How blockchain can change billions of lives

The July sun beats down on Achike Okafor’s back as he boards a bus leaving the small town where he has been working for the last nine months at an oil refinery. The bus will take him nine hours across Nigeria’s poverty stricken countryside to Lagos where he will see his family for the first time since starting work at the refinery late last year. The largest city in Africa, Lagos is an expansive port town of 14 million people. Like most major hubs in the developing world, Lagos juxtaposes both crippling poverty and unimaginable wealth often directly adjacent to each other. Achike, a bald middle-aged Nigerian man is dripping sweat as he pulls his two bags onto the bus. The temperature has long since blown past the torturous landmark of 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

In one hand Achike carries a bag with clothing and a few other essentials. In the other, a potato sack filled with 500,000 Nigerian naira (about 1,500 USD) constituting the fruits of nine months’ labor; all the money he has to support his wife and two young daughters for the next year. Achike is also harboring another piece of luggage unbeknownst to the rest of the bus, a 4-inch stainless steel blade tucked inside his waistband to fend off any would-be bandits who might endeavor to rob him of his hard earned cash.

Riding a New York subway Achike would seem like a criminal carrying a bag of cash and a knife the size of his forearm. But this is reality for Achike and millions of other African laborers willing to literally risk their lives to avoid devastating 15-20% fees charged for domestic money transfers. The high fees, and sloth-like service, often taking upwards of two weeks to process can be more than most workers can handle given they are already faced with some of the lowest wages in the world.

Achike Okafor and his sack of cash on an overheated bus seem fundamentally disconnected from Bitcoin and the typically wealthy, libertarian community it attracts. But it is Bitcoin and the revolutionary technology that enables it, that could hold the keys to unlocking financial freedom for Achike and the billions like him abandoned by a broken financial system.

Known as the “blockchain”, no technology can claim a narrative so fundamentally disruptive since Tim Berners Lee and the World Wide Web. Blockchain was first introduced by an ingenious, and fascinatingly to this day completely anonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Nakamoto (a pseudonym) published in late 2008 a white paper titled “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” (I.e. Bitcoin).

Bitcoin, a virtual currency, was the first successful large-scale implementation of blockchain technology as a decentralized ledger system. What this means is that when your friend Alice sends a Bitcoin to a stranger named Bob, they do it directly with each other over the Bitcoin network without having to trust a bank with keeping an accurate record and handling the transfer. When transferring money there are three essential functions that a traditional centralized financial authority would serve for Alice and Bob: 1. They would’ve ensured Alice did not send that same Bitcoin to another person while also sending it to Bob (known as “the double spend” problem) 2. That Alice had enough in her account to send that Bitcoin to Bob. and 3. once the Bitcoin was sent they would’ve updated Alice’s account to have one less Bitcoin and Bob’s to have one more.

With a bank, you not only must relinquish your financial agency by placing complete trust in the bank which can cause problems (see: Bank of Bangladesh), but you also have to pay sometimes significant fees, and wait days or weeks for these incredibly fundamental value transfers to occur. What the blockchain does is it provides the mechanism for individuals to transact on a peer-to-peer basis with zero trust and ensure that there is no possibility for transaction reversal, or that the money will be locked up for long periods of time all while paying negligible fees. With Bitcoin, each member of the network receives a copy of all the Bitcoin trades ever made, made up of a series of connected, time ordered blocks filled with transactions (i.e. the “blockchain”). Computationally endowed network verifiers (called miners) solve cryptographically randomized puzzles to ensure the validity of those transactions.

This seemingly mundane use case of transferring value via electronic tokens peer-to-peer can be extrapolated to highly potent applications. Harking back to the comparison with the Internet, we saw how the rise of the world wide web led to great changes in the financial system. Throwing the information highway wide open meant equal access to information and created opportunity for social and economic mobility particularly among the middle class. Blockchain takes the next step in changing the financial system; most immediately by leveling the barriers to entry in the banking system and expanding opportunity for low-income unbanked workers like Achike.

The potential effects of a paradigm shift of this magnitude on the banking system, and beyond, is difficult to overstate. Even in the relatively financially promiscuous United States, 27.7% of households are either unbanked or under-banked according to national survey results published in 2013 by the FDIC. In other words, 34.4 million households in the U.S. either have no bank account at all or have an account but don’t use it, typically for financial reasons. The numbers are even more severe in the developing world where there are nearly 2.2 billion unbanked adults in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East according to a 2010 McKinsey report, the largest and most comprehensive recent analysis of its kind. These numbers reveal that Achike’s nine hour, sweltering--knife wielding bus ride serves as a disappointingly accurate archetype of the financial privation faced by the working class in the developing world.

