Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) are a private financing mechanism used to fund social programs. Also termed 'Pay For Success,' and 'Outcomes Based' or 'Performance Based' financing, these partnerships involve private entities funding projects aimed at improving social outcomes. If by the end of the project period, 'success' metrics are met (according to third-party evaluators), investors then profit by being paid interest on top of the reimbursed government funds for the cost of the project. This page includes a collection of updates and critical perspectives on these profit structures and on Blockchain Identity systems, de-centralized online ledger programs, poised to be the data backbone that would provide 'proof' of 'program impact' for investors. For files related to Blockchain, see: http://bit.ly/Blockchain_Files. [Note: Views presented on this page are re-shared from external websites and may not necessarily represent the views nor official position of the curator nor employer of the curator.]
The following resolution was reviewed and approved at the 2019 National NAACP Conference in Detroit, Michigan. (Pg. 62-63 of full set of resolutions).
Resolution in Opposition to the Use of Blockchain Identity Systems
WHEREAS Blockchain technologies are being developed as tools of digital identity management; and
WHEREAS, transaction data pertaining to vital records, voting, ownership, healthcare, professional and educational credentials, employment, and financial income can be stored on Blockchain systems; and
WHEREAS, global technology interests are placing heavy pressure on governments to scale Blockchain adoption as a financial tool within proposals to privatize public services, including ‘Public-Private Partnerships (P3); and
WHEREAS, governmental interests are exploring the use of ‘smart contracts’ on Blockchain as a means of delivering public benefits; and
WHEREAS, public benefits distributed via ‘smart contracts’ can incorporate coded interventions that preference specific behavioral outcomes; and
WHEREAS, the use of “programmable money/digital currency” may undermine the ability of benefit recipients to make autonomous economic choices, and indenture the future wealth of such populations; and
WHEREAS, aggregation of an individual’s public benefit data within a Blockchain identity system could exacerbate punitive profiling of recipients of services; and
WHEREAS, prototypes linking Blockchain systems to profit extraction through social impact investment initiatives have already been developed; and
WHEREAS, hundreds of billions of dollars have already been directed into social impact investments by the world’s most powerful individuals and financial institutions; and
WHEREAS, consolidation of personal data in Blockchain identity systems will position the global poor who receive benefits via smart contracts to become data backbones upon which “impact” metrics would rest, in effect amplifying investment wealth of elite investors on the backs of vulnerable communities; and
WHEREAS, researchers have warned of the harms of relying on Blockchain systems, given the immutable nature of the technology that would mean false data and/or embedded vulnerabilities would never fully be able to be reversed, remedied, redacted, nor deleted; and
WHEREAS, security flaws are already rampant in Blockchain systems that claim to be secure, leading to the compromised integrity of the systems, and to highly sensitive personal information being vulnerable to exploitation;
THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the NAACP opposes any state or federal legislation that would require an individual to create a Blockchain identity in order to receive any public services or benefits, including but not limited to: education, healthcare, addiction treatment, behavioral health services, law enforcement, housing, and/or food and nutrition.
THEREFORE BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the NAACP will engage in community education efforts to communicate to the public about the structure, function, benefits, and inherent risks of Blockchain technologies."
[Re-sharing does not indicate endorsement]. The proposed solutions in the accompanying article are untested, unproven, and poised to do more harm than good for the vulnerable communities whose data will be placed on to Blockchain platforms.
"By Shanzhai City Holdings
"The Brazilian government is implementing a nation-wide early child development program to conduct weekly home visits to vulnerable children and their families in order to identify risks and opportunities for child development. In the city of Boa Vista, the program is named Survive and Thrive Boa Vista Early Childhood Program (the “STBV”) and aims to tackle the continued high rates of neonatal mortality and the large disparities in early childhood development. Targeting children between 0 and 3 years old living in deprived and low-income families who have already participated in income transfer programs such as bolsa familia, the Boa Vista Municipality Government expects the STBV can eventually eliminate neonatal mortality in the city, and in longer term education inequality."...
"Blockchain-powered computer programs promise to revolutionize the digital economy, but new research suggests they’re far from secure.
Computer programs that run on blockchains are shaking up the financial system. But much of the hype around what are called smart contracts is just that. It’s a brand-new field. Technologists are just beginning to figure out how to design them so they can be relied on not to lose people’s money, and—as a new survey of Ethereum smart contracts illustrates—security researchers are only now coming to terms with what a smart-contract vulnerability even looks like.
Digital vending machines: The term “smart contract” comes from digital currency pioneer Nick Szabo, who coined it more than 20 years ago (and who may or may not be Satoshi Nakamoto). The basic idea, he wrote, is that “many kinds of contractual clauses (such as collateral, bonding, delineation of property rights, etc.) can be embedded in the hardware and software we deal with, in such a way as to make a breach of contract expensive (if desired, sometimes prohibitively so) for the breacher.” Szabo called physical vending machines a “primitive ancestor of smart contracts,” since they take coins and dispense a product and the correct change according to the displayed price.
