“Blockchains are not the panacea. They’re not the silver bullet,” he said. “But they can be useful for certain applications.” 

Mell’s lecture, “Can blockchain improve operational efficiency while enhancing trust?” explored the areas where blockchains, or append-only distributed ledgers linked by cryptography, may be useful in the future. Among them are identity management, random number production, and potential government-managed cryptocurrencies. 

He spoke in depth about the possibility of managing identities using both blockchains and smart contracts, a computer protocol that helps one exchange money while avoiding the services of a middleman. In other words, a smart contract is an immutable, publicly readable, and executable code that acts as a trusted third party in transactions, he said. 

“If we had such infrastructure that worked, that would be very powerful,” Mell said. 

It reminded him of the time an FBI special agent visited his home and asked Mell a few questions about a person of interest. Mell asked the agent to show him proof of his identity. The agent took out a black, leather wallet. Inside that was a “metal star.” 

“It looked very pretty. It looked very authentic … I answered personal questions about one of my friends to an absolute stranger because he had a metal star,” he said, to chuckles from the audience, including a few FBI special agents. “Now imagine with smart contracts … that special agent could come to me, and if I had an app on my phone and I gave him some identifier from my app, [he could]digitally prove to me that he was a special agent and authorized to be doing this kind of work.” 

At the end of his 30-minute lecture, he concluded that although blockchain technology isn’t a universal remedy, it holds great potential for the future.

“If we can overcome a lot of scalability issues and assure ourselves of security issues, then we can create a smart contract infrastructure that’s scalable and secure and can be used worldwide,” Mell said. 

The Humanitarian Aid Blockchain Summit, a mix of breakout sessions and presentations that was sponsored by Fordham’s International Institute of Humanitarian Affairs (IIHA), took place at the Lincoln Center campus on Dec. 7.

In an opening address, Giulio Coppi, IIHA humanitarian innovation fellow and digital specialist for the Norwegian Refugee Council, said organizers had learned from the first conference, which was held last November, that Blockchain is a particularly expansive topic, given its newness. Therefore, organizers were determined this year to stay focused on specific, concrete efforts under development.

Thinking Practically on a Large Scale

“For the tech people, listen to what aid actors have to say, because these problems are not something that can be tackled in a pilot or in a small-scale project. We’re talking about enormously complex situations and challenges,” he said.

“At at the same time, try to take this as an opportunity for you to design in a different way, to design for hardship, and not for normal urban life; to design to go global, not to get stuck at the first obstacle once you go to scale.”

He also implored aid workers not to shy away from asking hard questions about the functionality of systems being presented to them.

“The same technology can be used in a ton of different ways. Talk about the technology and how it can be applied in different ways and different situations,” he said.

Sending Aid Dollars Securely

Because Blockchain is an open system that cannot be altered without alerting everyone involved to the changes, one of the most promising areas where it is being applied is the distribution of funds. If money can be securely sent from a donor directly to a person in distress, the logic goes, the possibility of those funds being siphoned away by corrupt middlemen is lessened.

The day’s third plenary session addressed this idea in a conversation between moderator Laura Walker McDonald, director of innovation at the Global Alliance for Humanitarian Innovation; Aradhana Gurung, lead manager of World Vision International’s Nepal Innovation Lab; and Gustav Stromfelt, new venture consultant and project manager at World Food Programme.

Gurung talked about SIKKA, a blockchain-based digital assets transfer platform designed for financial inclusion that her group has been using to help residents affected by the 7.8 earthquake that hit Nepal in 2015. Stromfelt discussed Building Blocks, a similar system that his organization has started using for digital identity and cash transfers in Pakistan and Jordan.

Proof is in the Small Success Stories

Among the details they discussed was how to convince donors to accept Blockchain data for the purposes of auditing their relief efforts. Stromfelt said small successes have begun to assuage concerns donors may have had. Their first test was with just 100 beneficiaries in Pakistan, and that success enabled them to try a larger pilot in a refugee camp Jordan. A “triangulation database” allows administrators to securely track data from all the entities involved, such as banks and supermarkets.

“The reporting that we’re pushing back up to our donors in Jordan is bar none some of the best. I think right now it’s the best you could possibly get, to the point where we’re accessing funds that we would not have accessed previously from very, very large donors,” he said.

Designing with the Culture in Mind

Design was a large part of the discussion as well. Gurung noted that SIKKA was designed to work via text messages, and there are no plans to design anything more complex, such as a smart phone app. In Nepal, flip phones outnumber smartphones, and text messages are a widely understood and accepted form of communication.

