Transcriber: Michele Gianella Reviewer: David DeRuwe
Let me start by sharing a personal story.
[At the age] of 16, I had an online business,
and I'm quite proud to say
that it was generating a rather decent amount of money,
given the fact that I was a student.
That's also the time when I made my first strategic mistake.
I was only selling a single product.
Now, as some of you might know, selling one product,
when that product stops selling, the business stops as well.
That's the first strategic mistake I made, and I made others afterwards,
and that's probably why I started my career
as a strategy consultant afterwards.
But I remember that moment very well.
I was 21, I was sitting in my student room,
and I felt uncertain.
Uncertain about the income that would come in the next coming months.
How will I make my living?
And so when we have questions, we often ask our friends for answers.
In my case, I don't like to bother my friends too much.
So I asked a search engine how to make money on the Internet.
Now, search engines, they turn out to be really, really good friends.
First because at least they reply, but also they reply with a lot of pages.
And that day, they replied with bitcoin.
Now, bitcoin is a revolutionary tool
that allows us to rethink the way money is created
and also to rethink our financial system.
But behind bitcoin, there's a technology
that allows to have a much more profound impact on society,
and that technology is called "the blockchain."
Now, the blockchain is a complex thing,
and I very quickly became amazed by the inner workings.
I tried to understand how this thing was working.
I wrote my master's thesis on it, I wrote a book on it,
and I even managed to make a career out of my passion.
Now, what is really key to understand in the blockchain
is how much of a paradigm shift it is.
And the last big paradigm shift we knew was the age of information,
was the Internet that came along.
Now, I'd like to compare those two
so that you understand how powerful the blockchain could be.
The Internet made it possible for anyone
to spread any type of information to anyone else,
without the need for a news aggregator in the middle, in a very horizontal way.
That's exactly what blockchain makes possible as well.
Blockchain makes it possible for anyone
to create his own currency or blockchain token
and start sending it over to anyone else,
without the need for a bank or financial intermediary in the middle,
in a very horizontal way.
Now, there's a lot for money applications in businesses,
but I want you to make up your mind, for yourself,
how the blockchain actually can transform our world.
And I want you to understand how the blockchain works.
So what we're going to do today is have a very simple explanation
of how the blockchain works.
And that's why I brought with me my magic boxes.
Now, this is a block from the blockchain.
It's block number one,
and in this block, we can store all types of information.
For example, data, transactions, or maybe contracts, whatever.
Now, what's very key to understanding the blockchain
is that the blockchain is managed by rules.
And one of the rules of the blockchain
is that every block is linked to the previous block.
So when block number two comes along, he says,
"Hello, I'm block number two,
and I'm going to link myself to block number one."
Now, a couple of minutes later, a third block comes along,
and he says, "Hello, I'm block number three,
and I'm going to link myself to block number two."
By doing so, we create a sequential order of blocks
where each block is linked to a previous block,
which creates a chain of blocks;
hence the word "blockchain."
It's just that simple. This is a blockchain.
Remember how I said the Internet and blockchains are very horizontal.
That means that there is no such a thing as one single blockchain,
but everyone who wants to be part of the blockchain community
can create his own blockchain.
He can have his own blockchain on his computer.
When someone wants to have access to the information on the blockchain,
he just downloads a local copy.
And as a result,
everybody has, within this community, the same information.
There is a consensus on the information that exists.
So we have a chain of blocks.
We have a chain of blocks that is distributed.
Now, there's also a magic trick to the blockchain.
It's that you can't really remove information away.
Now, to illustrate that example, I'm going to assume that I write a book
and before publishing my book, I'm sending my book over to Maureen
who sits somewhere in the room here today.
Maureen was a student with me, and I'm asking her for peer review,
asking her to give her feedback on my book before I publish it.
Now I'm waiting, and Maureen receives the book.
She reads the book and she thinks,
"Oh, that's actually a really good book. Who knows? Maybe one day, a Nobel Prize."