Enter the blockchain: Today, the most common conception of a smart contract is a computer program stored on a blockchain. A blockchain is essentially a shared accounting ledger that uses cryptography and a network of computers to track assets and secure the ledger from tampering. For Bitcoin, that gives two parties who don’t know each other an ironclad guarantee that an agreed upon transfer of funds will happen as expected—that is, no one will get cheated.
Smart contracts are where things get interesting. Using a smart contract, two people could create a system that withdraws funds from one person’s account—a parent’s, let’s say—and deposits them into a child’s account if and when the child’s balance falls below a certain level. And that’s just the simplest example—in theory, smart contracts can be used to program all kinds of financial agreements, from derivatives contracts to auctions to blockchain-powered escrow accounts.
ICOs everywhere: One of the most popular applications of smart contracts has been to create new cryptocurrencies. A few of them have provided glimpses of a new kind of economy in which a purpose-made digital currency can be used for a “decentralized” service, like data storage or digital currency trading. Investor excitement over the promise of such applications has helped fuel the ICO craze, which has raised over $5 billion. (What the hell is an ICO? ← Here’s a primer)
But hold your horses: Technologists still don’t have a full picture of what a security hole in a smart contract looks like, says Ilya Sergey, a computer scientist at University College London, who coauthored a study on the topic published last week.
Users learned this the hard way in 2016 when a hacker stole $50 million from the so-called Decentralized Autonomous Organization, which was based on the Ethereum blockchain. And in November around $150 million suddenly became inaccessible to users of the wallet service Parity, which is also rooted in Ethereum.
Sergey and colleagues used a novel tool to analyze a sample of nearly one million Ethereum smart contracts, flagging around 34,000 as vulnerable—including the one that led to the Parity mishap. Sergey compares the team’s work to interacting with a vending machine, as though the researchers randomly pushed buttons and recorded the conditions that made the machine act in unintended ways. “I believe that a large number of vulnerabilities are still to be discovered and formally specified,” Sergey says."...
"I’m not a fan of the term “smart contracts”. For a start, it has been used by so many people for so many different things, that we should probably just ban it completely. For example, the first known reference is from 1997, when Nick Szabo used it to describe physical objects that change their behavior based on some data. More recently, the term has been used for the exact opposite: to describe computation on a blockchain which is influenced by external events such as the weather. For now let’s put both of these meanings aside.
I want to focus here on “smart contracts” in the sense of general purpose computation that takes place on a blockchain. This meaning was popularized by Ethereum, whose white paper is subtitled “A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform”. As a result of the attention that Ethereum has received, this meaning has become the dominant one, with banks (and others) working away on smart contract proofs-of-concept. Of course, since we’re talking about regulated financial institutions, this is mostly in the context of private or permissioned blockchains, which have a limited set of identified participants. For reasons that are now well understood, public blockchains, for all of their genius, are not yet suited for enterprise purposes.
So is the future bright for smart contracts in private blockchains? Well, kind of, but not really. You see:
Smart contracts make for slow and clunky blockchains.
If you know about the halting problem and understand how data dependencies prevent concurrency then you may already be convinced. But if not, make yourself a coffee, take a deep breath, and follow me down the rabbit hole…
Understanding smart contracts
In order to understand Ethereum-style smart contracts, we need to start with bitcoin, the first (and still most popular) public blockchain. The bitcoin blockchain was originally designed for one thing only: moving the bitcoin currency from one owner to another. But once it was up and running, people started embedding “metadata” in transactions to serve other purposes, such as digital assets and document notarization. While some bitcoiners fought these applications, an official mechanism for metadata was introduced in March 2014, with usage growing exponentially ever since.
As well as projects built on the bitcoin blockchain, many next-generation public blockchains were developed and launched, including Nxt, Bitshares, Ripple and Stellar. These were designed from the ground up to support a broader range of activities, such as user-created assets, decentralized exchange and collateralized borrowing. Each of these blockchains has a different set of features, as decided upon by its developers, and each must be upgraded by all of its users when a new feature is added. Things started to get rather messy.
Having been involved in some of these projects, Vitalik Buterin posed a simple but brilliant question: Instead of lots of application-specific blockchains, why not have a single public blockchain that can be programmed to do whatever we might want? This über-blockchain would be infinitely extendible, limited only by the imagination of those using it. The world of crypto-enthusiasts was almost unanimously convinced by this powerful idea. And so, with $18 million in crowd funding and to great excitement, Ethereum was born.
Ethereum is a new public blockchain with an associated cryptocurrency called “ether”, like hundreds which came before it. But unlike other blockchains, Ethereum enables anybody to create a “contract” inside the blockchain. A contract is a computer program with an associated miniature database, which can only be modified by the program that owns it. If a blockchain user wants to change a database, they must send a digitally signed message to its contract. The code in the contract examines this message to decide whether and how to react.
Ethereum contracts can be written in one of several new programming languages, such as Solidity and Serpent. Like most programming languages, these are Turing complete, meaning that they can express any general purpose computation. A key feature of Turing complete languages is the loop structure, which performs an operation repeatedly until some condition is fulfilled. For example, a loop might be used to print the numbers from one to a million, without requiring a million lines of code. For the sake of efficiency, programs written for Ethereum are compiled (i.e. converted) into more compact bytecode before being stored on the chain. Ethereum nodes then execute this bytecode within a virtual machine, which is essentially a simulated computer running inside a real one.
