Spreading epidemic is hitting global mutual trust, why is it difficult to rebuild transnational trust with blockchain

Text 丨 Interlink Pulse

The epidemic is spreading globally, but in the field of public opinion, there is more criticism and less cooperation. Especially with the country as the boundary, the number of incidents of national discrimination and racial discrimination has increased rapidly.

This epidemic has also hindered globalization, and industrial collaboration has moved from a global long chain to a regional short chain. For example, the United States intends to set up all antibiotic industry chains in the country, but allies will not. The United States currently imports 96.6% of antibiotics from China.

Although global decoupling is not economical, many countries are heading this way for political reasons, and the epidemic has given them excuses.

Behind such accusations, discrimination, and decoupling are the collapse of the original trust mechanism. As a trust machine's blockchain, advertised as a natural transnational, can it save the crisis of trust between countries?

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Who organizes international industrial collaboration

It's hard to imagine that there are already 4 billion machines around the world working together to do one thing-bitcoin mining. As a non-governmental cross-border collaboration project, Bitcoin has gone through 11 springs and autumns, developed into an industrial empire, and has 30 million "workers" working for it. These people have no issues of nationality and racial discrimination.

Leaving aside the value of Bitcoin as a digital asset itself, the ability of large-scale transnational “cooperative operations” demonstrated by it proves the trust value of blockchain.

The epidemic prevention has been used in some scenarios in the single market blockchain.

Inter-chain pulse statistics. In February, various blockchain companies in China developed 26 epidemic prevention and anti-epidemic blockchain applications, aiming to resolve domestic issues including public welfare, citizenship, disease declaration, medical data interoperability, government governance, and financial assistance. Trust issues in the field.

However, after the spread of the international epidemic, there was no case of cross-border blockchain applications. From the demand side, blockchain technology is of great value in global joint defense and control. For example, the collection and distribution of global relief supplies can use the blockchain to reduce the cost of the process; the registration and traceability of passenger travel trajectories can help reduce the risk of virus infection; and if the global epidemic is decentralized, it will be There will be no sudden disclosing in the United States of the exact number of diagnoses in each state.

At present, the application of China's blockchain in the epidemic has begun to have practical effects, but more importantly, such attempts will accumulate experience or play a huge role in the next public health event.

Chinese companies are willing to do this kind of business. In addition to social responsibility, on the one hand, the blockchain has risen to the national strategy, and there are paying agencies; on the other hand, the blockchain technology companies have business landings, which promotes the momentum of more business cooperation. . The lack of a transnational epidemic prevention blockchain is due to a lack of commercial motivation.

J.P. Morgan can organize more than 200 banks to participate in cross-border collaboration with JP Morgan, Facebook can attract more than 1,000 global companies to support Libra's new projects; IBM can unite hundreds of companies in each of the fields of shipping trade, food safety, finance, etc. Supported by commercial purposes.

For native blockchain projects, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, etc. have also organized tens of millions of people to participate, and their coin issuance has played an important role.

In the absence of profitability, who will pay for the construction of global public health blockchain projects? The most credible is probably the WHO and the United Nations.

Both of these institutions recognize the blockchain very well, but neither has sufficient funds. According to the 2018-2019 two-year budget publicly disclosed on the official WHO website, the source of funds for the WHO is mainly divided into two forms: assessment of contributions and acceptance of donations. Among them, the assessed contributions of each member state accounted for 17% of the funding source, and the remaining 83% came from donations from countries or organizations. This causes its funding to be high and low, and its use will be strictly supervised, making it difficult to quickly use it for the construction of a blockchain system. The United Nations funds are assessed. Due to the customary arrears of a major power, it should be difficult for the United Nations to adjust quickly to such experimental operations.

Slow-moving multinational industry blockchain

As the saying goes, nothing that money can solve is not a problem. If the UN and WHO have funding, can such a project be completed?

The conclusion is still difficult.

In February 2020, the Forbes 2020 list of the top 50 blockchains was officially released. Among them, the "United Nations" was quite eye-catching. According to the statistics of Interchain Pulse, the United Nations has launched 6 blockchain projects, 4 of which are targeted at a single market, including:

• Cooperation between the United Nations International Telecommunication Union and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations aimed at tracking the pig supply chain in Papua New Guinea;
• United Nations Capital Development Foundation develops blockchain for remittances in Nepal;
• The United Nations Development Programme is using blockchain technology to track the cocoa supply chain in Ecuador;
• UN uses blockchain-validated iris scans for Syrian refugees.

Among the United Nations blockchain projects, one of the cross-country markets is January 22, 2018. The United Nations announced the establishment of a CCC. The alliance members include at least 32 organizations and will work to use blockchain technology to maintain accurate weather records.

However, Interlink Pulse has inquired about this organization, and news has stopped updating for a year.

In addition, last year UNICEF received the first Bitcoin and Ethereum donations from the Ethereum Foundation, but it has nothing to do with industrial collaboration through the blockchain.

The World Health Organization's blockchain project also faces the challenge of cross-border collaboration. In March 2018, the World Health Organization stated that blockchain technology has the potential to completely change the healthcare industry, especially in the field of medical drug supply chain. WHO intends to start with the drug supply chain.Blockchain technology is expected to reverse the pharmaceutical industry due to counterfeit drugs and patient safety issues, and the blockchain provides two key opportunities for the drug supply chain: combating counterfeit drugs and optimizing the drug supply chain.

However, two years later, this chain has not yet been operated.

The United Nations and WHO are already the most fair institutions in the world, but coordinating institutions across countries are facing problems. Some other international organizations are more political and difficult to reach a global consensus.

Perhaps, the path of multinational blockchain operation is this, small-scale, almost no political forces dominated the use of industrial alliances first, and then continue to expand alliance members, and eventually form a global industrial blockchain ecosystem.

Facebook and JP Morgan include some multinational blockchain projects led by IBM, because the political forces behind them are too strong to form a global consensus.

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