What she does is -
she's actually copy-pasting the book,
because that's what we do in our digital age now.
She changes my name by her name, and she publishes the book before I do.
So what can we learn here?
First, "Maureen,
I thought you were a friend, but you're not really such a good friend.
You sneaky woman, I knew that, but still ... "
I was cautious.
Before I tried giving the book over to Maureen,
I made a fingerprint of the book.
And I stored that fingerprint in block number two.
Because the fingerprint is stored in block number two -
and not the book, otherwise everybody can read the book for free,
and that I don't want either.
There is proof that I owned the book at a certain point of time,
which is a point of time before actually sending the book over to Maureen.
So if Maureen wants to cheat,
she has to remove the proof that I own the book.
She has to remove the book from block number two.
She doesn't have to remove it only on her blockchain.
She also has to do it on the 10,000s of other blockchains
that exist around the globe.
And that's a very difficult task to do.
Maybe she can remove the block on her blockchain,
but everybody in the community will quickly realize that she's cheating,
and by the way, block number three now makes a link to block number one.
That's not a valid rule on the blockchain.
If she wants to stay part of the community,
she has no other choice than actually accepting the truth
and accepting that there is a proof that I owned this book before.
Now, I also mentioned how we could transfer
tokens or transfer payments on the blockchain.
We're going to see now.
So far, we saw blockchain as a chain of blocks.
It's distributed.
The magic trick, you can never take information away.
We're now going to see how we transfer value on the blockchain.
Therefore, I'm going to ask someone in the audience -
young lady there, what's your name?
Karina: Karina.
Jean-Luc: Karina, OK.
I'm going to send three tokens over to Karina,
and I assume these tokens actually exist before; they're created beforehand.
And I'm writing a check from Jean-Luc to Karina
for an amount of three tokens.
This check goes into block number one together with other transactions,
and the block starts spreading on the network, within the community.
Everybody starts to see that I sent three bitcoins
or three tokens over to Karina.
A couple of minutes later, another block comes along.
A couple of minutes later, Karina,
you decide to send one of your tokens to someone else in the room.
Who do you choose?
Karina: Antoine, my boyfriend.
JL.V: Your boyfriend, Antoine, of course, then it stays in the family.
What are you going to do? You're going to do the same thing.
You're going to write a check from Karina to Antoine.
You're going to sign with your digital signature.
This transaction goes with other transactions
in block number three.
Before other people start accepting block number three,
they will ask themselves essential questions.
Is this a valid block?
This block number three, does it respect the rules?
First, does it link to block number two? Yes, it does. That's a valid rule.
Is everything that is in the block also valid?
Karina, can she just send a transaction like that?
Is that a valid transaction?
Does she even own one token to send over?
What they will see is that in block number one,
she received three tokens from me.
She didn't spend them in the meantime, so she can certainly spend one token over.
Everybody in the network - well, computers from everybody in the network
will do the exact same checks.
They will realize that this is a valid block.
All the transactions in it are valid.
And we have new state of information:
Karina owns two tokens.
Now by doing so, we create again a consensus over the network,
and we kind of collectively have an accounting system running.
You can imagine that this has some drastic changes
for the accountants of tomorrow
and also the auditors of tomorrow who review the work of the accountants.
That's exactly what the people ask me to talk about most of the time.
How will blockchain change my company?
How will it reshape my industry?
That's not what I want to talk about today.
Today, I want to share an application of the blockchain
that very few people talk about,
an application that I care about,
an application that I think can make up
for all the jobs that will be lost through the innovations of technology,
actually make up for that and that will allow a basic income.
Now, what is a basic income?
A basic income is an unconditional amount of money
that we give to everyone within the community,
it's given under a specific amount of time,
and it's a specific amount.
The amount is fixed as well.
What makes a basic income is also the fact that it's a redistribution mechanism
that allows the money to be redistributed within that community.