When an Ethereum contract is created on the blockchain, it sets up the initial state of its database. Then it stops, waiting politely until it’s called upon. When a user of the blockchain (or another contract) sends it a message in a transaction, the contract leaps into action. Depending on the code within, it can identify the source of the message, trigger other contracts, modify its database and/or send back a response to the caller. All of these steps are performed independently on every node in the network, with identical results.
To give an example, a simple Ethereum subcurrency contract maintains a database of user balances for a particular asset. If it receives a message to transfer funds from Alice to Bob, it will (a) check the message was signed by Alice, (b) check that Alice has sufficient funds, (c) transfer funds from Alice’s to Bob’s account in the database and (d) respond that the operation was successful. Of course, we don’t need Ethereum for that, because a simple bitcoin-style blockchain with native asset support can do the same thing. Ethereum really comes into its own for complex multi-stage business logic, such as crowdfunding, decentralized exchanges, and hierarchical governance structures. Or so, at least, the promise goes."...
Bombarded by no shortage of unfamiliar technical terms in 2017, consumers in the blockchain sector once again proved a ripe target for hackers and criminals. But, not all hacks and scams were created equal. Some rose above the froth – either due to their size or impact – as well as what they said about the state of blockchain technology and the industry itself.
Still, the impacts of these incidents were far from academic. Whether it was a simple wallet hack, fraudulent ICO or a bug in a piece of software code, investors lost millions, with nearly $490 million taken in the incidents below.
So far, none of the perpetrators of these crimes has been caught or even identified, and it’s questionable whether most of these funds can be found or returned."...
Ask a blockchain advocate and you’ll hear all about how decentralized databases are primed to save the world. But if you ask 43 high-profile blockchain technology startups what they’ve built since raising funds, you’ll hear nothing but crickets.
At least, that’s what happened when MERL Tech, a technology research firm that monitors trends in emerging technology, reached out to blockchain companies about their work. The firm’s conclusion is that blockchain startups are promising big and delivering nothing.
MERL Tech’s team found no evidence that these companies actually delivered any sort of functional products or services — not even any sort of updates on how their work was coming along. And reaching out directly yielded nothing but radio silence.
A blockchain is a sort of distributed database that advocates argue will increase transparency by redistributing power. The idea is that everyone who buys in will have their own copy of anything that happens on a blockchain — for example, cryptocurrency transactions — so no centralized entity like a big bank could hold too much power.
But many question whether or not blockchain tech actually serves a purpose. Often, blockchain seems like a buzzword that tech startups add to their pitch decks in order to attract investments.
Selection Bias
Of course, 43 individual startups do not represent the entire blockchain industry. It’s possible that MERL Tech, which likely acted in good faith, happened to investigate some bad apples or select shadier companies.
Ultimately, take this as a warning to do your due diligence before buying into a new blockchain company’s bold claims."...
By Alison McDowell (WrenchInTheGears.com) "This week Jeff Bezos of Amazon announced plans to direct $2 billion, in part, to the creation of a “Day 1 Academies Fund,” which would underwrite the costs of full-scholarship “tier one” Montessori model preschools in low-income communities.
I spent much of this past summer researching the construction of a speculative social impact investment market dealing in pre-school children’s human capital data (here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).
Major players including University of Chicago economist James Heckman; hedge fund manager Robert Dugger; former Minneapolis Federal Reserve economist Arthur Rolnick; billionaire politician JB Pritzker; and Utah tech entrepreneur Jim Sorenson carried out this work quietly, diligently, steadily over the past decade.
The machine they’ve built is vast with tentacles reaching into influential foundations, institutions of higher education, venture capital firms, global banks, bipartisan political circles, and NGOs. It’s the puppet master behind all the Smart Start, Early Literacy, Grow Up Great, Grade Level Reading campaigns you see posted on buses and billboards in your town.
They use cute baby pictures in the advertising, but we need to recognize these efforts for what they truly are. This is about power, using digital technologies and predictive analytics, to mine rising global poverty rates for profit. Ever more vicious forms of innovative finance, like Social Impact Bonds and now impact securities, seek to transform human life into fictitious capital the elite can manipulate to enrich themselves. In this end game of late-stage capitalism, the data of vulnerable children will be collected and used as a source of profit extraction. Make no mistake. The Amazon “academies” will be data centers first and foremost.
The Bezos announcement indicates that perhaps this infrastructure is ready for prime time. Heckman and Pritzker have been doing road shows to sell it for years. I’m sure they’re anxious to see how the motor runs. Within moments of hearing the announcement I began poking around to see where the connections were. What immediately came up was that Jeff’s mother Jackie, who helps manage the Bezos Family Foundation, presented on the topic of preschool human capital investing with James Heckman at the Aspen Institute Festival in June 2017. The title of their talk was “The ROI (Return on Investment) That Matters.” You can be sure that if I’m sitting here at my kitchen table and know all of this, Bezos, his mom, and Heckman know far more.
