 Firstly, the shape of the talk. Just going to do the what is blockchain because some people may be coming just because they would find out what blockchain is. Pros, cons and questions of sustainability. A couple of case studies looking at forests and diamonds and the use of blockchain. The emergence of the use of blockchain in sustainable trying to determine sustainability or sustainability of the supply chain. There's lots of elements to that. So beyond blockchain, in much of the way in which blockchain is being spoken about, we forget that it's actually part of a much more complex and broader technological transformation that's taking place. I think it's really important to understand where blockchain is fitting into this broader fourth revolution that humanity has brought upon us or some of humanity living somewhere in America and Russia and somewhere else. And then conclusions. So blockchain, what is it and how does it work? I don't know exactly, so I'm not going to pretend right. Key thing is that a lot of the hype around blockchain is that basically we are moving from this where the internet, the excitement the internet was that we could share things, we could share files stuff. We now with blockchain will be able to share value in terms of assets, in terms of property, carbon credits here, energy, music files, ownership of music, property rights, votes, you can actually share things. And it's that quality that is seen for that blockchain can absolutely transform society. Most of you will no doubt be going, when should you get to mention Bitcoin? Right. That's it. It's over. That's Bitcoin over. Bitcoin is part of this. Blockchain is the technology that underpins the exchange of digital currencies. It was the hardware that was designed to ensure that there wasn't a double spend. It was called a double spend. The importance of not having a double spend is to ensure the integrity of the system. Having Bitcoin a blockchain system means that you can transfer funds immediately. You don't have to have intermediaries and it's secure and immutable and all these things. So this is a long distance from here where money was hard to move. It had solid form. We're not there. We're over here. The idea is we're going there. But the bigger value of blockchain is that it is a ledger system that records things. You can record exchange on fear and it's a system that's decentralized. So all the people who are involved in the network are visually, they see the exchange taking place. This is recorded historically. It can't be tampered with. So every exchange is authenticated amongst the collective by consensus. This moves away. I've got this image here because I've got a link by link. Jacob Marley in Charles Dickens. His role was to record transactions and debt in the ledger. He was the one in control completely. Whereas in the blockchain everybody sees everything and nobody can be manipulated. So that's the idea in its magicness. So you get different types of networks. In a very simplified network Mr Marley is here. But you could say the state. You could say a central bank, a centralized network. We all have to go to the center point to use and do our transactions exchange. In a decentralized network you can have a number of nodes, a sort of competitive environment. But in a distributed network, and this is what blockchain is called, a distributed ledger system, everybody is interconnected. Everybody sees everything. This is roughly in theory how blockchain works. So you get a request for something. So this is an asset based transaction. A request, it goes to everybody. Everybody knows about the request happening. The network in a node validates this transaction. This is what's known, as you may have heard, of miners. So the miners is the computer power to solve the problem, which is the algorithmic problem. The algorithmic problem is what's known as cryptography and this is what makes it more secure than digital transactions. Once it's verified, you create a new block. And that block, which is verified and mutable, you cannot change it, is added to the existing block. And then the transaction is completed. This, in theory, can never be changed. This is an open distributed network. It's an open distributed network, where it's permissionless. Anybody can take part. Now that's the high end of blockchain being open, permissionless, democratic, everybody takes part. You deal with power, it's a libertarian dream. But it's not going to end up like that, that's the thing. And it's not ending up like that. One of the big next steps is to try and break down the interactions on blockchain to pass value. And one way of doing that is through contracts. And this is where smart contracts come in. Smart contracts were developed, particularly with the emergence of Ethereum. Ethereum is a new medium that a young Russian guy developed, he's got his name, Vitavec. And it's like a virtual machine or autonomous program that everyone can use Ethereum and they can develop their contract on Ethereum and it can be permissioned contracts. And the way the smart contract works is, so this, for example, is the centre of the house. You would have the seller of the house, the buyer of the house, they come to an agreement, they register that, it goes to digital currency, the exchange occurs and you go to a digitised land deed. At each point, when there is an agreement, the next stage happens. So you break down every single, this is why it's important for sustainable commodity supply chains, at every point you can break the chain down with a contract. But it's what's contained in the contract that matters. And that's about algorithms and code. And this is where trust becomes extremely interesting, if you... The emergence of