Now, I know what you might be thinking.
How the heck can a society progress,
if everybody receives money to do absolutely nothing?
Well, we've all been there.
I've been there, myself.
What I realize is the answer doesn't relate so much to the question
"What will we start doing as a society once we have a basic income?"
Rather the answer is related to
"What will we stop doing as a society once we have a basic income?"
What will we stop doing once we have a basic income?
In today's world,
the way the societies are architected and the way our governance is architected,
there are a lot of support programs.
Think about it like the pension schemes,
the unemployment benefits that we give every month to a couple of people.
It's a very complex thing, different types of amounts, and so on.
All these programs, and the jobs related to these programs,
they become obsolete once you have a basic income.
So this is something that we will stop doing.
Another thing is we know that poverty leads to criminality,
which leads to more work for the police department,
which leads to more work for the justice department.
And I know in some countries,
there is a lot of work at the justice department.
Once we have a basic income above the poverty line,
we can assume that criminality will diminish,
which will result in less work for the police department,
which will result in less work for the justice department as well.
Now all of these things are things that are paid by our society.
The society pays for it, but who actually pays in the end?
That's you.
The taxpayer pays for all of these things,
yet at the same time,
large corporations somehow manage, in a more or less legal way,
to pay as least taxes as possible.
And I think there, as well, blockchain can make something possible
that makes it impossible for these large corporations
to avoid their duties to our society.
So going back to the question, "Why do we need a basic income?"
I think having a basic income will give people the certainty
about the income they will have in the next coming months.
We will also slim down the work
that is being supported, carried by the governments,
to its bare essence.
All the programs that are useless will no longer be there
if they are replaced by a basic income.
Finally, I believe more transparency through the blockchain
will also make it more difficult for companies to avoid taxes.
We'll come back to that in just a minute.
But first, let's have a look on how this will actually work.
What you see arriving here,
that's the basic income people in a community receive.
Of course, there are people outside of these six people
in the community as well.
Before getting the money, the money needs to come from somewhere.
We need to find a way to find that money.
That's why we proposed a wallet for redistribution.
A wallet for redistribution is one that sits on the blockchain
that's going to collect a certain amount of tokens
to be redistributed afterwards.
We know the amount of tokens that is necessary
because we know the number of people to which we need to give a basic income.
There are many different ways to fill up this pot.
I'm not going to cover all of them.
One way to fill up this pot
will be that every transaction that happens,
there's a percentage of that transaction that goes to this redistribution pot.
In this case, we had a transaction
from someone who's rather poor to someone rather rich.
That might be because the rich person
is rich because he is producing goods continuously,
and there is just someone who bought something over from that person.
You might realize, as well,
that the more people receive money, the richer they are,
the more they're also contributing to this pot
because whenever you get money,
you're actually giving a part of your money
directly to that wallet.
That's why, I believe, if we embed that in the system,
in the rules of the blockchain,
it's impossible to avoid taxes at this point of time,
because as soon as you need to receive a payment,
the blockchain also redistributes a part of that amount
into the wallet for redistribution.
Now, you get the ID,
multiple people start making transactions with each other,
the pot fills up a bit,
and then, of course, that's what can happen as well,
is that someone who works for a corporation of someone else
and receives a salary for that, on top of his basic income.
He doesn't have to,
but if he wants to earn more, he can certainly do so.
He can propose his services.
You get the ID.
The rest of the community does the same thing
and our wire for redistribution frees up.
Then comes the first of the month, and we start redistributing the money.
Everybody starts to receive his monthly basic income.
Now, I know some of you might think basic income is really nice,
but there are certain jobs nobody wants to do.
Let's take an example, cleaning the roads.
Maybe no one wants to clean the roads.
In that case,
we might have to foresee some additional incentives
for the people who will clean the roads.
Therefore, we also can budget these things in our wallet
for redistribution in our budget,
and when the people clean the roads, they get incentivized to actually do so.