People are increasingly concerned about the degree to which power and wealth are concentrated in the hands of the tech sector, Amazon in particular. They hear the stories about the terrible working conditions, the surveillance of labor via wearable technologies, that workers can’t afford shelter. The solution offered is a roving RV work model. While some have embraced Alexa as a virtual assistant, many others see it for the intrusive data-gathering device that it is. Now Amazon and its dynamic pricing model is moving into bricks and mortar retail through the purchase of Whole Foods. There is a growing sense we are being watched; that our value is data tied to where we go and what we buy; that our options for meaningful work are shrinking; and Bezos sees us as pawns to be managed for his benefit. Plus, those AWS (Amazon Web Server) data lakes!
My hope is people will realize this announcement isn’t just about Bezos or Amazon. It’s a sign the impact-investing, early childhood education machine is getting ready to roll. It is a mammoth, mammoth machine. Many will be scooped up in its net. Bezos is a great one to put out front. Many are already angry with him, so they throw up tweets expressing their dismay but they don’t look deeper. Some get that there is an aspect of data profiling, that it might also involve ed-tech promotion, but they are NOT talking about speculative global finance. Impact investing is not on anyone’s radar, but it should be. If you haven’t seen my videos on Social Impact Bonds or Blockchain Identity, check out the links here and here.
I’ve read widely and gotten pretty good at registering the signals of where things are headed. No one has shown me the plans for these Academies, but I can start to guess what they might look like. Join me for a tour of a fictional pre-school I’ll call “Montessori, Inc.” In the scenario that follows I lay out elements of a preschool model designed to serve the social impact investment market that Heckman and his partners have built. It includes links to examples already in operation in the real world. Will Bezos’s Academies follow such a model? Only time will tell.
Surveillance play tables are real. This is the world we live in now.
"Join us on the tour:
“A Company” is the venture partner backing “Montessori, Inc.”
“Montessori, Inc.’s” centers are found in the nation’s poorest communities, often in past-their-prime strip shopping centers near the highway. Picture the pop-up charter schools all over Florida. Link
“A Company” cultivates women of color to become franchise operators of “Montessori, Inc.” and touts its status as a MBE, WBE enterprise. Link and Link
Once on board, franchise managers are expected to toe “Montessori, Inc.’s” line (which is actually “A Company’s” line) and follow all company procedures, especially regarding expansive data collection and family compliance policies.
The teaching staff is low income. Most juggle several gigs to get by.
They are expected to keep up with the latest micro-credentials and take online training classes they can’t afford to stay eligible to teach. Link
Fees are automatically docked from their meager salary. Link
Each staff member’s engagement with online coursework is tracked biometrically, the data uploaded to their employee profile. Link
“Montessori, Inc.” maintains extended hours of operation, but algorithms set irregular shifts ensuring most workers don’t get enough hours to access benefits. Link
While a “Montessori, Inc.” preschool education is offered free of charge, not everyone who is eligible will be able to enroll. “A Company” outsources their review process to “Progress Pathways” to make sure each family is a “good fit” for the program. Link
Preschool operations are funded using innovative finance mechanisms structured around outcomes-based contracts. For schools to meet their agreed-upon “success” target, franchise operators must carefully curate whom they admit into the program. Because “Montessori, Inc.” is not a public preschool, they can do that. Link
One part of the evaluation is the LENA screening. Each child must wear a vest with a recording device for a full day. Data is analyzed to predict if the child is likely to fall into a “word gap,” meaning they are not spoken to enough at home, which could impact their literacy levels. A low LENA score can be a disqualifier. Link
If accepted, parents must then agree to give “A Company” ownership of all the data collected on their child and the family through school-affiliated apps while the child is enrolled in the program. Data collected informs dynamic pricing for goods and services purchased at any of “A Company’s” affiliates. Of course the goal of the company is to help families make “good decisions.” Nudge pricing is part of that strategy. Link
Each student enrolled at “Montessori, Inc.” is assigned a digital identity on Blockchain. All of their data and credit goes into the e-wallet. Link and Link
If a family relocates, they take their child’s accumulated data with them to another center. “A Company” promotes this as a means by which poor children “build social capital” from an early age. Link
Parents are expected to volunteer twice a week, and participation is tracked on an app. Their time, valued at less that $5 per hour, is compensated not in cash but in points redeemable in “A Company” credit. Link
They’re also expected to participate in “Montessori, Inc.’s” “smart family tips” text-messaging platforms. If they don’t document that they completed the required number of suggested educational home-based activities or respond promptly to text messages, their children can be bumped from the program. Link and Link
Upon enrollment, each family is issued a device programmed with behavior-tracking games geared to early literacy development and executive function training. Toddlers need to continue to level up on their custom development trajectory or risk be bumped from the program. Link and Link
Families must keep their child’s device charged and in working condition and send it to school each day. This “Montessori Minder” device is a key element of the self-directed curriculum offered by the school. Each child is given a personalized playlist of activities for the day, which they work through at their own pace. They submit evidence of tasks completed to the online student portfolio platform. Link and Link
Access to each center is authorized through biometric scans at the front door. Link
Attendance is generally used as one of the impact investing metrics, so that is taken on an app to ensure that data is high quality. Link
The “smart” classrooms are minimally furnished. All furniture and physical items come with embedded beacons that track students throughout the day. Link
All the children and staff wear slippers with Internet of Things (IoT) sensors embedded in the soles that track their interactions with one another and with physical objects in the space. Link
The centerpiece of each pre-school is their WePlaySuperSmart table. While toddlers interact collaboratively with screen-based activities on the digital table, a video camera captures their interactions. AI is then use to analyze the video and complete behavioral rubrics in a dashboard outlining where they are within the “Big Five” traits OCEAN (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism). Link and Link
Other activities during the day measure behavioral elements like grit, resilience and executive function. Some sites are piloting EEG brainwave headbands. Link and Link
With the play tracker app, each child gets a haptic buzz when it’s time to go outdoors and play on the smart equipment. The app tracks their fitness goals against online games tied to literacy progression and non-cognitive skill development. The program investors love that Play Tracker keep every child moving on their development pathway. Link and Link
For schools with limited access to outdoor space “A Company” provides access to indoor augmented reality play systems (that have the added advantage of increased data capture). Link and Link
Parents can monitor classes via remote cameras, and real time data is uploaded to each student’s dashboard throughout the day.
