?
Dubai is on its way to being the first blockchain-powered government by 2020. Coming forth via the CIO Majlis (Chief Information Officer’s) session on ‘Blockchain Technology,’ Ahmad Al Mulla, chair, reportedly had this to say:
Dubai is a frontrunner in adopting the latest technology and has set a goal to become the world’s first government to execute all implementable transactions on the blockchain by 2020. The government initiatives in this direction present tremendous business opportunities for the private sector in the UAE.
HH Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammad bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai, started the Dubai Blockchain Strategy. And Dan Frankel, Blockchain City Adviser to Dubai believes distributed ledger technology could reduce banking costs by $15 to $20 billion.
The nation has done a lot to start down this path. Recently Dubai signed up with U.K.-based ObjectTech to build digital passports. Additionally, UAE retail banking giant Emirates NBD will use a distributed ledger against check fraud and to add to security.
The government is allowing citywide blockchain payments. Dubai is on the way to being a true blockchain city.
Of course, many if not most of the improvements stated herein work to the advantage of the Dubai government.
One of the hopes of blockchain and certainly cybercurrencies, is that they won’t just make existing practices more efficient, but that they will fundamentally change the way things are done and make systems less invasive and freer.
Most everything Dubai is doing is making the collection and centralization of information more intense. That is a far cry from using the Internet to encourage freedom and innovation.
Freedom will have to come outside of established states. Perhaps with island states and other kinds of non traditional living dedicated to less rather than more officialdom.
Just because Dubai is applying blockchain to passports doesn’t fundamentally change the bureaucracy and is just more centralisation - in the long run what do you think?
Sr Director CRM | Digital Transformation | Product Head | Loyalty | Web3 | Salesforce Ranger
7 年Interesting article, but I think we need to stop lumping together cryptocurrencies and blockchain. I would agree that Bitcoin (the grandfather) of blockchain and cryptocurrencies was striving to create a currency that promoted transparency, that aimed to give control back to the people/individual and ultimately intended to promote the decentralized exchanging of a non-fiat currency. That being said, the technology behind bitcoin ie. Blockchain, is a powerful technology/tool that any company or government can and should use to reduce inflated legacy application & infrastructure costs. Every organization will always look to new technologies to reduce cost or improve performance of their current operations, blockchain happens to be one such technology and I applaud any organization that successfully deploys blockchain tech and actually achieves a cost reduction or some other form of ROI.
Principal Software Architect | ?itcoiner
7 年I agree, blockchains can be used for greater freedom or greater control depending on how they're applied. Though weeding out banking is definitely a huge reduction in costs regardless. Perhaps this will be the end of banking at the cost of further erosion of privacy at the hands of government. Looks like UAE is getting there first due to less bureaucracy and more control. Modern governments today are designed with the idea that you can't trust people with power (checks and balances). Giving them more power is not in our best interest. Our power comes from participation in their systems. We must learn and participate in only the systems that truly serve us, not repress us.