“There’s so much we can do in terms of what the technology can do, but then we always have to remember what is our core mandate to the country that we’re in,” she said.

The complexity of Blockchain may be the biggest impediment to getting large organizations to accept systems like SIKKA, she said.

“Messaging is so complicated. We use so many terms that sometimes even I get lost and have to go back to my team and be like, what does that mean again, what does that token do?” she said.

 Kamea Aloha Jr., aka CrytoCoinKid, exemplifies how one can best explain it, she said. Aloha Jr., an eight-year-old Youtube vlogger from Hawaii who covers subjects such as cryptocurrency and coding, makes complex subjects easy to understand.

“If you can explain what you’re trying to do to a 6-year-old kid, you’re on the right path.”

‘Society 5.0’

In a closing speech, Ambassador Toshiya Hoshino, Ph.D., Permanent Mission of Japan to the United Nations, said he was optimistic that attendees will help the UN achieve its sustainable development goals, which were adopted in 2015. He said there is a widespread acknowledgment that today’s problems can’t just be solved by governments alone.

“The United Nations is different from the United Nations 10 years ago. This is a place where all are invited to discuss issues with business representatives, academics, scientists, innovators, and to use our ideas and strengths to make a better world possible,” he said.

Humanity has entered “Society 5.0,” having passed through the first four variations of hunter, agrarian, industrial, and information society, he said. Science and technology, including Blockchain, will be the centerpiece of the next phase.

“There are issues of scalability, including the enormous amount of energy it consumes, and longer response times for verification when more users incur transactions,” he said. “But Blockchain has great potential for its resilience, high security, and immutability.”

“We could have the banking industry—which is incomplete in a lot of developing countries—skip some of the steps we went through in the West, and go right to blockchain technology,” said Paul Johnson, a 35-year veteran of the investment community and an adjunct professor at the Gabelli School of Business.

Johnson, a senior advisor with the financial services firm Harbor Peak, spoke to 140 students and alumni of diverse academic and professional backgrounds at the Lincoln Center campus as part of the Fordham at the Forefront lecture series.

In the lecture, titled “Bitcoin, Blockchain, and the Future of Business,” he described the new capabilities brought about by blockchain, a dispersed online system in which transactions are made both more secure and more transparent because information about them is open and stored across the network.

In the developed world, blockchain will take costs and layers out of all sorts of transactions, such as real estate and importing and exporting, Johnson said. Much of its impact will be behind the scenes, he said.

And in the developing world, “it’s quite possible [blockchain]it will become the backbone to a new banking institution,” he said. “Much of its capabilities are yet to be seen.”

He added that it’s too soon to translate blockchain into money-making opportunities, and noted that some aspects of blockchain—such as how to resolve disputes—still need to be ironed out.

“There’s a difference between recognizing its importance and then trying to monetize the trend,” Johnson said.

Bitcoin Risks

Acknowledging the buzz around bitcoin, a digital currency used for blockchain transactions, Johnson advised investors to be cautious, referring to it as a “cultural artifact—a collectible like a Jackson Pollock painting”—rather than a currency.

“It has value because the community has given it value,” he said. “But it’s hard to determine the value of these things that have cultural appeal.”

Johnson offered similar advice about ICOs, or initial coin offerings, which are created through blockchain technology. Like an initial public offering, an ICO is a fundraising tool in which a company sells digital tokens to raise capital rather than issuing shares of ownership. So instead of acquiring equity in a company, purchasing ICOs is like buying a voucher for something that has a finite economic value—“a haircut, a movie ticket, or a ride on a ferris wheel,” for example.

“You can actually buy them, they look like bitcoin and are based on the idea that blockchain is really important,” he said. “That’s where ICOs are in the sweet spot of sucking people in. That causes me concern.”

Johnson attributed the bitcoin rage to “FOMO,” or the fear of missing out, a powerful emotional driver that moves many to make investment decisions without fully understanding what they are buying.

“It’s not some sort of magical currency,” he said, “and if you don’t know what you’re buying, you have the potential to lose a lot of money.”

One attendee, attorney Mike Krieger, LAW ’77, noted that blockchain could cut out the intermediaries in personal and business transactions, bringing “huge cost savings” but also “major declines in certain jobs related to work now done by these intermediaries.”

At the Gabelli School, Johnson teaches courses on digital currency, blockchain technology, and value investing. His students are working on a project called Jesuit Token that will use blockchain technology to promote community service University-wide. The goal, he said, is to incentivize and reward 25 million hours of community service in the next 20 years.

