Humanitarian Blockchain and its Liberating Technologies for Refugees

Last October, dozens of refugees remained stranded in Calais after authorities announced the closure of Calais’ ‘Jungle’. In a report from the Guardian, over 1,000 refugees remained, including more than 100 children, with many facing the prospect of having nowhere safe to sleep.

Yet, with French and U.K. officials accusing each other of not doing more to sort the situation out, the ‘Jungle’ became a poignant representation of Europe’s failure to tackle the migrant crisis.

Humanitarian Blockchain

One organization is stepping forward with blockchain ideas and solutions designed to address some of the barriers that they perceive to be standing in the way of social, political, and economic freedom, not only for refugees but for other disenfranchised populations.

Launched in February 2016 by founder and CEO Julio Alejandro, London-based Humanitarian Blockchain is the world’s first DIY e-governance consultancy project that is attempting to tackle social and global problems using blockchain technology.

Speaking to CCN, Alejandro, a U.S. and U.K. foreign correspondent for Mexican-based newspaper, Excélsior, said:

[Our goal is to] provide financial, communicational, and organizational independence to refugees and the organizations that help them with decentralized, accessible, and non-jurisdictional blockchain technologies.

The organization is attempting to achieve this goal through its four liberating technologies: bitcoin Visa debit cards, Estonia e-residences for high-skilled immigrants, a DAO model for HR NGOs, and non-biometric, reputation-based, digital identities.

Out of the 30 blockchain-for-good use cases Humanitarian Blockchain has mapped, they have identified 30 organizations, mainly startups, that use a combination of these technologies. Furthermore, Alejandro states that costs are reduced by not developing in-house solutions, but by outsourcing actualizations and improvements with cheap implementation.

The cost of the e-residences and a bitcoin Visa debit card is €120 while the cost of implementing a DAO no-managers model and automated Smart Contracts for a small HR NGO is €1,000. Humanitarian Blockchain is planning on using BitNation’s Pangea identity system, which is free, once it’s ready this year.

In consultation with organizations and governments within Europe, Alejandro is examining and promoting the benefits of blockchain technology, analyzing the local ecosystem, and looking at its needs and opportunities for future development.

Last September and October, Students for Liberty asked Alejandro to give lectures and talks in ten countries. In November, he debated on anonymity, untraceability, and decentralization for the European Commission legislation body in Prague before taking his discussion to Tel Aviv and Beirut at the beginning of the year.

By focusing on people that they’ve identified as oppressed, Humanitarian Blockchain aims to serve as contractors and consultants, teaching and implementing pilot projects for social good in complex ecosystems; to match blockchain developers, who might be living in London or New York, with organizations that request their help; and to participate in social competitions that promote humanitarian, social, and political uses of blockchain technology.

Social Experiment

Even though the Calais camp disappeared last October, back in June, Mexican-born Alejandro undertook a social experiment pilot when he went to Calais.

At the end, there were two things that he noticed.

Firstly, posing as a Syrian refugee living in The Jungle, Alejandro found it difficult to pay in a coffee shop with a bitcoin debit card. He said that the issue of having no fixed addressed or job meant that merchants were more likely to ask questions, suspicious of where a refugee may have received the card and how money was put on it for a refugee to use.

He said:

As a brown, heavily bearded, Muslim-looking male, I was denied service and was asked to leave [places of business].

Secondly, they discovered that the inhabitants of the Jungle were often African and Asian economic immigrants hoping to remain anonymous and underground, rather than the highly-publicized refugees from Syria.

He added:

With limited capacities to teach or implement this project in mass scale we decided to re-adapt our strategy into a smaller group: young, anonymous immigrants with risk of radicalization.

As such, the organization identified three types of people that it is aiming to help: political dissidents, victimless crimes, and rehabilitating those who have committed serious crimes, but can’t reinsert into society or the job market, forcing them underground or being radicalized into violent activities.

Alejandro believes that digital identities will help oppressed communities regain their dignity. As they won’t be government sanctioned, he says that reputation-based identities will eliminate violence in case of wrong doing.

He states:

In a post-nation world, if you commit a crime you would get your reputation downgraded. ID and reputation systems are the preventive method towards crime and punitive behavior.

He concludes by adding, that with the use of digital identities, businesses, audiences and stores can ban or limit access for a person into a place, instead of having them sent to prison.