Ethereum and smart contracts has basically led to this environment where we've got enormous amounts of new initiatives and this is a lot of these on the back of initial coin offerings. Promoting an idea, getting people to invest in the concept of the idea and then developing these new platforms to invest in new projects. So we've got all sorts of projects and I'll get onto the environmental projects in a moment. But basically the argument by Nusbaum here is crypto-economics users don't need to trust in anyone, any individual or organisation, but rather the theory that humans will behave rationally when correctively incentivised. Now for me that's a very worrying statement. There's some keywords in there like humans rationally behave incentivised, right? That's worrying. That doesn't fill me with trust because one of the key things with smart contracts is you will incentivise by code each phase of the exchange. At the end of the day, the general consensus around blockchain and all its hype is to say it's improved transparency and transactions, it removes intermediaries, it decentralises to this distributed ledger, it improves trust through removing trust, it's secure immutable because of the cryptographic nature of the exchange, right? The disadvantages are quite similar to the advantages in many ways. There's a lack of privacy, you have to expose yourself onto the network and this contradicts lots of people's inherent feeling of security. So often people tend to go for permission-based systems and when you use a permission-based system, you then hand over control to whoever is managing, like in the case of Bitcoin, you would have a permission-based holder of the wallet, your wallet, so you don't hold a public wallet, you have a private wallet which is permissioned, right? So you've ended security a little bit, you've undermined your security, you've introduced intermediaries and intermediaries will take advantage of this situation by charging you and then we'll start to see big intermediaries emerging. There's also the idea that it's not open to attack. If 51% of all the mining power for the algorithm to solve the problem is held by one or a group of actors, then they can verify an action on the blockchain, right? Now this has been worrying particularly around Bitcoin and this is why we've seen some terrible things happening. It's because the majority of the mining power until very recently has been in Russia and China in big digital mining farms and China's has reacted to this day because it's been sucking loads of electricity from the national grid. Also, as you will know, there's a lot of hype about blockchain and an extreme amount of hype, I kind of was into it, but it is an unproven technology and with any unproven technology there's high risk. So there's a question about do you continue with something that's so high risk or how do you manage it? There's definitely an energy dimension to it. I'm sure somebody would ask me that question. It is to do one half hour of a Bitcoin transaction as the equivalent to the average American person's use of electricity for one day. So if you do the math when you're upscaling, that's a lot. And if you think about the inequity of access to electricity in parts of the world, this is adding to inequity globally. And there's a big regulatory void and part of the regulatory void is compounded really by a real lack of understanding obviously because it's an unproven technology. But really trying to understand how it fits in with incumbent technologies now, incumbent institutional systems. There's quite a lot of work going on with financial systems, but then looking beyond that and that's where we're going to look beyond. Because big enthusiasts see lots of opportunity for the use of blockchain to help resolve environmental problems. So you may have already read recently that you could use blockchain to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of recycling in supply chains as I'll put. I'll be talking about proof of origin, reduced footprint, unsustainable practices, transparency. There's over a thousand already blockchain-based energy companies that have been developed through IOCs, as I said, initial coin offerings. There's an interest in using blockchain for monitoring and reporting in multi-lateral environmental agreements, particularly around the Paris Agreement. But also other ones like CITES on the Convention on International Trading Dangerous Species, that non-profits could benefit from blockchain and be more effective in their work. Carbon taxes, carbon trading, and incentivising people. So nudge theory, nudge people into good practice. So there's a lot of enthusiasm about blockchain that it could do all these things. Now you've got to remember it's really only been around as a transaction for cryptocurrencies since around 2008. The technology has been around since the early 90s, but Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies since 2008 have really been the platform for experimentation. But now we're seeing some really interesting developments within this regulatory void. So can blockchain help to guarantee sustainable forestry? Forestry is a big complicated issue, and sustainability of forestry is a big complicated issue. Lots of people think forests are great. They create jobs, wealth. It's a big sector. Demand is going up, so we need to manage forests more sustainably. If we could do more sustainable practice of informal wood production in certain parts of the world, we could increase the GDP in those countries, lifting people out of poverty. All these are very beneficial pictures of forests and wealth, but then there's the nasty side. Vast amounts of forests are illegally harvested, leading to degradation of