-Claire Curry

But blockchain—the shared-ledger architecture that supports cryptocurrencies like bitcoin—has potential to create “fast, secure, paperless transactions,” he said.

Walker was one of several speakers marking the book release of The Truth Machine: Blockchain and the Future of Everything (St. Martin’s Press, 2018) by Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna. He and the authors were also joined by blockchain engineer Joseph Lubin, founder of ConsenSys; financial adviser Joshua Brown; and Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, co-founders of Gemini, a digital asset exchange.

Bitcoin Billionaires

Today, said Cameron Winklevoss, businesses are at the “bottom of the first inning” for cryptocurrencies. He and his brother, Tyler, began investing back in bitcoin in 2012, and he said the two haven’t looked back, in spite of volatility.

As Bitcoin billionaires, the Winklevosses spoke positively of the controversial cryptocurrency.

“Wall Street armies are amassing at the border” to begin investing, Cameron said. “Bitcoin has more lives than a cat; every day it lives on.”

Fertile Destruction and Disruption

Brown said that he was an early naysayer, but has since converted to cautious optimism. He couched his concerns within an historic context: he expects there to be a big bust for cryptocurrencies, but such busts have happened before and they have not always been a bad thing.

When innovative industries go bust, they also can lay groundwork for newer industries that swoop in and reuse the infrastructure. He said the 2008 tech bust left behind the fiber optic networks now used by companies like YouTube.

“If we look back at the dot com era, that was a bubble and a bust,” he said. “Most of the companies died and some survived, but every one of those companies drove learning. And the people who worked there drove a lot of creativity as well as destruction.”

He said the same patterns of boom and bust were happening as far back as a century ago with canal systems and railways.

Don’t Occupy–Build!

Lubin, one of the initial creators of blockchain technology, argued that such financial destruction is what blockchain seeks to avoid. He started working on blockchain after witnessing a “moral and financial bankruptcy” in economic as well as political systems.

“I could see a cascading collapse, and there was no good way to grow our way out,” he said.

Lubin said that, after reading the Satoshi Nakamoto white paper, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” he sensed an opportunity and became an expert in the underlying technology.

He saw blockchain as a new trusted infrastructure that makes it feasible for software developers to create a clean separation between the protocol levels and not rely on “protocol priests,” to build every new application.

“It’s a way of distributing control to content creators with far fewer intermediators,” he said. In order to effect change on Wall Street, “let’s not occupy, let’s build.”

“It’s the movement of all our foundational analogue forms—paper, rubber stamps, and subjective interpretation of rules,” he continued. “If all these elements move onto blockchains, then we can see any transaction involving those things cleared and settled over days and weeks [instead of months].”

He noted that corporations are beginning to like the technology, but a lot of work remains to be done.

Casey agreed. “This is not a static technology,” he said.

In addition to ING event was also co-sponsored by the Museum of American Finance, Investopedia and the Gabelli School of Business. 

Blockchain, a newly developed, incorruptible digital ledger system, has the potential to solve this problem, said researchers and experts at a daylong conference on Nov. 10. at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus.

“We all know that global complex emergencies today are riddled with immense challenges. More people than ever, since World War II, are affected by natural and manmade disasters,” said Brendan Cahill, director of Fordham’s Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs (IIHA).

“Blockchain can have a role not only serving people who are endangered by these crises, in refugee camps or in disaster response, but also in finding new ways that allow for people to be more self-reliant and that ensure the success of long-term humanitarian projects.”

A Technology Resistant to Data Tampering

The conference brought together representatives from intergovernmental and nongovernmental agencies to share the ways they’re taking advantage of the technology, which has made possible the use of the digital currency, bitcoin. Blockchain is a chainlike technology, used for things such as ledgers, that is resistant by design to the modification of the data.

Nick Petford, Ph.D. vice chancellor at Northampton University, detailed how the security afforded by blockchain technology could make possible what he called a “Distributed Learning Ledger.” Such a tool could better capture a person’s nontraditional education experience, including work with families and friends, religious values, and life changing experiences.

Mariana Dahan, CEO of World Identity Network, said that there are two billion people globally who have no proof of who they are, with many living their entire lives with no verifiable ID. In her native Moldova, Dahan said there is hope that blockchain could be used to thwart human trafficking of children.

“If we had an electronic ledger that would record any attempt of getting a minor or an undocumented child out of the country without the consent of the parent, we would be able to secure this information and then act upon it,” she said.

