Human history is always involved with the national agendas and secret policies against their rivals and competitor. This discriminatory behavior is an outcome of politics where common interests force them to compromise the democratic decision against the other one.
Human vs. Computers
These politics will always remain with the human nature that justifies why humans cannot leave biased actions while making a decision.
A similar concept you can find when humans make mistakes while doing probabilistic research compared to the machines, which can give fast results and a 90% success rate in decision-making or statistics about the future with available data.
First Automated Financial System
When we talk about tomorrow’s world, we often talk about AI, Blockchain, IoT, and data sciences, believing that these technologies would be our future savior for a better world. However, these technologies, especially public blockchain, tend to revolutionize the world with trust, decentralization, and democracy with an unbiased approach.
When Satoshi wrote the code of the blockchain technology and made the Bitcoin application, he has one and only one thing in his mind, which he has mentioned on the first block of the bitcoin.
The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.
Satoshi Nakamoto used the Genesis block (first block in a Blockchain) of Bitcoin to log a powerful message which would remain there for the rest of Bitcoin’s existence. Bitcoin was created right after the devastating 2008 economic collapse which was caused by central banks, and in the Genesis Block, Satoshi Nakamoto made it very clear what the aim of Bitcoin was.
In another post, he has mentioned something following
A lot of people automatically dismiss e-currency as a lost cause because of all the companies that failed since the 1990’s. I hope it’s obvious it was only the centrally controlled nature of those systems that doomed them. I think this is the first time we’re trying a decentralized, non-trust-based system.
Bitcoin was not the first attempt to create a digital form of money. Many companies have tried to accomplish this during the early days of the internet boom. However, all of these projects prior to Bitcoin failed or were never actually completed. Satoshi believes that this was due to their centralized and trust-based nature, two qualities that money should not have.
Decentralized Autonomous Organization and Decentralized Finance
Bitcoin and Ethereum public blockchain networks have given the idea of how machines can now run an organization without the need for physical staff and supervisors. The entire organization would be made as public property. The only rule that has to be followed is based on the computer code written by the community and agreed by the community. The community might be a group of the owner who wants to run an autonomous organization.
This concept minimizes human interference and makes it emotionless, biased less, and democratic in taking decisions or actions.
International Bodies like FATF
The Financial Action Task Force on the initiative of the G7 to develop policies to combat money laundering.
The FATF has developed the FATF Recommendations, or FATF Standards, which ensure a co-ordinated global response to prevent organised crime, corruption and terrorism. They help authorities go after the money of criminals dealing in illegal drugs, human trafficking and other crimes. The FATF also works to stop funding for weapons of mass destruction.
Politics and Centralization Control
According to the research paper “Is the FATF an economic hitman?” by Usman W Chohan; his findings of the report suggest that the FATF’s political warfare and structural violence present a pertinent analogy to the thematic ambit of economic hitmen.
The paper explained the developing country like Pakistan’s role in counter-terrorism and fixing its financial system to comply with the FATF regulation and policies. However, this paper also highlighted the political influences inside FATF to put Pakistan on the grey list.
The mantra of doing more for such developing countries shows why powerful entities in any kind of international body can also influence decisions simply because politics and biased actions are humans’ nature, which cannot be fixed unless replaced by a machine.
On 26-June-2020 The Pakistani government on Saturday questioned the decision of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to keep the country on its “increased monitoring list” until the implementation of two separate action plans to counter terrorist financing and money laundering.
Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi pointed out that the global dirty money watchdog had acknowledged his country’s efforts to strengthen its financial system, adding that the last remaining agenda item on a 27-point action plan devised in June 2018 was also being addressed and Pakistan would continue to do more to fix it.
“I think in this situation, there is no justification to keep Pakistan on the grey list,” Qureshi said in a statement. “We will have to see if the FATF is a technical forum or … being used for political purposes.”
Decentralized International Bodies Need Machines
The concept of Decentralized International Bodies similar to (Decentralized organizations with smart contracts) can be the key to control biasedness or human errors.
In the era of enormous data, smart-contract type technologies can replace such decision-making that would be immune to influence its decision.
Not long ago, when Satoshi dreamt about the financial system, he gave the idea of how an organization of money, aka bitcoin, can be run worldwide without any centralized or third-party involvement. Today, cryptocurrency has become a reality in trading and exchanging values simply because technologies can fill the gap of trust, provenance, and code of Law.
If banks politics in 2008 has made richer more richer and poor more poor, similarly international bodies can be influenced and corrupted.
These are the words of the blue-eyed boy of the American establishment, who later wrote a partial autobiography of his life, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, when according to him, he had to get out as his conscience was not letting him go to sleep at night. “We (economic hitmen) work very much like some of the hitmen for the mafia – because- like them, we are looking for a favor, except we do it on a large level with governments and countries.” As a reaction to economic crises, If the international financial system can be developed on blockchain technology, then having a democratic, decentralized decision system can be brought to life where policies and regulations are written in the form of CODE as LAW.
Security and Integrity
A public blockchain network like Ethereum can provide decentralized autonomous organization; if a smart contract is written using absolute security best practices, this could allow the public to view the code, which works as a Law. This Law can take action based on the code written without doing any suspicious activity.
Not only code, but the data persisted in such a system can be viewable by anyone at any time. This kind of transparency is not available in any sort of technology in this world. A system that is not working under anyone control but once you have deployed your code as Law it will do what has been written, without any intervention or change. Additionally, you cannot upgrade that smart contract like any traditional application, to upgrade, you have to write another smart contract because anything written over this network would be immutable forever.
Regarding security, international organizations can write and use best practices to ensure their system would comply with decentralized philosophy by not keeping any single entity as the sole controller of the contract. Once it is deployed on the network, even the entity who has deployed would not be able to unchanged or create any dispute data on the network.
The Integrity of the data is dependent on the participants; a system should be designed in a way that it should take input with absolute input instead of random inputs or influenced data. This way, the system can restrict each participant from staying on the topic with the required information.
Transparent Integrity of the data and Auditors role
All over the world, researchers and geopolitical entities can do audits freely on the data inputted by member’s participants. This way, another layer of data integrity can be managed and make sure that humans who now have the role of input data must input based on the fundamental objective instead of their political agendas, which can be visible in front of the public.
Another layer to restrict member participants’ politically driven behavior is by giving the auditors worldwide a chance to vote dishonest member participants.
A secure autonomous world
Self-driving cars are just the tip of the iceberg when we talk about autonomous activity by machine. The security provided by public blockchain networks and the combination of such technologies as machine learning and data science can open the door for us to remove the insecurities and vulnerabilities of our existing systems.
The future of these international bodies like FATF is being claimed for controversies in recent updates.
Such bodies are essential, and their role is crucial to regulate their domains. But the trust gap is enormous, which required machines to fill the trust part without biased actions and personal agendas.
It is inevitable to make these bodies truly decentralized. Otherwise, the third world countries will always struggle to put their case listen without political influences.
Farhan Hameed Khan is an innovation leader, solution architect, blockchain trainer, social entrepreneur, and writer. He has more than 18 years of experience working in the global IT industry. He has been working on blockchain-based solutions for the past few years and contributed to professional products, research, and education.