ecosystems, loss of habitat. The impact on indigenous peoples and their rights, their claim for territories that they've been trying to look after and then established legal rights over since after colonial times. Climate change impacts on forests are making forest management, forest planning even harder now. Human rights issues, as we say. So these are many governance challenges, enormous amounts of timber flowing across the world illegally in these supply chains. So can we do anything about that? We could address the demand side that's driving deforestation. We could look at these examples here. Deforestation primarily in Brazil is through cattle and soy. In Malaysia it's in palm oil, Indonesia palm oil and pulp and paper and furniture. The key thing is to address the demand side, but certification doesn't really address the demand side. It addresses the supply side. So if we're saying increase demand, which we are, then will we be able to achieve sustainability? Will blockchain be able to achieve sustainability? Can we trust it? If you don't address the demand side, have you completely undermined the trust in a system? Because you're not really comprehensively addressing the question. What's been interesting, so as Levine pointed out, being involved in forestry, I kind of came in around here. So just as FSC, the Forest Institute Council and PFC were really starting to get going. But before that, certification was being introduced for organic farming. In the 80s we've got earlier Fair Trade and the Rainforest Alliance certification systems. Part of the reason these could be done is we get the development and evolution of technologies. And I have to say, even though it's down here following all this, I really didn't follow any of that. I didn't follow the interrelationship and the potential of technology in relationship certification. I never really thought of that. So I think it's important to think about the elements of certification. So if you break it down into four elements, there's obviously more to it. But you need to establish standard and criteria. That is absolutely fundamental. What your standard and criteria to justify what constitutes sustainable, and then you are going to sell that as sustainable to the marketplace, it's going to be accepted as sustainable, is absolutely fundamental. Then you will certificate according to that criteria. You need people that are qualified to undertake that. People that can establish that it's met the criteria. You need to trust in those people. You then can have a label and then the consumers need to trust in the label. They have to trust this system. Most people don't understand the system. Most people have no idea how this system works. But blockchain will include the system and we will trust the label in our blockchain system. The impact evaluation will hopefully feedback and verify that the whole certification system is working. But there have been, over the years, many reports about the failures of certification systems. They come out regularly. There was a very famous one back in the 90s, Trading Incredibility, which I thought was one of the best titles, Rainforest Foundation. Because that's what it is. I think that's a really nice way of putting it, Trading Incredibility. It doesn't matter whether you're trading credibility paper-based or blockchain-based. It's just you're trading on the trust of the consumers that it's sustainable. There's nothing that blockchain is going to do to change that in itself. That's the key thing. So, should we trust certification? When I was talking about the amount of deforestation at the end of the day, and this is 2013, it's pretty much the same. Somebody can correct me if you want. Only 10% of the world forests are certified and 28% of industrial roundwood is certified. The majority of this is in the global north. The cost of certification are a problem. The scale is often, it's large companies that have certification systems. At the end of the day, there's a dominance by two sectors, the two sustainability criteria. PEFC and FSC. So, you've hardly got a competition. It has to be of almost one size fits all, even they've got slight variations. So, there's been an initiative out on a limb. It started up quite recently in Brazil, which is a responsible timber exchange. It doesn't use the word sustainable because it's trying to meet criteria for legality and or sustainability. And it uses blockchain technology to track each point along the supply chain that all the requirements are met. And this includes all the legal requirements, paying tax, when it's being exported, doing all the proper paperwork, et cetera. This is only just starting to be rolled out and it's starting to get a lot of attention. I haven't done any research on it, but it's interesting it's starting to be rolled out. There's increasing dissatisfaction with certification. Is this an option to increase our trust and relationship with products that we consume? Now, just briefly, I want to go into the diamond supply chain. The diamond supply chain is dominated by De Beers, the government of Botswana, who sell on the De Beers trading centre. And Al Rossa, which is a Russian diamond trader. So even though if you've got blockchain for De Beers who have been accused of genocide and they've completely undermined a process which I'll go on to, to establish provenance and ownership of diamonds. And Al Rossa, who although they've taken part in the diamond supply chain, they are also equally obstructive to developments to try and include things like human rights in the criteria with the Kimberly process. So the Kimberly process, which established in 2011, relatively recently. The idea is the import-export certification scheme. So it's not about