While Nakamoto’s technology is incredibly groundbreaking, it comes at a cost. Some estimates, like one put out by the Hamilton Institute of the National University of Ireland compares the energy cost of the Bitcoin network to the energy consumption of all of Ireland. Another figure, calculated by technology journalist Chistopher Malmo put the energy cost of a single Bitcoin transaction equal to the daily energy usage of 1.57 U.S. households. This raises serious environmental questions about the scalability of Bitcoin-style blockchains and whether one could ever come close to supporting the transactional demands of a national bank, let alone the entire global financial system.

However, the energy-intensive protocol used by Bitcoin is not an essential element of blockchain technology. It is possible to leverage the value of an open, distributed ledger, along with other protocols that address needs for privacy, regulatory review, etc. without relying on computationally intensive methods to reach a consensus about whether a transaction can be trusted.

For example, companies like Ripple Labs in San Francisco have developed blockchain protocols that completely eliminate the need for computing power to verify transactions. Ripple Lab’s blockchain consensus protocol uses a community-based approach; where there is an established list of trusted users to help facilitate energy-free transaction verification. This of course poses its own set of problems in terms of who belongs on the list. In preliminary testing vulnerabilities have been shown with this protocol but the technology is still very promising. The Ethereum network, the only other crypto currency with a market cap near the $1B mark outside of Bitcoin is hoping to accomplish something similar with their upcoming switch to a consensus protocol known as “proof of stake”. Proof of stake will employ mathematically robust game theory to direct the consensus protocol ensuring good behavior.

David Mazieres, a Stanford University computer science professor, recently developed his own blockchain system called the “Stellar Consensus Protocol” aimed at resolving the vast imbroglio that is remittance payments in the developing world. I sat down with Mazieres in January ’16 to discuss the technology behind Stellar as well as its real world applications. According to Mazieres, “Stellar takes a similar blockchain concept to Ripples but applies it to the transfer of fiat currencies (like dollars and naira) in a non-profit format using a much more streamlined consensus protocol”.

Mazieres also discussed Stellar’s recent partnership with cloud-based micro financing company Oradian, based in Achike’s home country of Nigeria. Among other uses, micro finance technologies like that developed by Oradian drastically reduce the cost of certain forms of banking in the developing world, a valuable service that has no doubt applied significant downward pressure on the 2.2 billion adults unbanked figure cited in McKinsey’s 2010 report. According to Mazieres, the partnership between Stellar and Oradian was formed when Antonio Separovic, Oridian’s Ceo, marched into his Silicon Valley office and announced “it takes 12 hours and a bus to move money from a microfinance center in Lagos to a microfinance center in the North of Nigeria”, an arduous journey that Achike can no doubt empathize with. Mazieres was apparently immediately convinced of the consonance of the partnership and agreed to it on the spot.

Stellar’s blockchain money transfer technology working in tandem with Oradian’s microfinance platform, establishes a powerful system for the storing and transferring of money across Nigeria at virtually no cost. Within a week of its rollout in Nigeria, over 300,000 Nigerians were using Stellar and Oradians joint service with great success. After the January rollout, I imagine the possibility that Achike no longer carries his bag of cash and knife with him on his long bus rides to see his family. Rather, he can store his money with Oradian and wire it to his family hundreds of miles away in Lagos in a matter of seconds with Stellars transfer protocol at virtually no cost.

Just like the Internet 25 years ago, Blockchain is a technology that is confusing, requires more than 10 minutes to explain and is surrounded in a haze of technical jargon complicating the laypersons ability to fully grasp its implications. The Internet quickly shed this enigmatic status because of its sheer usefulness and the transformative impact it had on the world. It is at least worth acknowledging the possibility that blockchain, with all its limitations, has the potential to be as powerful a disruptive force in the next two decades as the Internet has been in the last two. Blythe Masters, a finance prodigy and former JP Morgan executive put blockchains potential in even more definitive terms at a tech conference last year exclaiming that, “you should pay attention to blockchain the way you should have paid attention to the Internet in the early 1990s”. Bitcoin, the virtual currency that started it all is no guarantee to make it out of the decade. In-fighting and scaling limitations might send the still infantile virtual coin to an early grave. But it is difficult to foresee a future in which blockchain, the technological legacy of bitcoin, does not play a major role in the increasingly globalized world of the coming decades.