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BitGo Reveals Hard Fork Planning; Will Not Support Bitcoin Unlimited

With a hard fork looming, BitGo, a multi-signature bitcoin wallet, has advised its customers what to do in the case of a new chain, whether it is Bitcoin Unlimited, which BitGo deems unsupportable, or a supportable option such as Segregated Witness.

Ben Davenport, co-founder and chief technical officer, advised users in a recent blog what actions BitGo will take and gave recommendations on what they should to in the event of a hard fork. BitGo did not assign a high probability of a hard fork until recently.

Bitcoin Unlimited Unsupportable

BitGo will not support Bitcoin Unlimited, which it does not consider supportable. It will support Segregated Witness, (SegWit) which it consider safe and tested in the core code.

BitGo believes any near-term fork will be contentious and bad for the bitcoin ecosystem. Brand dilution and user confusion will remove billions of dollars from the bitcoin market capitalization, Davenport noted.

SegWit, on the other hand, will provide additional block space in the near term.

BitGo cannot predict how the scenario will unfold, but the company will move as quickly as possible to provide solutions to protect customers’ interests.

Unsupported Hard Fork = Altcoin

Any hard fork introduced without industry-wide consensus will be an altcoin, regardless how much hash power that coin has. The majority of bitcoin exchanges share the same view, Davenport said.

If a hard fork were executed in a supportable manner, BitGo would support it with an API as soon as possible.

To support a hard fork, according to Davenport, it must meet the following:

1. The hard fork has to be coordinated by a clear on-chain mechanism and have a grace period between activation and launch.

2. It must provide strong two-way protection, whereby transactions are only valid on one of the two chains. Minus this measure, users can safely transact separately with splitting techniques that place an excessive burden on the end user.

3. It has to offer “wipe out protection,” so that once it forks, it remains permanent. The new fork’s software should not be capable of producing a reorganization back to the original chain as it will wipe out the new chain.

Bitcoin Unlimited does not meet any of these criteria. In addition, there are problems with “emergent consensus” that can lead to ongoing network splits and reorganizations of arbitrary length chains based on the way miner groups establish consensus parameters.

There are also concerns about the quality of the peer review process and the general code of Bitcoin Unlimited. Because of this, BitGo will not support a Bitcoin Unlimited hard fork in its current form.

BitGo will change its position on Bitcoin Unlimited if it makes changes to make the fork supportable.

What Users Should Do

Davenport recommends users take the following actions if the Bitcoin Unlimited hard fork launches.

1. Pause any outgoing transaction activity from BitGo. Otherwise, transactions can occur on both chains.

2. Keep in close contact with BitGo for assistance in moving coins safely or in splitting coins. BitGo will help customers split their coins, but it cannot determine how long this will take.

3. Once a hard fork has resolved itself back to a single chain due to it being abandoned by miners, or a splitting plan has been deployed, it will be safe to transact again on the original chain.

Should there be a supportable fork, BitGo recommends the following steps.

1. Continue to safety transact on the original network with the BitGo API. Users will not be able to transact on the new fork immediately. Transacting will not affect the coins on that side of the fork.

2. Be ready for block times on the original network to increase significantly, due to an increased load on the network. Execute only necessary transactions and be ready for possibly higher fees for a number of weeks due to the extended number of blocks.

3. Transact the value on the new coin by waiting for BitGo to add support for the new coin, or use the two keys with software built by others. BitGo cannot commit to any time frame for supporting the new coin.

Also read: Here’s why a hard fork can’t work

Other Concerns

Malicious forking that undermines the existing minority chain with excess hash power is also a possibility. This can create a chain of empty blocks or a working chain suddenly experiencing a chain reorganization many blocks deep. BitGo considers this to be the same as a 51% attack on the bitcoin network.

In such a case, BitGo recommends halting all bitcoin activity, including outgoing transactions and crediting incoming deposits. One cannot make normal assumptions about block confirmations to finalize a transaction.

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BitPay Won’t Use Bitcoin Alternatives For Payment Systems Despite Scaling Issues

While many expected bitcoin to replace the use of credit cards and replace the banking system in 2013, the cryptocurrency has faced challenges as a payment system since it has not been able to safely accommodate its growth, according to Nasdaq.

Bitcoin is currently dealing with some issues as a payments platform, mainly because the system is experiencing growth at a rate faster than it can safely scale.