Students are expected to be goal-oriented, motivated, and self-reflective while at school. Student agency is highly valued by “A Company” and the games on “Montessori Minder” are calibrated to push each child towards that goal. Link
By the end of their time at “Montessori, Inc.” each student will have a high-resolution picture in data of where they fit into the human capital pipeline of the gig economy.
“’A Company” is proud to be able to make that happen and ensure no toddler is left behind."
"The first baby born on the blockchain is expected to enter the world at a small clinic in rural Tanzania this week.
What does that mean – to be born on the blockchain? Has the world finally gone too far with its distributed ledger obsession? Just the opposite, Niall Dennehy, COO of AID:Tech would argue – more like it’s finally found a use case that is more practical and more noble than cryptocurrencies.
That use case, said Dennehy, is to guide Tanzanian mothers through their pregnancies and establish digital identities for their babies at birth, which he says will make it easier for those mothers and children to receive aid from governments and non-profits throughout their lives.
AID:Tech uses digital identity and blockchain tech to create a new, more transparent way for governments, enterprises and NGOs to deliver digital entitlements. It has teamed up with PharmAccess Foundation, a group focused on improving healthcare access throughout Africa, to devise this creative new use of distributed ledgers.
In a recent interview with Karen Webster, Dennehy explained how AID:Tech and PharmAccess Foundation came together to innovate this humanitarian application for blockchain tech, what benefits the organizations believe they can deliver and why they say blockchain was the right tool for the job.
Transparency
From lack of healthcare funding to high child and maternal mortality rates, the Tanzanian healthcare system presents quite a few substantial challenges when it comes to caring for mothers and babies. One of them is the difficulty of getting funds from well-meaning donors to end recipients.
Even when charitable organizations try to step in and offer aid, those funds don’t always get to their intended destination. Dennehy said that’s how AID:Tech got started: Monitoring how aid is delivered to eliminate the corruption that exists around cash delivery.
A distributed, immutable ledger creates transparency to ensure that donations and government services and remittances, such as welfare, go where they are needed instead of into sticky pockets.
“We use blockchain,” Dennehy said, “but at heart, we’re a data logistics company, ensuring that something gets from Point A to Point B.”
Blockchain Babies
Dennehy said the greatest potential for blockchain in this setting is with the unborn: two billion people lack a form of legal identity, and the world’s population is only growing. Assigning people an identity at birth could help trace services and aid to ensure they’re received by the people who need them.
If people can be assigned an identity at birth – with, of course, the mother holding control of the data until the child comes of age – then Dennehy said the person’s identity can become an aggregator of data for welfare, aid remittances and donations, eliminating the fraud that can be all too common in the no-man’s-land between well-meaning donors and end recipients.
The aggregator facet is a key part of what Dennehy said AID:Tech and PharmAccess are trying to do. He said a blockchain identity alone doesn’t do people any good; it’s tying it to necessary services that will create value as these blockchain babies come of age.
Healthy Moms
As for the mothers, said Dennehy, using blockchain to track their healthcare activity throughout the pregnancy and after birth can help ensure a healthy process and delivery, reducing the potential of either the mother or the baby dying in childbirth.
Today, women receive a paper booklet upon learning they’re pregnant, and each time they go in for prenatal care, the doctor or midwife writes down data from the visit in the booklet. That booklet is later sent to a processing center where it is manually entered – but that doesn’t happen until three months after the child is delivered, and since it’s entered manually, the data is error-prone.
Logging that information on the blockchain instead, said Dennehy, enables healthcare providers to incentivize healthy, proactive pregnancy behaviors. For instance, if a patient shows up for all her appointments, she may receive a digital asset representing an umbrella, which she can present at a shop to receive the umbrella.
