The potential impact of block chain on the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development · United Nations eBooks · 2021
This chapter discusses how blockchain could impact the Sustainable Development Goals. The discussion focuses on how current visions that society attributes to blockchain could play out and what could be their impact on sustainable development. An interesting prior example is the Internet. An initial meaning that society placed in Internet technology was that it would create a “global village” that would spread equity, justice, and democracy. These were expectations based on technical characteristics of the Internet (cheap, instantaneous, two-way communication). These expectations did not realize, and the actual use of the Internet has a direct impact on sustainable development (positive and negative). In fact, similar hopes were raised by the telegraph, railways, then the telephone. One prediction about radical innovation may be that some of its most important effects in the long term will be felt in areas where it was hardly expected to matter at the beginning (for example, the impact of internal combustion engine on urbanism). Similarly, blockchain technology is in its infancy, and there many different visions of how the technology is likely to develop, which products will result from this development and the potential consequences of their use.