the impact on the environment, it's not about human rights, it's about where it's come from that you can verify is primarily to do with conflict diamonds and blood diamonds. So it's motivated by what was happening in Liberia with Charles Taylor. So that was the focus, requiring governments to participate. You've got a very small market dominated by key players, high value goods, very small goods. And so you only have to get a small number of players together and get agreement. But the quality of that agreement and the effectiveness and implementation is open to questions. The last chair of the Kimberly process was Akhmed Bin Salayim of UAE. And he was the one that brought blockchain into the Kimberly process. He believed that basically to achieve a transparent, accountable industry, you needed to have much more on the ground contact and that this work needs to continue. So they introduced, they went together with Everledger who are tracing ownership and provenance, but they're not looking at sustainability. And this is quite interesting because people assume that what it means with Everledger and the blockchain certifying provenance, that they're actually addressing things like human rights and environmental dimensions. And Everledger is part of Ethereum. It's only because of that technology that it's able to be. But the primary goal of it is to ensure that the diamonds that are traded are legal and have not come from conflict areas, that's the primary aim. It's not about sustainability. Now, finally, I wanted to sort of, you know, the focus is on blockchain and blockchain has somehow the answer to all things. That it's, should we be focusing on blockchain and trust? Or is there a bigger landscape in terms of new technologies and some of the older technologies? And I would say there is. But basically there's sources of data that are, some are already well established, some are emerging like machine to machine learning, that are being fed into what I would call the data space. In ways that are very difficult to understand how it's being drawn into cloud networks. And it's about who can control and interpret that space. Who can control and interpret that information. When the data is gathered, who are the people that are doing the analytics? And then how is it being shared and used? Merhamun data is a magic, it's what you do with it that counts. So the key thing that goes back to the point that I was making a lot earlier was that data is key to the way that blockchain contracts, smart contracts, are developed. If you're talking about a supply chain, you have to have in each point in the supply chain with a smart contract requirements embedded within that smart contract. The more requirements you have, the more complex it is, the more energy is used to resolve it, the more costly it is to develop it. So you would like to set up a supply chain, a sustainable supply chain, with as few smart contracts in it. But try and convince the end user that it's sustainable. So we're back to the same issue. It's like what's contained in the code, which is your algorithms to be put into the smart contract to determine whether you've met the requirements in law, in text. When that's put into the smart contract that it gets met, but you have no idea what's in that smart contract, how it's been interpreted, how the data has been integrated and the analytical frame has been composed and constructed. So as a consumer, we are back, we are even further away from being able to understand sustainable and sustainability. At least I could go and look at FSC sustainability criteria and try and work out whether it was reasonably coherent. And then maybe I could do some field work. This is going to make researching and understanding what the components are, what the criteria are, and how they're being applied and how data is being used to determine whether the criteria have been met, and I mean also the legal criteria, harder to actually work out. Now some people are saying, well, this would make it much more flexible, you would have a lot more data, it would facilitate much more localised, open, accessible or affordable exchange systems. I would, I'd love to believe that, but what I'm already seeing is that the processes, the control over data analytics and control over cloud systems, the major mining capacity, it's very, once again, it's very dominated by incumbent companies, but also emerging companies. And you need to look at this through sort of political economy. I think the idealistic idea of, we're also developing smart contracts and exchanging sustainable commodities, be that word, be that any kinds of food, whatever, there's an idealism in some of that. I think we would be wise to question. And then, can we trust each other, this is my, when one man is going up and putting his racing car by the sun, and other people are experiencing the impact of ongoing extreme consumption which is completely unsustainable, not addressing the demand side. We live in a really crazy world. Blockchain is not a silver bullet. The broader technological framework within which it's trying to be demonstrated that it could potentially deliver sustainable supply chains is, I think, open to being highly questioned. But one of the big things is, as a researcher, is understanding even how you begin to do that, particularly around how algorithmic coding is incorporated into smart contracts and then how that links with meeting the requirements with data analytics and data availability. So, that's, I did it in 45 minutes, said I would. So, I would hope you have some questions, because I've got loads of questions that I didn't manage to answer, that I'll go away with. Okay, well, thank you very much. Questions, I guess? It comes to