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Location : Ether-Sphere Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator Humor : Über Serious
| Subject: PERPETUALLY HOWLING DOGS OF THE IRRATIONAL LEFT: Crypto-Colonialists Use the Most Vulnerable People in the World as Guinea Pigs Wed Jun 30, 2021 6:05 am | |
| Blockchain technologies bring surveillance and political pressures, undermine local sovereignty, and create resource allocation controls on recipients.
Vanuatu is an island nation in the Pacific Ocean, with an estimated population of just over 300,000. It’s routinely impacted by extreme ocean weather events like typhoons and hurricanes, a pattern which has attracted support from international charitable aid conglomerates to boost the country’s weak technological infrastructure.
UK non-profit Oxfam, in partnership with an Australian financial app, has developed an eyebrow-raising solution for Vanuatu: a disaster relief payment system that runs on blockchain and cryptocurrency so that when other systems go down, people can still pay for essentials.
“The idea was that as soon as a disaster event happened, they can just switch on this economy,” explained Pete Howson, a senior lecturer at Northumbria University who studies cryptocurrency and blockchain, in an interview. When the situation becomes less dire, the system can be shut down. But it’s not the Vanuatuan people who control the system.
“It’s just someone at Oxfam that decides when the disaster is over,” said Howson. “People lose their economic sovereignty.”
.https://www.vice.com/en/article/wx5zz9/crypto-colonialists-use-the-most-vulnerable-people-in-the-world-as-guinea-pigs
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