Incentivizing healthcare at this critical time in a woman’s life gets her through the door, said Dennehy, which generates data – and presenting that data back to the woman empowers her to make better decisions around her own (and her baby’s) health.
Scalability
When Mastercard came up with a way to track medication compliance for Hepatitis C patients in countries with limited resources, it leveraged its card rails and underlying infrastructure for rewards points to track healthcare activity and to incentivize patients to receive the care they needed.
Patients who took all of their medication as directed could be completely cured, but many were not compliant with their treatment plans, so they remained sick. So, figured Mastercard, if it could use a loyalty/rewards structure to incentivize patients to take better care of themselves and follow their doctors’ instructions, more people could be cured."...
"It’s time activists began to develop a working knowledge of Blockchain and self-sovereign digital identity, because these are the mechanisms that will drive the transition to IoT monitoring for the purposes of Pay for Success deal evaluation. I created a slide share about Blockchain as part of a “Smart Cities” post I wrote last year, which can be accessed here if it helps to have visuals.
The technology became public in 2008 when Santoshi Nakamoto published the whitepaper “Bitcoin: A Peer to Peer Electronic Cash System.” No one knows who Nakamoto actually is. Over the past decade Bitcoin digital currency has generated significant buzz, yet many believe Blockchain will be even more transformative, as big as or bigger than the rise of the Internet.
MIT is heavily involved in Blockchain research and development through its Digital Currency Initiative, housed within the MIT Media Lab. The program is led by Neha Nerula, formerly of Google who holds a PhD from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Nerula served on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Blockchain from 2016-2017. Its faculty advisor, Simon Johnson, co-founded the Sloan School’s Global Entrepreneurship Lab and worked as chief economist for the International Monetary fund.
In an April 2018 article, “In Blockchain We Trust,” Michael Casey, global economics professor, goes into detail regarding the use of Blockchain to create “value” in virtual worlds by securing ownership of digital assets. As we kill off the planet and begin spending more and more time in online environments, there’s cold comfort knowing the forces of global monopoly capital are rapidly colonizing digital worlds, too.
Blockchain is the structure that underpins crypto-currencies like Bitcoin, but it’s much more than that. In its simplest terms, it’s a ledger that keeps track of transactions, all kinds of transactions that may or may not have a financial component. Unlike a dusty accounting ledger or its modern equivalent, something like Quick Books, data stored on Blockchain is distributed. This means multiple exact copies of the same encrypted data live on peer-to-peer networked computers, which supposedly makes it more secure. If one node goes down the information is not lost. It is portrayed as the ultimate “permanent record.”
Data stored on Blockchain is “verified” by computers that use a consensus process, competing to solve cryptographic puzzles in exchange for Bitcoin payments. This cryptographic authentication injects “trust” into transactions, enabling security without the need of a third party to ensure everyone is on the up and up. Once data is locked into Blockchain, promoters of the technology say it is immutable, unchangeable. Although, as with everything coded, there are still vulnerabilities and hacks as discussed in this MIT Technology Review article “How secure is blockchain really?”
It may be some indication of the level of actual “trust” developers have in blockchain that the Chamber of Digital Commerce and Coin Center created the Blockchain Alliance in the fall of 2015 to “pro-actively engage” with regulatory and law enforcement agencies. In the United States, government partners include: DEA, DHS, DOJ, FBI, US Marshal Service, US Secret Service, ICE/HSI, CBP, IRS-Criminal Investigation, FDA, US Postal Inspection, Commidity and Futures Trading Commission, SEC, FTC, FDIC, as well Attorney General’s Offices in California, Texas, New York, and Ulster County. Seems they have some rather powerful partners.
Some Blockchains are public, others are private. Data stored on private chains can be made accessible using a combination of matched public and private “keys.” A public key is used to verify and encrypt data. It is public and can be known by anyone. A private key decrypts data that has been encrypted with its paired public key. These keys consist of extremely long sets of characters, which can be shortened to a public key fingerprint or associated with biometric information via a biocryptic process.
Digital currency payments validated with biometric information like iris scans have been prototyped using refugee populations over the past few years (see the featured image). While the technology that undergirds it is complex, programmers are developing accessible interfaces that make using digital currency as easy as opening an app and verifying a transaction, financial or otherwise, with a thumbprint or facial-recognition scan.
Beyond their capacity to hold tokenized digital currencies, e-wallets are being used to hold all sorts of other information. They are touted as an effective means to manage the continuous flows of activity, money, and data that surround us. In the fall of 2016, the state of Illinois; home to many Pay for Success players including: James Heckman, JB Pritzker, Rahm Emmanuel, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (trading financial and commodity derivatives), charged a Blockchain Taskforce with examining ways to use the technology to promote economic development in the state and “improve record keeping.” Their final report, issued in January, is available here.
Below is a map of the players involved. Click here for the interactive version.
"Given the turbulent, even frothy environment for disruptive digital technologies, one novel entrant promises to be among the frothiest: blockchain. The secure distributed ledger technology behind Bitcoin, blockchain has exploded out of the realm of the dubious cryptocurrency into a hype-driven category of its own.