climate change. We pollute the atmosphere and rely on forests and other things to sequester the carbon. Governments are very reluctant to set up registers who has the right to pollute or who's got the right to a particular area of forest to sequester the carbon. This could be something that happens open source spontaneously to overcome the malaise of global governance, government lack of it. Any views on that? Well, I think yes, it could, but I doubt it will. I doubt it will, because vested interest will not allow that to happen. The price of carbon emitting is getting higher and higher as the capacity of the atmosphere to absorb all our muck reduces. There will be incentives soon, I think. But incentives for who? Yeah. And who will be able to pay and who will be able to buy out somebody else? It's almost like the end of the Soviet Union. Everybody had chairs and then people just grabbed them off other people and then we ended up with sort of an oligarch. We could have an oligarch with carbon polluters who have the right to pollute. There you go. Internalising the external costs of production, the environmental costs and so on, that really I think does need to happen because our pricing system is hideous and dysfunctional. Dot chain could have some answers there, but again a huge amount of questions. Again, I'm not saying that it doesn't have potential. I'm just saying that I question whether the kind of smart contracts that will be developed by incumbent industries will undertake to do that honest work because it would affect their business models dramatically. So what I'm saying is that they will, as we've seen for years with the sustainability criteria and declarations infrastructure, they'll use a sort of framework which appears as a classic green washing and you'll sort of have green blockchain washing through smart contracts. That's my concern. I believe that a better world is possible and blockchain could be part of that better world, but I'm just trying to be a bit more critical that I suspect that when you're already seeing that IBM are controlling and Ethereum are like now the big ones, Everledger are controlling the sort of space in which smart contracts are being issued under ICOs. It's already moving in that direction where you get sort of the, what's the word, have my dinner. I'm a lawyer, so for me when I hear contracts I think about the law around contracts and there are quite often, even though contracts were meant to be a meeting of the minds for example, there are quite often contractual disputes based on a misunderstanding of what the contract meant or failure. To deliver, et cetera, et cetera. I won't go into that any further, but it would seem to me that with these smart contracts, which seem to be kind of black boxes if you don't really know what the content of these algorithms are, and there are bound to be disputes at some point in time. How are we going to adapt a legal regime to be able to deal with that? Have you looked into some of those ideas? Are people writing about that and thinking about that? There's quite a lot written about that in relationships of financial technology, fintech, because you go back down to the sort of ideal of the distributed ledger system and then Ethereum, and that in that space it's permissionless, there's no intermediaries. You need intermediaries. You need intermediaries to resolve conflicts. You need witnesses. You need somebody to act as the third party to manage these disputes. Then you need to know how the contract was agreed, that the parties understood the contract and the contents of the contract, which again is problematic regarding smart contracts, because you're not going to fully understand how the smart contract was arrived there and what was contained in it, and how it's triggered, because each smart contract is triggering something. So again, what we'll see is that blockchain and smart contracts will be incorporated into the sort of incumbent industries and sectors like forest stewardship council or sustainable palm oil initiative, and they'll still have their dispute resolution and they'll have to work out how they're going to deal with smart contract breaches. So I think it will change slightly business as you do, particularly in legal side, but I don't think the structures are going to change as dramatically as some early advocates of blockchain have been going. But everybody, please ask more questions, but I'm going away and continuing research, so more questions about it. If you think I didn't say something, please let me know. In terms of the actual contract, it's all coded. It's all by computer code. What it's doing is allowing something to take place. Once an action has happened and it's verified, then the next action is enabled to take place. It's like a gateway each time, so you enable the next part of a process to take place. But the more smart contracts you have, the more energy it takes and the more cost it is, so you want fewer contracts within a supply chain, which goes for simplified supply chains, so you don't want complex supply chains, which goes to aggregation of markets and all that. It's not to do with the language. It's just a program, coding program. Any language could work with that. So it's not attached to English, for example. It could work with any language. You gave the example of BB Real, and I just had a quick look on the website. Blockchain doesn't have to be necessarily decentralized. In this case, it doesn't seem like the blockchain on which they're storing their board information or certification information is decentralized, so the entire chain of the data is stored on the blockchain, but it's controlled by the company. Am I right or wrong? It seems like they're just sort of