How Smart Contracts Will Change the World | Olga Mack | TEDxSanFrancisco

When I was six years old growing up in Siberia, I told my mother that I would like to become an artist. She said, wonderful, to be clear, it wasn't like your day at the carnival was wonderful, but more like I spilled my coffee and my white shirt. You see, in my kindergarten, the works of art were ordered from best to last and I was always in second place, so before my mother agreed to spend on my art education, she wanted to know why I want to be an artist and so , without missing a moment. beat and looking her straight in the eyes I told her I want to make the

world

a more beautiful place of course and that's how I spent seven years getting to know the universal language of the visual arts and how I was improving seven years later we emigrated to the United States I was 13 years old I didn't speak English and you remember well 13 very few things are more traumatic than a combination of puberty and high school, but at least everyone else had a chance to discuss how traumatic it was.

I couldn't say anything. word and instead I got lost in my studies and discovered another universal language of mathematics and science, so I had a second professional conversation with my mother where I told her that I would like to be an engineer, my mother asked me why and without missing a word I looked at her directly into his eyes and told him that we should make the

world

a more functional place, of course, now you have to understand: my parents were engineers, this was music to their ears, my father walked a little taller and was already a tall boy and My mom smiled, she finally did something right, but that didn't last.

I learned English, I developed opinions, I developed a sense of justice and I wanted to make sure I made an impact. I really won to make a difference, so I had a third conversation with my mother where I told her that I would like to be a lawyer, she didn't even ask me why and the conversation quickly went from mom to dad, so my dad sat me down and said Olga, I'm used to it. idea of ​​you making the world I am a beautiful place and then you had this idea of ​​making the world I am a functional place and I thought that was a great idea.

It seems like you gave up on both, but in reality it was different. I wanted to ask Oh, he took the bar exam, it turned into a check, more or less, take that dad, I'm kidding, my dad has always supported me, this is not the story I'm going to tell him, but he never stopped wonder how two engineers managed to raise a lawyer. Now fast forward to today and I think I've finally discovered what

will

make the world a beautiful and functional place. Smart

contracts

and before I tell you what they are and give you examples of their applications, let me talk a little bit. a little bit about blockchain, the underlying technology, now you might be wondering what the heck blockchain is and if you think about it for a minute you can even imagine a movie starring someone like Dwayne the rock Johnson, you know, blockchain, unfortunate name aside , it's really a distributed ledger immutable immutable means that if you put something on the blockchain it's very difficult to

change

it, it's pretty much there forever distributed means that no computer can't decide it's a network of computers around the world that share that decision and the ledger it's just a table like an excel table that contains a lot of information now, what makes this technology work is cryptology which is a magic ingredient when mixed a lot, that's what makes work sharing work now, this technology It's not a joke, it's a lot of math, but in essence I think of blockchain as a history of all transactions.

Now, using blockchain and a technology platform as a series, you can create decentralized applications or adapt them and at the center of the applications are

smart

contracts

, which brings me to

smart

contracts, let's talk about smart contracts which I hate. To disappoint you, those smart contracts also have a misleading name, they are not really smart, since this girl is very smart and they are not really contracts like on the pages of legal jargon pages where you sign our mandate, not that kind of contract, There are actually pieces of code that encode business logic and essentially facilitate three functions: one stores rules, two verifies rules, and three are self-executing.

I tend to think of them as very secure vending machines, for example each vending machine stores a rule that says if you insert a dollar you can get a snack of your choice and then when you insert a dollar the correct amount is checked and after verification, voila, happy moment, you get a snack of your choice, that's how smart it is. the contracts work and because they are blockchain applications there are no middlemen there are no brokers there are no escrow agents there is no government corporation not even a lawyer it runs automatically so to summarize smart contracts are pieces of code they are very secure and self-determined.

Executing that is very exciting and the business world is in the process of adopting smart contracts, we

will

see numerous applications in the financial sector supply chain of IOT and many others, but the reason I get up in the morning and I am very excited about smart contracts because of their potential to solve problems that have never been solved before. Now I will review four applications and treat them separately, but in reality anyone's smart contracts can combine more than one application. I want to make sure you really get a breadth. and the depth of what is possible, which is why a smart contract application is very good for storing data.

