http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Opinion-and-Analysis/We-must-adapt-to-fast-changing-technology/539548-3494316-91tmeq/By Bitange Ndemo
Posted Wednesday, December 21 2016 at 19:20
Last week, the Coalition of Automated Legal Application (COALA) invited me to talk at their seventh edition of Blockchain Workshops at Strathmore University. This was in collaboration with the African Development Bank.
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Majority of the international presenters were young lawyers on a mission to change the world as we know it today.
COALA’s objective of holding the Nairobi workshops was to share knowledge on the emerging technologies within the Blockchain family.
This international multidisciplinary collaborative research and development initiative endeavours to bring clarity in the field of Blockchain technologies, smart contracts and decentralized autonomous applications.
What is Blockchain? Many people simply know it as the technology behind the Bitcoin or other alternative currencies often referred to as cryptocurrency.
However, this is a limited view of this technology that is set to change the world. The broader definition extends beyond currency.
Academics researching the field will call it a distributed database that maintains a continuously-growing list of ordered records called blocks.
Each block contains a time stamp and a link to a previous block. Once the data is recorded, it can never be erased and no retroactive alteration can be made in a block.
This makes it possible for different use cases.
For example, the problems that we have in the Ministry of Land where crooks have been altering records and stealing land from legitimate owners can be dealt with using Blockchain.
Indeed at the workshop we were told that the government is working with IBM to introduce the technology.
There are several other areas of application including monitoring and payment of royalties for the creative industry, monitoring and validating performance in the education sector.
The technology can be applied in virtually every sector, not just in the financial sector as earlier assumed. COALA is involved in many projects that Kenya should pay attention to.
These include: exploring how blockchains, smart contracts and decentralization can impact productivity, economic growth, shared prosperity and civic participation; legal enforceability of smart contracts; Internet of Things; consensus and scalability around optimization and reduction of transaction/co-ordination costs of the information economy as well as privacy, data integrity and national security.
In essence, these workshops were addressing the inevitable future.
now...do you understand what it means for "BITLAND" to be competing against "IBM" in year one of our start up?
That was our competition for this specific contract in Kenya...
guess what...no fucking start up in history can compete with IBM in their first year...sorry...we're just not that full of ourselves...however...the fact that we have IBM as our direct competition now...come on guys...you MUST see that as being validated for the protocol...right?
I mean...just think about that for a second...
Bitland was competing DIRECTLY with IBM for a government contract...
that just happened...
and in fact, in the process, knowing that we could not possibly compete with IBM i just proceeded to bolster the argument FOR IBM...rather than compete as a competitor, I put the concept above Bitland...and NOW you see how strongly the Kenyan government is coming out in favor of Blockchain?
go back a month...you will NOT find this rhetoric coming from the Kenyan government specifically concerning Blockchain. they have a plan for 2030 digitization path that they just started in 2015. Blockchain was not a main part of that.
Until last week...