on the back of the blockchain technology. Anything can use blockchain, but it doesn't necessarily have to be decentralized because nobody has the incentive to use their mining capacity to certify or run their computing power to certify some sort of those standards. So just going back, the kind of big ideal where blockchain was, this is the future, this libertarian model, is the completely distributed ledger. You don't have a business who's controlling the information. So with the timber exchange, they do control that process, so you've got a decentralized exchange of information, and they're using blockchain within that to channel the information and act as gatekeepers for the export of the timber. And they are acting as the ones saying, yes, we're verifying that it has met all the requirements, and they're using blockchain to do that. So there are different ways in which it can be used, and that's an important point because basically new embedded or new actors can come in and use blockchain technology to advance their interests. It may not be to the benefit of local communities, as many people were like, oh, that's great, local communities can establish their own market and be a completely distributed ledger, and I can know that, you know, so-and-so down 300 miles away what tree it was at what time. We will still have business models that have supply chains that are decentralized, we don't have completely decentralized, decentralized, and to varying degrees, depending on different commodities. One piece of origin for renewable energy. So one of the things I was considering is the potential of this technology to eliminate intermediaries. However, when I started to research a little bit more, I realized that there is not so much scope to reducing intermediaries because you want to produce and certificate, you need an issue in body, you need a national registry, so you eliminate maybe the company that manages the trade of certificates, and vice versa, the certificates, but that is the only stage where I see that you can eliminate the topic of certificates. Do you see any other stages where you can eliminate intermediaries in the trade of certificates? I think with the point about intermediaries, there's a sort of conflict, and it goes back to your point about resolving disputes and legitimacy and authority. The people want an authority to be there to trust in to resolve disputes. It would be very difficult if we had to resolve all our disputes ourselves. Every single thing that happened, you know, you're going by a loaf of bread, there's something wrong with it, I have to go and resolve the dispute about the people that made it, was it from the factory, or was it from the person that grew the wheat, and then I have to work all that out. So you want to need an intermediary, and this is kind of where, again, the kind of hype and fiction around blockchain is that we're going to get rid of intermediaries. That's going to reduce costs. It's going to mean that we're just this global democracy of people who's exchanging things. Intermediaries are there for a reason. Now, not all of them are the best things in the world. Maybe we could improve intermediaries and hold them more to account, but I think there are problems about the intermediary dimension partly to do with how much you know as a consumer as to how certification of sustainability is constructed because they are the ones still controlling that. So, although the timber exchange example is new, it's novel, it's innovative, it's out there, I think it started last year. Was it last year, James, or two years ago? It's been around three years. But PFC and FFC are picking up big time on bringing blockchain in-house and using it for their certification schemes. So I think you'll start to see a crowding out of innovative new approaches by these bigger players, like you're saying. So there's incumbent players, there's new players, some of them might survive, a couple of them might survive, but the incumbent players will try to find ways to employ the new technologies. Not to keep businesses usual, but to adapt, but to not go out of business. And I think the point about intermediaries is they have to say you can trust us. And that's why blockchain, you can say we're using blockchain, and if you say you can trust blockchain, it's immutable, it's transparent, it's secure. Somehow that overcomes the problems that have existed before with certification. So it's taking them up a grade. So I mean it would be quite interesting to look at how certification bodies across different sectors, what kind of narrative they use around blockchain and how they incorporate into their systems. I guess they still need the auditory, they still need almost everybody except the intermediary that uses it by himself to facilitate the exchange. So in the supply chain it just rather, so you still have the auditing of the certification, but not within the supply chain, the buying and selling. No, you still need the auditory for certifying that that timber meets the sustainability criteria. I see that the only gap where you can eliminate some transaction on-course is the transaction of buying and selling the certificate. I mean I think the point I've been trying to make is that the smart contracts will be the way in which a lot of the requirements are met along the supply chain. So that does get rid of some of the intermediaries who will be involved in those processes. When it goes to customs there will be someone trying to do it. What I mean is that this blockchain seems super revolutionary, but at the end of the day it's like bookkeeping, no kind of thing. I mean there is the argument that it's a 21st century version of bookkeeping, which goes back to my slide about