They get a bit additional income to do so.
The whole thing is about managing the budget
and being sure about how much we need in the future.
As an economist -
if there is an economist, in the room, he might tell me,
"Jean-Luc, it's nice,
but if there's not enough velocity in the economy,
your pot will never be filled."
And that's true.
If there's no one who transacts, the economy slows down.
Actually, what will happen
is that there will be less and less money going to the pot,
and there might not be enough.
That's why I propose
that on top of this rule that we can implement in the blockchain,
we implement a second rule
saying that if the amount of money we need in this pot is not obtained,
we have something like a wealth tax, or "impôt sur la fortune" in French,
that directly takes the money out of the wallets
of the different people in the communities.
By doing so,
we also encourage people to spend things and to have the economy pick up again.
It's one way of filling the pot.
There are different ways. That's not the essence today.
The essence is really to understand
that you can embed this rule in the blockchain
and make this work in a very efficient way.
Now, did we just solve everything here?
Is this it?
We have - the robots can come,
and we still have all our income and live in a decent way.
Well, not so fast.
Some of you may know
that cryptocurrencies, or blockchain-based tokens, are volatile.
They are not regulated.
That's something we don't want.
We don't want the prices to change overnight.
That's not such a good thing.
The second thing
is blockchain also operates, very often, on global scale,
which means that they can be subject to external pressure,
such as market manipulation or political pressure.
So that's also something we want to avoid.
Having this implemented from one day to the other, globally,
will require a single currency.
That's something all economists agree on, is not a good thing.
It might also lead to too much geopolitical instability
because of this new reality.
While our current financial system is actually too big to fail,
this idea is too big to succeed.
So what can we do?
What we can do
is instead of going global, we can go local.
We can have a multitude of basic income systems
living next to each other on multiple local levels
at a scale that is large enough
to have a thriving economy of goods and services,
but also at a scale that is sufficiently small
to have a control over it.
Now, blockchain-based projects on a local level,
they exist, and they exist very close to us.
In the Flanders, there is a municipality, that encourages kids to go to school,
that go to school with a bike that receives a blockchain-based token.
And with these tokens, they can go to local retailers
and spend these tokens
just the way they would spend their fiat currency, their euros.
I think that's a really nice idea, but let's be honest.
Let's bring that to the next level,
and instead of just rewarding kids to use their bike to go to school,
let's create an economy that prospers on the basic income.
And that, by its very nature,
makes a circular economy much more a reality,
that also bonds a community together,
and finally,
that is resilient to what happens in the macroeconomy
and the economy outside of the local economy.
So what do we need to make that happen?
We need four things:
First, we need local municipalities.
We need a local city that has some political courage
to say that we want to try this out,
maybe complementary to the current system, of course.
We also need an identity system
to know who's part of the community, and who's not part of the community.
We need a way to transact peer-to-peer.
That's where blockchain comes in.
Remember the checks we use.
And we need a governance system
to actually define what the tax rate will be
and who will get something out of the budget.
That's a thing I didn't touch upon,
but there is a thing in blockchain called "smart contracts,"
which allows to define these rules
and make sure that these rules are correctly implemented.
And also allows people
to vote on these rules directly through the blockchain.
So governance is very important.
Now, while all of these ideas around basic income and local currencies
have existed for many decades now,
what is new today
is that we have the architectural trust.
We have the tools to build these systems.
Now, before finishing, I want to share something with you.
I want to share the results
of the different cities where we implemented a basic income.
There are two trends that can be observed.
The first trend is people start educating each other much more.
The second trend is people start caring for each other much more.
Now, I don't know about you, but to me,
education and caring for other people are two values I hold very dear.
Yet it sometimes seems so difficult in our busy lives
to give them the place they deserve.
If your basic income manages to achieve that,
and only that,
I believe it already makes the world a better place.
Thank you.
(Applause)