Stephen Pair, a co-founder of BitPay, said customer service inquiries have increased due to transaction confirmation delays. BitPay has also witnessed higher transaction fees for its own transactions, causing the company to stop covering bitcoin network fees on invoice payments.

BitPay Responds To Payment Delays

BitPay has become more creative in designing user experience for delayed payments. Delays are often an opportunity to explain the way the bitcoin network works and direct people to wallets with dynamic transaction fees.

Copay and BitPay wallet users have largely escaped transaction delays since their wallets dynamically calculate transaction fees.

One method for addressing transaction delays and increased transaction fees is the Lightning Network. Its caching layer would allow for improved versions of features such as immediate transactions at no cost that people have associated with bitcoin.

Pair said BitPay is exploring all possible scalability solutions. He is not surprised bitcoin has to scale. He is surprised that while short-term throughput bumps were expected, changes for on-chain throughput were expected a few years ago.

The slow pace of increased throughput was not foreseen, he said. A scalability limit will be reached at some point that will be addressed by solutions like Lightning Network.

BitPay Will Stick With Bitcoin

BitPay has studied alternatives to the bitcoin blockchain and concluded none are compelling, Pair said.

Some observers suspected BitPay and similar companies might switch from bitcoin to altcoins or permissioned blockchains on account of the high U.S.-dollar-denominated fees and network congestion.

While Pair acknowledged there are scaling issues, the company continues to witness more consumers using the existing technology.

He said bitcoin is the most cost effective, secure and fast means of value transfer on the Internet.

BitPay sees itself as a payment innovator. Consumer and business-to-business payments are no different on BitPay’s platform and the bitcoin network.

Tony Gallippi, BitPay co-founder, noted at the recent Distributed: Markets fireside chat that the company’s transaction count more than doubled in the last year. Much of the growth was in digital goods and video games.

Gallippi said the Steam digital distribution platform’s acceptance of bitcoin was a source of growth for BitPay, and that there is much overlap between the bitcoin and gamer communities.

Pair said BitPay is also witnessing growth in bitcoin’s use for B2B money transfers. He said bitcoin is a fantastic solution for such transfers, particularly for global payments where bank transfers are inefficient and slow.

Also read: BitPay CEO on safe bitcoin scaling: soft fork first, hard fork next

B2B Payments Embrace Bitcoin

B2B companies are using the BitPay platform for billing settling international payments with a lot of suppliers, Pair said during the fireside chat.

Gallippi noted there has been an increase in bitcoin’s use for payment disbursements.

He said it is not easy to pay people on a regular basis in the majority of countries. It is hard to pay people in places where a lot of apps are being developed, such as India, Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

For app stores or digital marketing companies, Gallippi said BitPay can receive one payment from the business and then disburse payments in bitcoin to all of the endpoints.

BitPay built the product for its need to pay its employees in bitcoin, Pair said. There are now a lot of Fortune 500 companies asking BitPay to solve similar payment issues.

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Blockchain Academy Partners Satoshi Centre to Boost Bitcoin Education in Botswana

The South African-based Blockchain Academy is to collaborate with the Satoshi Centre to drive bitcoin and blockchain education in the African nation of Botswana.

According to an announcement from the Blockchain Academy, a two-day course, from the 1-2 May, 2017, will provide a detailed understanding of what bitcoin is and its distributed ledger. Attendees will also learn how they can utilize the technology when it comes to constructing their own applications.

Sonya Kuhnel, managing director of the Blockchain Academy, said that there is a call for blockchain skills in South Africa with Botswana pegged to see an increase in demand too.

She said:

This is an extremely interesting space to be involved in and provides many opportunities for incumbents and individuals to experiment with this emerging and disruptive technology.

Earlier this month, a Blockchain Academy was launched in the south Indian state of Kerala where it will endeavor to research and provide consulting with blockchain technology. Along with providing training and education in South Africa and India, the Blockchain Academy, established in 2015, does so too in Zimbabwe with clients ranging from Barclays, legal firms and entrepreneurs.

Africa’s Blockchain Development

The progress of blockchain in Africa is continuing at an accelerated pace as they become more embracive of the technology.

This can be seen through the African financial system, which is realizing the potentials it holds particularly when it comes to reducing the cost of banking transactions. The governor of the South African Reserve Bank also revealed that the bank was open to digital currencies and blockchain, with many speculating that of the African nations, blockchain will take off first in South Africa. While the global banking consortium led by R3 saw its first African member join ranks in Absa Bank, which is one of South Africa’s largest banks.

