Session
Organizer 1: Veronica Piccolo, Internet Society Youth SG
Organizer 2: Elnur Karimov, Kyushu University
Organizer 3: Salvatore Orazio Agatino Giannitto, ISOC Italy Youth
Organizer 4: Nicolas Fiumarelli, Youth IGF Uruguay
Speaker 1: Puteri Ameena Hishammuddin, Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group
Speaker 2: Sandra Garin, Private Sector, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)
Speaker 3: Tina van der Linden, Civil Society, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Speaker 4: Alakanani Itireleng, Private Sector, African Group
Nicolas Fiumarelli, Civil Society, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)
Salvatore Orazio Agatino Giannitto, Civil Society, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Elnur Karimov, Civil Society, Eastern European Group
Panel - Auditorium - 90 Min
Environmental sustainability: Can a proof-of-stake blockchain foster trustworthy and an environmentally sustainable use of DLTs rather than the proof-of-work based one?
Decentralisation of Power: Proof-of-Stake has the potential to re-centralize the decentralised nature of blockchain by depending on an individual’s/entities’ stake towards the technology. Can a human-centric blockchain ensure that every individual has power on the blockchain without staking their cryptocurrencies?
Reimagining governance: In permissionless networks, cryptocurrencies reward those who maintain the network. On the other hand, in permissioned networks, those who maintain the network have different incentives, e.g., they have formed a consortium to run a business or deliver a service. This means that there are many possibilities that can be explored without making money the central point of everything to ensure that people are treated fairly on the blockchain. What are these possibilities; and can the governments regulate and control this specific technical issue?
Connection with previous Messages: Katowice IGF 2021 Messages
-Faced with the realities of anthropogenic climate change, it is clear that the environmental impact of technology needs to be further investigated and adequately addressed
-Acknowledge and encourage the contribution of youth: Young people play a key role in the achievement of sustainability and environmental conservation, and their actions need to be supported by providing necessary infrastructure and connectivity
2021 IGF Youth summit key messages:
-Ethics for DLT. The ethical aspects of the phenomenon of the increasingly widespread tokenization of everything, including even people, just for the sake of profit should be taken into account. The development of DLT ethical code could help to address many issues in this area.
1. No Poverty
5. Gender Equality
8. Decent Work and Economic Growth
9. Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
10. Reduced Inequalities
13. Climate Action
16. Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
17. Partnerships for the Goals
Targets: This panel is aimed at stimulating the debate on the adoption and development of the different consensus mechanisms of existing blockchains.
SDGs 1, 8, 9, 10, 16 are addressed by exploring the potential of blockchain to reduce inequities by favouring credit access and decent jobs, to improve efficiency and security of supply chains, as well as to build strong and reliable infrastructure for public services.
SDG 13 is addressed by stimulating the conversation around less energy-intensive consensus mechanisms than Proof of Work.
SDG 5 is addressed by giving space to female voices in blockchain, generally underrepresented, and who in turn can be an example and inspire other young girls to approach blockchain.
SDG 17 is addressed by favouring cross border dialogues and cooperation, exchange of good practices and public/private partnership to develop blockchain solutions for sustainable development.
Description:
Blockchain is one of the rapidly growing technologies that is currently disrupting many sectors including finance, art and even the DNS. It is now at an infant stage with an exponential growth as it is facilitated by the powerful hardwares and computers that currently exist. To put into perspective, blockchain now is like the internet in the early 90s where everyone had just been introduced to the ability to connect and talk without being physically together.
With the rapid and disruptive growth of blockchain, the financial sector was the most impacted as Decentralized Finance (DeFi) became mainstream and more often known as cryptocurrencies or crypto for short. This is because the first successful application of the blockchain, Bitcoin, was aimed at removing the centralized function of banks or any financial institutions. Following the footsteps of Bitcoin is Ethereum where it kickstarted the Web3 revolution. With Ethereum’s smart contracts and standards, almost anything can be decentralized. Famous examples are Decentralized Applications (DApps), Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). Thus as an outline, blockchain has created two major revolutions - DeFi and blockchain based applications/systems.
However, there is a call for the blockchain community to work on a better mechanism to address the climate impacts that are caused by blockchain based on PoW (Proof-of-Work) where computers run energy-intensive computational work 24/7 to solve complicated mathematical calculations in order to mine blocks.
In accordance with the call for environmental sustainability, Ethereum has embarked in a change of consensus mechanism, transitioning from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake. In Proof-of-Stake, the higher you stake your cryptocurrencies, the more chances it is that you’ll get to “win the block”. However, this also poses new questions on how effectively decentralised can be a DLT system that rewards major stakeholders with the consequence of concentrating governance.
New consensus mechanisms can be explored to design a more environmentally friendly blockchain which, at the same time, is more human-centric, where no discrimination is carried out among individuals who want to participate and everyone is treated like equals on the blockchain.
This panel will give a multilevel, comparative view into tech governance of DLT and explore if there is room for the multi-stakeholder approach to policy development.
The first outcome of this session will be to introduce a serious debate on DLT and blockchain governance that, despite its considerable expansion in the economy and national administrations, its social and environmental impact, is still perceived as a niche area, mainly related to the use of crypto. This is confirmed by the fact that the IGF 2021 messages make no specific mention of DLT, blockchain and related outputs.
Thus, the main outcome of the session is expected to be triggering a long-term, yet intensive process of discussions, capturing the interest of the Internet governance community and put them on a network with industry and policy experts, Scholars and young enthusiasts to encourage research, multi-stakeholder dialogue, collaboration and capacity building in the area of blockchain governance and human rights.
The delivery of policy papers will also be encouraged.
Hybrid Format: To ensure wide audience participation we plan to kickstart the session by launching a word cloud with Menti to survey the audiences' knowledge about blockchain and what comes to their mind when they hear the word “blockchain”. Both online and onsite participants will be able to anonymously submit their responses.
We will have 1 onsite moderator directing the session and giving the floor to the speakers both on site and online.
In the slots for opinions and questions from the public/audience, for each of the questions, the onsite moderator will be attentive to the physical queue and will ask the online moderator in the case of hands raised or written comments, in which case the questions will be allowed in a round-robin basis (that is, starting with the online hands and written chats, and then following the physical queue, and so on). The online moderator has the main task of maintaining the order of the raised hands and written chat, reading the questions and giving the floor to online audience speakers. That way we will achieve an equal foot between the online and on-site audience.
Usage of IGF Official Tool.