VC money is pouring into numerous blockchain startups. IBM is betting the farm on the technology. Pundits around the globe are calling for blockchain to reinvent everything from equities trading to charitable giving.
And yet, aside from Bitcoin itself, real-world implementations of blockchain are few and far between. Has the hype exceeded the reality? Let’s see what a number of skeptics have to say."...
[ Note: Re-sharing does not necessarily indicate endorsement]
Abstract:
"The purpose of this article is to discuss the application of blockchain technology in e-government, particularly in the Chinese context. Chancheng District, part of Foshan City in Guangdong Province, China, has undertaken a project called "The Comprehensive Experimental Area of Big Data in Guangdong Province" since 2016. Promoting the application of blockchain technology in e-government is an essential part of this undertaking, which is the first use of blockchain in government in China. Taking Chancheng's project as a case study, this article analyzes the framework, difficulties and challenges of applying blockchain to e-government at present, and discusses how blockchain technology can contribute to the development of e-government and public services in China. This article considers the practical realities in China and discusses the application of blockchain technology in Chinese e-government, finding that blockchain technology can bring the following benefits: (1) improvements in the quality and quantity of government services, (2) greater transparency and accessibility of government information, (3) development of information-sharing across different organizations, and (4) assistance in building an individual credit system in China. However, information security, cost and reliability are still major problems in application. Thus, establishing a general application platform of blockchain technology and developing management standards are crucial for promoting and applying blockchain in e-government. Blockchain provides an effective way of making government services more efficient, but standardizing the management system, processes and responsibility for the application is necessary for its further promotion. This article, by providing an analysis of the practice of blockchain in e-government in China, could serve as a foundation for further practical work and theoretical research in government services."
"Abstract: The last decade's developments in computation are major topics of debate among business, policymakers, and social movements alike. Blockchain, Bitcoin, smart contracts, the Internet of Things, machine translation, image recognition, the Earth Bank of Codes – all are understood to be not only business opportunities but also political and environmental issues. Seldom mentioned, however, is the extent to which these innovations are part of an ecological history that goes back to the early 19th century and before. A strategic understanding their dynamics and contradictions requires looking again at longstanding pictures of labour, mechanization, commons, and capital accumulation. Different ways of thinking about Marx's categories of living and dead labour inspired by the work of the later Wittgenstein can help."
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"Alice is a decentralized social impact network built on the Ethereum blockchain. It helps social organisations (charities, NGOs, social enterprises) to run projects transparently, using smart contract-based incentives to ensure their impact is independently verified and accessible to everyone.
This makes it much easier for funders (philanthropic organisations, impact investors, small donors) to identify and scale social projects that demonstrably work, while reducing due diligence, reporting and other transaction costs.
Alice’s first application is live at http://www.alice.si. Much of our code is open-source and available on our website in geek mode http://alice.si/geek-mode."
"Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and Ethereum have long had a reputation as being somewhat of a "Wild West," beset by hype bubbles, scams, and hacks — and that seems unlikely to change any time soon.
Amid the massive hype and speculation around Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), $8 million (£6.1 million) was stolen from would-be investors in one startup.
For the uninitiated, ICOs are a fancy new way of fundraising enabled by digital currencies like Ethereum— participants invest money and receive digital "tokens" in return. It's largely unregulated, and some observers believe the market is in a massive bubble — with some ICO crowdfunding events raising hundreds of millions of dollars.
In the case of Coindash, its ICO was rapid — and disastrous.
The attacker(s) had apparently hacked into the website and changed the address that investors were sending their funds to — meaning the cash was funnelled directly to them. It's the digital equivalent of changing the name on the paperwork so investors make out their cheques to the wrong person — and it's basically irreversible."...
"Readers are invited to challenge my position. This technology is in its nascence and more is yet to come….
Blockchain undermines The Fair Information Practices Principle of Participation
Computer based patient records have already caused millions of innocent patients’ private medical details to be breached and exploited. These records should by right have remained offline. Currently, I believe that it is a serious mistake for the health care field to adopt blockchain technology as a storage and transmission modality for patient information. Existence of information in perpetuity on a Blockchain obliterates the protections inherent in the Fair Information Practices Principle of Participation. The Fair Information Practices Principle of Participation states that an individual should “be able to challenge data relating to him and, if the challenge is successful, to have the data erased, rectified, completed or amended” (IAPP, 2018).
When wrongly diagnosed with a medical condition that might stigmatize an individual, the widely distributed nature of Blockchain storage renders it extremely difficult if not impossible to erase erroneous and potentially damaging information. In the case of private and sensitive medical information in general, the place for this information is with the doctor or nurse alone. For all the good it has done, HIPAA has failed to prevent the data breaches of 229,659,140 medical records (Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, 2018). No amount of security engineering will be sufficient to prevent more data breaches of computerized patient records stored on Blockchain. The world-wide-web was created to share information. It is by its very nature unsuitable for storing confidential patient information.