Marley from Charles Dickens. But then like MESC, the big shipping, they completely dominate the transportation and freight around the world. They're incorporating blockchain into their freight system throughout the whole supply chain. The reason they're doing that is to reduce cost. They believe that it will provide the necessary information that they would normally have to undertake some legwork to go and find through the smart contracts that each point along the supply chain has been met. And that information will be held within the blockchain because it's recorded, it can't be changed arguably, and so it is a cost cutting. So you have a revolutionary 21st century ledger system. Can I just ask the other people, because if it's quite technical maybe it might be for me. Again it comes back to how the supply chain system is designed. And how sustainability criteria are designed. And how involved communities could be in those processes. How that's done. So there is lots of potential. I mean to pick on James what you were saying. But there is a lot of potential. It's just I'm wary whether the effort and time will go in because those are sort of pushing this are the bigger players. And the more sophisticated, the more involvement you get particularly at the point of provenance and origin. The more detailed it is and the more costly it becomes even through a blockchain smart contract based system. And businesses are businesses and they like to reduce costs. Most an awful of the literature on blockchain which primarily you know about financial services. And the bits about supply chains. It's all about reducing cost. It's all about efficiency in the administrative side of the supply chain. It's not about sharing benefits and enabling people making things better. There's a small group of people that are like yeah this could do this, this could do this. But my reality head goes on and I just think yeah it's a big battle. To take something that could be really revolutionary and actually incorporate it into an existing embedded system of bias and power. That is already like drowning these people like running in the forest. So yeah, some people will come up with nice ideas and do things but on the whole. You mentioned the energy cost that it takes to run these mining farms in China and Russia. And I know these mining farms are largely for like Bitcoin so they're not directly concerned with sustainability. If they aren't concerned with sustainability, is there any effort to change the way these farms are powered to renewable energy sources or anything like that? Because I remember that I was kind of identified as an issue like relatively recently. Anyone's taken any steps to remedy that. Trying to shut them down, shutting them down as an emergency measure. Advocates are saying originally computers use a lot of energy. Technology will move towards more efficient systems. Another way is that people that are running or making money out of and this has happened more with cryptocurrencies have invested that into renewable energy systems to supply the mining farms so that they're running off wind or solar. So there's one up in Iceland somewhere that's totally paid for by cryptocurrency profits. So it could be channeling bad behaviour polluting into renewable energy. I think at the end of the day there is already been more efficient mining technologies being developed. It will link a lot to how much blockchain takes off in other spheres. Other areas are like health services to hold all your records in terms of your health so that wherever you go a doctor can access that health record. The insurance can access that health record. So this calculation of the energy cost is also maybe taking into account other things that aren't used any more. It could be a switch away from lots of paper but we've seen that in the 70s when we weren't going to use paper any more. Any more? I'll ask you your question now. My interest is in the distributed network in terms of housing and property ownership and how blockchain or ICOs in terms of crowdfunding could help change that whole system. So many people could crowdfund and they could buy space together rather than big players buying up several properties like this. Do you have any experience in that? Or have you thought about anything like that, like those implications of blockchain? I've read about the use of crowdfunding to raise capital through cryptocurrencies to buy property. I mean these are problems about whether it's acceptable to the existing property system within a country. And at the moment there's a lot of resistance happening on that side. There's also resistance even to crowdfunding and renting. There's a kind of move as well to use blockchain to undermine Airbnb so that it's one to one. So you don't go through Airbnb as a centre point, a de-centred, it's distributed. But I'm not a big follower of housing and stuff. There is quite a lot around. You mentioned at the beginning, is this manual? IBM has taken it across all the blockchain. IBM have set up a platform for people to set up their own smart contracts and their own ICOs and initial coin offerings. So it's a sort of experimental space. So they don't have to build the blockchain themselves. So this is the space that they've enabled. So it's kind of like a lab that they've built and they're funding. But very strategically. But other actors, I mean Facebook are now like, well where can we get in? How can we get into this? So it's a space that's going to change. But I think a lot of the big players in terms of the internet actors, the big groups there, Google and Facebook etc. Will start to try to see where opportunities for them are. And you've got to remember they're some of the biggest holders of data.