Safe, Swift Transfer of Funds

In the panel, Transparency Dividend: Can Blockchains Stretch the Humanitarian Dollar Further?, Dante Disparte, CEO of Risk Cooperative, said that just as the internet introduced the world to low-friction (easier) communication, blockchain technology has made transferring of funds easier and safer. That could be useful for helping individuals who might need to evacuate an area to escape a powerful hurricane, but who don’t [readily]  have the funds to do so.

“When you introduce blockchain, you can start asking some really interesting ‘What if questions?’ What if we could provide every person who was in an evacuation zone in harm’s way, or in the line of sight of a natural disaster, a $5,000 evacuation dividend?” he said. “Every holder of a homeowner’s policy ought to have that kind of evacuation dividend. With blockchain it’s easy to geo-reference, … to get that third-party validation that we need in the insurance industry.”

Andrew Kruczkiewicz, science adviser at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, said blockchain would help the Red Cross be more proactive in predicting where donors’ funds might be better directed. His organization is pursuing “impact-based forecasting” that assesses the potential impact, not just the hazard, of natural disasters. For instance, a storm might affect the entire state of New Jersey, but some areas of the state will inevitably suffer more because of sociological differences.

“If the Red Cross understands that funding is going to be a problem in a particular country or region, perhaps there are donors that are interested in trying to build resilience in that region or that country, or would like to decrease the potential impact of floods,” he said.

“Blockchain can help us to speed things up, make things faster, and add to the transparency side of monitoring and evaluation.”

“We have a long and storied history in the drawing up of ciphers in order to ensure that the information that was flowing to Rome was safe and secure,” said Father McShane. “If the Blockchain technology is new, the concept is ancient: how to build and support trust among different parties and how to protect information.”

Father McShane made the remarks at a collaborative workshop on Blockchain technology held at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus on Jan. 26. The workshop brought together experts from law, economics, business, enforcement, and technology.

“Blockchain will do for transactions what the internet did for communications,” said Bridget McDermott, vice president of Blockchain Business Development at IBM.

Blockchain is best known as the architecture that supports Bitcoin, the digital payment network. Just as Bitcoin’s momentum over the past two years has propelled it to become the leading cryptocurrency, the next 12 to 18 months could very well be the make-or-break moment for Blockchain to become as the standard for business transactions, said Dan Ramsden, GABELLI ’90, a lecturer at the Gabelli School of Business and managing director at Oberon Securities.

“There’s that point at which adoption is just essential,” said Ramsden. “The fundamentals of Blockchain are so compelling in theory, but we need to get to that tipping point. When this occurs, I think IBM will be a big part of it.”

Ramsden wasn’t merely complimenting the company because it was sponsoring the conference along with Fordham; he was referring to a version of Blockchain that IBM has developed from the ground up. That “immutable ledger” keeps track of the history of a transaction from start to finish via a “permissioned network, with known identities.”

In her keynote presentation McDermott explained that the design helps “build ecosystems and partnerships” but most importantly it builds a circle of trust. The network’s instance of known identities prevents anonymous users with nefarious intentions from disrupting the flow of the transaction. Secondly, the immutability of the ledger means that when a mistake happens, it can’t be covered up.

The presenters used a mock transaction to show how the process might work in importing goods from one country to another, say from China to Germany. On one end of the Blockchain is the exporter, whose identity has been verified, and on the other end of the is the exporter. The process starts with a purchase order; then the goods are inspected at the Port Authority of Hong Kong; then they’re shipped to the Port of Hamburg, where that port authority signs off on the goods; then they’re sent to the exporter, who in turn pays for the goods. At each point, all parties have access to the shared digital ledger. If something goes wrong along the route, parties know immediately and can respond accordingly, rather than entering into a dispute that is both costly and time consuming, said McDermott.

“With the shared leger, everybody is looking at the same information,” she said. “And it’s like doing a crossword puzzle in pen, so if there’s a mistake you can’t hide it.”

Few panelists had anything negative to say about the technology, including FBI special agent Joseph Battaglia,. He praised the ledger’s ability create a permanent record of transactions, as well as an IBM version that uses a secured identity.

“If everything is recorded and not able to change, then it’s very good from an evidence perspective,” he said.

Gregory Xethalis, counsel from Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP, said “if you can safely move currency where everyone can see and no one can hack or steal, that’s a remarkable advance.”

Erick Rengifo, Ph.D., associate professor of economics, said that the technology could be a game changer in developing nations, where trade can sometimes be stymied by banks.

“In the developing world the local banks are driving the trade, but they have limited resources,” he said. “Blockchain is way to create a public entity that will allow any type of investor to get funds to many of these small firms.”