The Rebuilding Needs To Happen Now … We Must Innovate and Transform Like Never Before

The Rebuilding Needs To Happen Now … We Must Innovate and Transform Like Never Before

The only pieces of paper I get in the post these days is either from my council, my government or from the NHS. Our public sector has basically failed to take itself out of a 1970s world, and properly use digital technologies.

There’s no digital identity, there’s no smart contracts running things, there’s no digital signing, there’s no great vision in how systems will interconnect, and no sustainment of any form of digital engagement. We still see data breaches in the NHS where emails are sent out with others in the “To:” email list. That’s a 1980s type of data breach, and shows a system which is behind the rest of the world by a few decades.

In fact, I cannot think of one major digital innovation that has come from the public sector in the UK/Scotland and which has properly laid-down a future vision of the information age. Politicians are perhaps still stuck in the thinking that making the network faster is the way forward … the faster .. the better.

There’s nothing that citizens can point to and see a new evolving future. There’s no X-Road, no major digital signing roll-out, no smart contract integration at scale, no wide-scale tokenization of assets, no changes to the laws to accept digital signing, and really not much change in the same old ways. Where is the great vision of a future economy? Where is the engagement with our citizens in building it?

Like it or not, we will see one of the most rapid and disruptive changes in our economy since we learned to trade with others. The whole concept of national barriers, government controls, and regulation could change in an instance. Our world will now enter a rapid period of tokenization, and few industries will not be affected.

Generally, our governments/public sector have matched to the Information Age by basically doing what we have done on paper, and then made it digital. We enter in our name, a 12-digit code, our sort code, and our CVV2, and then give all that away to someone else. What an old fashioned digital world we live in? That worked when the credit card was in our pocket, and where we inserted it into a carbon copy reader, but not now. Now, I believe, 2020 will truly kick start the tokenization era, and there will be few industries that will not be affected.

Governments of the world thus need to wake up to the potential (and threat) of this new trading world, and as it will be re-built faster than ever before. If you do not see your government rebuilding a scale, be worried. Silicon Valley could end up digitally “owning” our citizens and businesses, either identity, their trading, and control virtually every single interaction that they have in their lives. A failure to rebuild our governments and public sector at scale — and fast enough — will just hand the control of citizens over to those who are properly rebuilding around a tokenized world.

At the core of our future economy must be digital signing, smart contracts and identity, and it will affect every single industry and sector.

So if your government does not have a way to digitally sign things, and prove digital identity, their power could be swept away by the Libra Association. This is an infrastructure which has little in the way of legacy, and brings together the trustworthiness of a digital signing world with a consensus model of rapidly defining the truth. It is not a world which takes day, weeks or months to approve and validate something. It happens in seconds. The Libra Assocation are building the platform which are governments should have built, but have failed to see that this isn’t just another technology.

The Libra Association platform will start with cryptocurrency, but end in being a place for the trading of crypto assets within a smart contract world — and which is basically our economy. And these plans are not a “let’s take 10 years to adapt and see if it will be adopted”, it is a platform that will rebuild our broken and untrusted digital world. And governments will try to do their best to stop it, and do as they have done in the past, and regulate against it, and point to the evils of trading outside their borders. But it can’t be stopped. It is open source. It will exist. Companies will build things in there. Games will use it. Chat will use it. Assets will be traded on it.

Just like the finance industry, our public sector has had a decade to adapt to more trusted ways of trading, and if it fails now, we will see whole economies failing. If, in 2020, we are still using our paper-based ways of interaction with our government and the public sector, we should be worried. I will repeat again:

At the core of our future economy must be digital signing, smart contracts and identity, and it will affect every single industry and sector.

Here is the new super power: