# How will nations remain relevant in the 21st century? by Kaspar Korjus (Devcon4)

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2019-10-09
- Duration: 23:37
- Topics: blockchain, smart contracts, distributed ledger, Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-61YRbA9gWe8
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61YRbA9gWe8

## Description

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https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/4/how-will-nations-remain-relevant-in-the-21st-century

Kaspar Korjus discusses how nations will remain relevant in the 21st century. 

Speaker(s): Kaspar Korjus
Skill level: Beginner
Track: Society and Systems
Keywords: global, economy

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Devcon 4 was held in Prague, Czech Republic on Oct 30 - Nov 2, 2018.
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## Transcript

[Music] hi guys girls my name is Casper I'm thrilled to be here most likely I won't be your favorite guy today here I work for government and I help actually nations to become better not to destroy them and and sometimes I feel myself that I'm stuck in the middle I'm stuck in the middle of two different worlds and there are both ways why they don't like me when I meet you in a decentralized words I love to see how we can trust the platform mathematics encryption each other not some centralized Authority how it increases transparency how it lowers bureaucracy it's all great I am managing director of the e-residency in Estonia so in other hand my daily job is to help nations to become digital to give up become borderless and most like like I have helped your nation also and I see a lot of benefits of a nation-state as well actually I like many regulations with nations too when it comes to privacy even if you is a lot damaged I like about antitrust laws how the wide monopolies I like I can come here and I can roam using the same fees on internet I can travel without needing a passport there are many things which I do like about organizations and nations but the same time I feel and I support most of you that it can't kind of continue as it is because the dissatisfaction increases and we don't trust them much at all anymore and something needs to be read transformed but my logic is that instead of destroying and building something from scratch I will try to help them I bet they are so and throughout my last four or five years while I'm running this there have been already some pilots there we have examples of decentralized applications for example and the Tea Room blockchain which work together with nation-state services on a left-hand side Oracle ice has made way how you can check whether someone's identity is also valid in government side you know any smart contracts on the right-hand side it was just developed last month I think born actually won Berlin competition where you can actually do smart contracts using digitally signed digital identities approved by governments which means that all of those smart contracts are also legit in policing world in government world and and it increases transparency through this blockchain and it it has some different values why they have done it for example they brought out in their block that when you lose your card you can get the new one at Embassy so we Ortiz tell identity remains the same even if you lose your private keys of your wallet but what interests me more is that what else can you do what else can you do if you would like to help nations to succeed in becoming digital and what I will do now is I will show you that a 10 phase roadmap which I see can happen with nations it's like one path which I see that may take place in next 50 to 100 years time and and if you consider this big picture then please do you think how and where you can see you can be relevant to help succeeding those nations try try to make the change happen so 10 faces of digital nation-state steps I'll bring to you face number one where most nations are today faking to be digital I I'm from Estonia so I never experienced those but I heard that people have still those fax machines and you do signatures on paper with ink so for us it's we managed to skip that face after becoming green independent in 1991 we didn't really had those technologies because it's quite fun you print out PDFs and then you feel it and then you scan it and then someone I guess gets it from other scanner and then needs to fill it again on computer its signature which you can verify whether it's correct or not in the first place so not a real good mood and steps but the most nations are here today switching to digital and Estonia happened in 2000 so 18 years ago a meaning that besides nations recognizing you and true identity they also allow you as we have saw in stone as basic human right to recognize your own internet also so every every person managed to have a digital identity a new unique identifier on internet and each of us have that my digital identity is 3 8 7 1 2 1 2 7 9 6 and I'm not afraid of having a unique ID we can't miss confuse privacy with name like you know my name is Casper you can't kind of misuse the name you know my digital name you can't misuse that just computers are better knowing numbers and characters and each half private-public eater each transaction which we do where we enter is encrypted all the data is encrypted only I can decrypt it I own my data whoever checks my data if they are permission I will see that through a blockchain based system and if there wasn't a real case why they had to use my data then it's a criminal case and it ends up very very bad for them digital identities was launched like I said 18 years ago first five years no one used them for anything because there weren't