How Bitcoin Will End World Poverty
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William Blair partner Brian Singer explains how Bitcoin and blockchain encryption has a greater ability to bring more of the world’s population out of poverty than anything we’ve seen in decades.
FORBES: And is bitcoin the currency of the future? Or is it the payment system they’re developing?
SINGER: Bingo. It’s the payment system. It’s the blockchain encryption. And there are interesting things. I think bitcoin, or the, really, blockchain encryption that’s behind it, has a greater ability to bring more of the world’s population out of poverty than anything we’ve seen in
FORBES: Well, for one thing, it’s a cheap payment system.
SINGER: For one thing, it’s a cheap payment system. But it’s more important than that. It’s more important than that. Blockchain cryptography is all about digital transfer of ownership in a completely transparent and public way. Okay, I don’t want to go into any of the math and the complexity behind it, but think of what that means.
That means that I can actually record ownership in public, in a digital means. 50% of the world’s population has a mobile phone. I read an estimate this month that in 2020, 90% of the world’s population will have mobile phones. That’s probably a high estimate, but that’s okay.
FORBES: $25, $35 smartphones.
SINGER: We’re throwing them away and they can ship them off to emerging markets. But what’s powerful about this, now think about Hernando de Soto.
FORBES: Yes.
SINGER: Okay. The Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Peru, I really think Hernando de Soto should win the Nobel prize for the work he’s done. I hope he does. But he’s going around the world and identified one of the most powerful things to the economy and the creation of wealth. And that is the ownership of property.
FORBES: Which you can then use as collateral.
SINGER: Which you can use as collateral and when you own it, you will develop it. The best thing you can do for the environment is to own it. Because when you own it, you make sure it’s sustainable for your future family. And that’s powerful. But they don’t have the ability to own it. If you live in a shantytown, you operate outside of the legal economy. It’s not that you want to operate outside of the legal economy, but you have no ownership of any property.
FORBES: Although in the neighborhood, everyone knows who owns what.
SINGER: And once you introduce blockchain cryptography, guess what they can do? Have a public ledger of ownership and transfer that cannot be denied because it’s absolutely transparent. It’s absolutely transparent. It is the means through which these individuals can get exactly what Hernando de Soto thinks they best need to bring themselves out of poverty.
It is so much more profound than that, but at its very basis, it has the ability to give these individuals the right of ownership to property. And that has more than anything else, the ability to bring them out of poverty. And I can’t wait. It’ll be adopted elsewhere. I mean, blockchain encryption is such a powerful tool. It’ll be used by banks, it’ll be used by credit card companies, it will become a standard. But what’s more interesting is what it can do to poverty around the world to eliminate poverty.
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