The blockchain expansion that Africa is experiencing is set to continue as more organizations embrace the technology for what it is known for: transparent and efficient that delivers an effective solution for many sectors.

Also popular in Africa is the use of the digital currency, bitcoin, which is helping to grow many cashless societies on the continent.

Only recently, BitPesa, a major bitcoin payments startup that was launched in Kenya in November 2013, raised $2.5 million in a Series A round of funding. Such an amount is expected to help the company’s growth with an emphasis in Nigeria, which is BitPesa’s largest market.

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G20: Blockchain Essential to Build Inclusive Transparent Digital Economy for All

Blockchain holds the key to building an inclusive digital economy that is secure and transparent for the globe’s citizens, according to a new G20 report.

Published last week, but updated earlier this week, the report details how the blockchain can play a vital role in improving economic resilience as ‘governments fight to restore the public’s faith in cross-border economic cooperation.’

Julie Maupin, author of the report and a senior fellow with the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) said:

The G20 must take decisive steps to harness this technology in service of its policy goals across the core focus areas of economic resilience, financial inclusion, taxation, trade and investment, employment, climate, health, sustainable development, and women’s empowerment.

She adds that failure to do so ‘risks further fragmenting the global economy, undermining public trust in international economic institutions, and pushing the most cutting-edge blockchain developments into dark web deployments that are beyond the reach of government influence.’

However, she states that:

By acting now to embrace blockchains’ socially beneficial properties and minimize their potential downside risks, the G20 governments can lay the foundation for a just, prosperous, and truly shared global economy.

Banks Efforts to Implement Blockchain

While some don’t think the blockchain is going big anytime soon, despite investment being poured into researching and developing the technology, determined efforts are being undertaken within the financial sector to implement the blockchain to improve services for its customers.

Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, realizes the potentials that the technology can provide.

In a report, he said that while the distributed ledger poses risks, it also creates new benefits for businesses and consumers, creating a new financial system for a new age.

In her report, Maupin is aware of these risks by saying:

Blockchains also introduce grave new risks to the global economy by displacing or bypassing some of the intermediaries upon whom governments have historically relied to implement important regulatory safeguards.

While she states it’s not clear how safeguards such as the Financial Action Task Force can combat tax evasion, money laundering, terrorist financing and other dark web activities, she says that the blockchain has already helped to replace failures within the financial industry.

They are helping to expand financial inclusion to previously unbanked populations. They stand poised to improve the oversight of international markets by supplying policymakers with real-time data on financial flows and asset class risks.

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Blockchain A Potential Significant Enabler for UK Solar, Says SolarCoin Co-Founder

The blockchain presents the opportunity of becoming a ‘potentially significant enabler’ for U.K. solar, according to SolarCoin co-founder Francois Sonnet.

Speaking ahead of his panel on the future of solar technology at the Managing European Solar Assets event next month in London, he said that Bitcoin’s distributed ledger technology could be utilized across a number of different areas in the U.K. such as operation and management (O&M) and peer-to-peer energy trading, according to a report from Solar Power Portal.

He said that the blockchain can help calculate any form of data, which can include transactions involving solar energy data.

It can be an enabler for O&M in the case of the solar industry, anything which is related to peer-to-peer energy transfers. That’s certainly going to be a very big enabler because the latencies, the fluidity of information is actually much higher than it is from other systems.

Created in January 2014, SolarCoin rewards people for using solar energy. With a supply of coins designed to last 40 years, the aim of the company is to boost solar electricity use worldwide by rewarding the generators of solar electricity. It is thought that it will generate 97,500 terawatt hours of solar electricity, with the network growing as more people claim SolarCoin.

Energy Companies Explore Blockchain

Energy companies are increasingly exploring the potential that the blockchain can present when it comes to energy consumption. Over the last year, alone, there have been several tests undertaken to determine the how effective it can be.

U.K.-based startup Electron created a platform on the Ethereum blockchain, in December, which showed that energy supplier switches could be performed 20 times faster than at present, presenting major cost savings.

Other countries that are exploring the blockchain’s potential are Austria and Germany.

Only last month is was reported that Austria’s biggest regional energy company, Wien Energie, was joining a group of others within the industry to take part in a blockchain pilot with the intention of cutting down costsfor consumers within the sector.