For example, there is an American startup that is rethinking the census and building a decentralized protocol using smart contracts. The census is a very powerful tool in the United States and many other nations. The census is how we determine how to distribute billions of federal dollars each year. Each year's census is how we determine where we build bridges, schools, roads, hospitals, so the census is very important. This startup collects questions from people, then collects answers from people, and then. It is stored securely on the blockchain and anonymously, this way our legislators can truly get a representative representation of who we are as people and what we want.

Smart contracts are very good at facilitating trust, so for example another startup now a bit. more international, includes people from Australia, Canada and Germany, is connecting urban farmers, landowners and consumers, allows small rental agreements to be placed on the blockchain using smaller contracts and facilitates the rental of small plots of land and small plots of land They add up to form a large field, for example. If I had a house in San Francisco and I don't have time or interest in gardening, I can rent out my backyard or if I have a flat roof, even a roof so someone can grow it.

Now the benefits of urban agriculture are enormous, it allows me to reduce our carbon footprint it allows us to build a more united community it is an opportunity to explain to our children where our food comes from and, most importantly, urban agriculture is beautiful and delicious now number three smart contracts can function as software libraries and I know that sounds a bit boring. Talking about software libraries is a bit like me inviting you to watch paint dry or grass grow. It's a little boring, I get it, but it actually has life-saving applications. For example, in the United States, more than a hundred thousand people are waiting for a kidney transplant every year and on average it takes three to five years and in some states it takes up to ten and the real problem is that the longer you wait, the less chances are that the transplant will be successful.

Of course, there is a solution to Many hospitals allow someone in the patient's network to donate a kidney, such as a friend, family member, co-worker or just a great stranger, but the challenge is that the donor is not always a match; There is a solution for that too. allow an ex

change

, for example, if a donor A is not a match for a patient A and a donor B is not a match for a patient B, they can exchange the challenge is that this solution is very limited geographically, so two women from Germany, Germany and France. They are creating a protocol that allows matched donations to be matched in real time and across geographies, so it not only solves the time problem but also allows for successful transplant operations.

The application for smart contracts is really good at authenticating, for example, since 2015, a start. in Finland has been working with the government to give a prepaid card to every refugee and displaced person who enters that country. That card stores the identity on the blockchain. A refugee can now go to the bank and open a bank account. No passport, no ID required. then they can quickly get benefits from the government so they can survive, but it gets even more interesting than this by using smart contracts, they can borrow from their network so that they can not only survive, but they can also build credit and have a chance to prosper, can they?

What if we extend this solution? to 70 million refugees who on average stay in their host country for more than ten years, you know, when we think about a better world, we generally don't think about blockchain, we don't think about smart contracts and it's partly because these technologies are not good. Of course, I understand funny names, very complicated technology and a lot of mathematics is also not useful, but I am convinced that once we realize that we can use smart contracts to solve long-standing problems we will attract talents from all over the world and we will be able to take advantage of creativity and knowledge, let me give you an example: there is a decentralized social network in New York for artists, without words, just images, and the amazing thing is to see those artists play with it, explore, make mistakes, collaborate and, in ultimately making beautiful art, yes, there's a part where they use smart contracts to make sure they pay fairly and that's absolutely important, but you know, what's more interesting, a hundred and fifty thousand artists, 50 countries, Creativity unleashed new works of art that had never been seen before in collaboration. creativity completely unleashed imagine if we could channel that creativity that intelligence into other disciplines to solve the world's problems.

I am convinced that the advances we have made from the dawn of time to the information age would pale in comparison to what we can do with this technology. You see, when I was six years old and wanted to make a world a more beautiful place, I had never heard of smart contracts, and when I was sixteen years old and wanted to make a world a more functional place, I had never heard of smart contracts either, and even when I went to law school and wanted to make the world a more just place. I had never heard of smart contracts, but today I am convinced that smart contracts have arts and sciences coming together to make a difference and sell the world's biggest problems.

Imagine a world where there is trust. imagine a world where we can unleash the creativity of this planet imagine a world where a census represents who we are where urban farms are thriving where kidney donations are flowing and refugees step up to be part of our world, right? That would be a beautiful and functional world, thank you