For medical information that will be widely distributed, even if this distribution occurs in a private Blockchain, that format is still prone to hacking. If revealed to prejudiced potential employers or other entities, this could affect a person’s ability to earn a living, establishing a framework for the commitment of egregious wrongs that are inarguably intolerable to individuals. For example, if someone receives a false positive diagnosis of a serious communicable disease, this can be ruinous if the information is breached.
Blockchaincontradicts the foundational concept of Information Life Cycle Management
Information Life Cycle Management facilitates organizations’ ability to comply with laws and industry regulations regarding the disposition of personal data. Compliance with these regulations supplies numerous benefits, including but not limited to the security of information about individuals. “ILM is a policy-based approach to managing the flow of information through a life cycle from creation to final disposition” (IAPP, 2018). Where information is stored on a blockchain, the disposition of that information becomes impossible even when the information contained in those records is erroneous. Since blockchains can be hacked, and since they are widely distributed, personal information that should have been destroyed (but which could not be destroyed because of the very nature of a blockchain) becomes linked to numerous entities, exposing that information to breaches and the person to whom it is connected.
The lack of boundaries within this schema is also reason for concern with regards to confidential information. Despite robust encryption and other security measures, we have witnessed the proliferation of data breaches that would never occur if the information was simply collected by the one entity that needs it and stored in one locked cabinet, or on an offline hard drive. The notion that your personal information exists to be exploited has been widely adopted as a foundational credo of modern marketing, but its popularity does not render it ethical or right.
Blockchain prevents the Fair Information Practice Principle of Openness
When people’s personal information is entered into a system and they are not informed that it will become part of a blockchain, this runs counter to the Fair Information Practice Principle of Openness which states that “that there should be a general policy of openness about developments, practices and policies with respect to personal data. Means should be readily available to establish the existence and nature of personal data, and the main purposes of their use, as well as the identity and usual residence of the data controller” (IAPP, 2018). Given that the data will reside with myriad entities, it is not possible to inform users of where their personal data will reside, even if they are informed up front about the fact that their data will be stored on a blockchain. While some people may not care about their medical privacy, others may avoid seeking care altogether rather than risk their confidential health information being pushed through the torrent to numerous strangers. Yes, there are safeguards, but history tells us that these are likely to be dismantled.
With Blockchain, Consent and Choice Rights Are Denied to Patients
A Privacy Impact Assessment evaluates numerous factors in a system that collects PII, including the presence of “consent and choice rights for data subjects and whether the system is designed with information lifecycle principles in mind” (IAPP, 2018). It is unclear how storage of private information distributed across numerous entities in a blockchain allows a patient to have a choice about where their most personal data will be stored and shared and at the moment, it does not seem possible to delete the data once it is input into the blockchain. This nullifies a key feature of the information lifecycle.
“”For me, it should be very clear that it’s the user, using a service, who should be the one deciding, if how and for what purpose his data are processed,” Sippel said.” This reason alone is enough to nullify the idea of adopting blockchain technology as a modality for medical information storage.
It goes back to the most fundamental credo:
Just because a technology exist does not mean we should use it.
The nuclear bomb exists, but we should not use it.
The blockchain exists, but we should not use it to store any sensitive information, especially medical information.
By Alison McDowell "I created this video as a follow up to the one I prepared last year on Social Impact Bonds. It is time to examine the ways in which Blockchain could interface with social impact investing to further concentrate power and wealth and exacerbate long-standing forms of global oppression under the guise of philanthropy. This narrative flips the prevailing sales pitch for Blockchain on its head and offers a strong critique of a technology many consider a powerful disruptive force.
With decentralized identity, we are cuing up permanent records for the masses with potentially disastrous consequences. Is it prudent to place our "trust" in a technology of unknown origin? No one knows who or what Santoshi Nakamoto actually is and whose interests this invention advances. Why would we be so naive as to remake the world's social and economic structures around this code? What would it mean to live life on a ledger?"...
From WrenchInTheGears blog "With the debut of their Blockchain transcript, Southern New Hampshire University’s “College for America” and Learning Machine are in the vanguard of innovative digital credentialing for adults. At the other end of the “lifelong learning” spectrum, Trustlab’s IXO Foundation has staked out the early childhood space with a Blockchain DApp called Amply. Amply, an online attendance-taking system designed to track “impact,” is being piloted through SmartStart, a South Africa pre-school franchise.
This proof of concept, financed in part through UNICEF’s innovation venture capital fund, had registered over 3,100 students across 85 centers as of spring 2018. Innovation Edge, a South Africa based social impact investment portfolio manager specializing in ed-tech, IoT health, and early childhood education, is another Amply funder. Remember Ready Nation’s Global Business Summit on Early Childhood? The one coming up in New York this November that I blogged about here? The one where early childhood educators and policy advocates were specifically EXCLUDED unless they came with a vetted group of four business people? Well, Cynthia McCaffrey, director of UNICEF’s office of global innovation will be speaking at that event, and Innovation Edge is listed as a sponsor.
While at first glance Amply may look like many other smartphone apps, there’s a lot going on beneath the surface. In South Africa the government reimburses preschool providers based on the number of children attending school each day. With Amply, providers take attendance digitally rather than on paper."...
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