While a survey conducted in November found that German energy companies were outlining how to implement the blockchain to improve services.

Often referred to as the technology that is going to change the way the energy industry functions, as the blockchain is currently doing within the finance sector, it has the potential to fix current energy systems as it aims to meet growing customer expectations.

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Apple Rubbishes Breach Claims from Hackers Demanding Bitcoin and Ethereum

Apple has announced that their system has not been breached by a hacker or hackers, after it was reported earlier this week that they were attempting to use an alleged store of iCloud accounts and Apple emails to extort thousands of dollars worth of digital currency from the company.

On Tuesday, Motherboard reported that the hackers, who identified themselves as ‘Turkish Crime Family’, were demanding $75,000 in Bitcoin or Ethereum, or $100,000 worth of iTunes gift cards in exchange for deleting the supposed horde of data.

The hackers claimed they had access to more than 300 million Apple email accounts; however, this number was then changed to 559 million accounts.

Now, though, in a report from Fortune, Apple have stated that their systems have not been breached, but that if the list is authentic, it was not obtained through an Apple hack.

An Apple spokesman said:

There have not been any breaches in any of Apple’s systems including iCloud and Apple ID. The alleged list of email addresses and passwords appears to have been obtained from previously compromised third-party services.

According to Fortune, a person aware of the contents of the unproven data set said that many of the passwords and email accounts are those that match data that was leaked in a previous breach at LinkedIn.

With hackers typically recycling past hacked data for future scams, there may be reason to be skeptical of this alleged hack.

Criminals Turn to Ether for Ransom

Interestingly, in the past, hackers have tended to demand their ransom payments in bitcoin.

A report in December found that hackers are using mobile phone numbers to steal millions in bitcoin. While universities have also found themselves paying hackers ransoms in the digital currency.

Now, though, in what may be the first incident, hackers are turning their attention to Bitcoin’s rival: Ethereum.

For years Bitcoin has been the prominent currency of choice for criminals, but in recent weeks Ethereum is gaining ground and distinction, which is positioning itself as a viable alternative when it comes to ransom demands.

Last week it was reported that Ethereum’s price rose above $57 on Coinbase before dropping down to $35. It has since risen to just below $45 with a market cap value of just over $4 billion.

In what is considered the first high-profile extortion case seeking Ether, this could mean that more criminals will eventually demand payments in it as its value steadily rises, gaining ground on Bitcoin.

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Australia Post Joins Alibaba to Use Blockchain in Counterfeit Food Crackdown in China

Australia Post has announced partnerships with Alibaba, the world’s largest e-commerce company and Blackmores, a prominent Australian natural health company to explore blockchain technology to curb the rise of counterfeit food sold in China.

The joint endeavor will look to develop a blockchain platform to improve the traceability of food products, with Australia Post being a major exporter of food to China. In recent years, counterfeiters have notably targeted popular Australian export such as beer and wine, honey and cherries, nuts and health supplements, according to an announcement.

Australia Post or AusPost is a wholly government-owned entity based out of Melbourne that is responsible for postal services within Australia and foreign territories.

The blockchain initiative will ‘help guarantee’ genuine food products to arrive in China, according to Bob Black, executive general manager for parcels at AusPost.

Black said:

The initiative will leverage our secure, reliable and fast service to support the authentication of Australian products bound for the Chinese market.

Counterfeiters have proven tricky to combat due to the logistics of fighting fraud in foreign territories, with food fraud underlined among the biggest issues facing the global food industry. The very real plausibility of health risks due to adulteration and tampered food material has led to a loss of trust from consumers and governments, with implications on trade.

As a result, the project will look to develop a blockchain ledger that records an entire supply chain transaction.

“We are delighted Alibaba has invited us to create an innovative platform, which will track food from paddock to plate, strengthening the supply chain,” Black stated.

With an immutable, tamper-proof, time-stamped ledger, participants will be able to ascertain the entirety of the food production and supply process. Suppliers can ascertain the when, how and where their food was grown before tracking its journey through the technology. Up-to-date audits and increased transparency between producers and consumers are also underlined as benefits by AusPost.

In September 2016, Barclays and Wave, an Israeli Fintech startup laid claims to the world’s first global trade supply chain transaction powered by blockchain technology. Butter and cheese worth nearly $100,000 was exported from an Irish agricultural co-operative and a trading company in Seychelles.

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