airing services after five years first service started appear and now literally everything is online and digital access available tens of thousands of services face number three which stone entered few years later like 15 16 years ago is data exchange something in the infrastructure layer which nation's mostly have failed today this is the screenshot of Estonia its decentralized way how government is built up and out a theis kept each of those green nodes like I said is a separate entity where my data can be there a path told we have done regulations so that privacy is taken seriously and beyond our data if we want to transact why its use would have this centralized way is it for many reasons first there is no single point of failure second it's very efficient it is very scalable if I give you some examples of the services what we can use for example two days ago I updated my driver license I logged into one of those nodes I gave access to the driver license entity to access my healthcare records that my eyes are still all right to access my picture for driver license to access my age whether I'm eligible to drive and where I live because it needs to be in driving license I could have done that without giving them allowance to access my data I needed to do that then manually physically but they gave that access they put everything together and next day yesterday I got my driver license I just teach the designing and accepting that I meant and see whether I'd seen a log which shows of that transaction and like that all of the services the magic is that most of the services which we need to use in Carmen site needs data from different departments if you declare taxes it asks data from tens of different sources about I allow access my salary my property how many children I have what's my salary etc it calculates everything together and I digital sign and I have declare my taxes so for us it's been there for quite some time and it works it's always been working and and for us besides having unique identifiers the data exchange layer has been very important factor for the success of our dish to society I put together one slide as many nations where I'm trying to help them try to do something severe similar but don't understand how to do it and I see that very first thing is for us all to make this level of your net awareness their awareness that it is possible to be digital so that privates and security is protected more a lot more than paper-based words like how do you know who checks today your health care data who owns your health care data who changes anything in your health care data you don't have any transparency any visibility anything to change with digital based systems Therese and with technology like rock chain and encryption we can have that trust to keep our data where how and how we exactly we want it to be the level of acceptance this comes most because people are not ready and don't give permission government to do anything digitally and that's why they really lag behind legislation data private protection acts private sax digital signature acts all of this legislation needs to be in place before government starts to become digital infrastructure data exchange as I showed you digital identity and then the services come usually carbons are starting from top down they start building some services and start picking out the rest later and that's why they fail phase number four becoming borderless this happened in Estonia 2014 and I started to run this Oregon called EU residency this means that every person on planet alone voluntarily can have and apply to become an e resident of Estonia to become our digital citizen and you obtain the same digital identity as Estonians have and you can access the same system same services then I launched that four plus years ago I didn't exactly know why you should like to become an e resident or why should we do it in the first place so it was more like carbon tax like a start-up manner trying to understand your needs and trying to do everything that you would love it throughout those years we have changed ten plus laws for you we have developed many services changed all the processes and now we are in exponential growth rate throughout the last years of people who become digital citizens of foreign nations and and using some systems mostly people use our business environment last talks have heard all about the financial exclusion problems today if you're coming in like 70% of nations today can't offer financial services to their citizens so people become new residents of Estonia they would set up a business within two clicks they establish banking accounts and they can start selling their services or products globally the same day having access to Apple place tours to Google's etc to really empower the financial inclusion through this platform and it's possible and it's scaling and for us the motivations are of course different in some ways for a nation its economic project because we increase our economy we offer our services to them we get some money from that so it there are incentivized to do it but for us and for me person of course it's more about about something to give back to those who lack in digital society who lack of those services and as we have this platform it kind of hasn't hurt us to offer that globally and I see that now there are two other nations who have joined and opened up and offered e-residency to others and they see that one day everyone will nations will understand that they don't need and they don't have to serve only those citizens who they own in that land they can have service and offer those to everyone and whoever wants can start choosing them I see that if today Emir isn't of some nations after seven years I mean resident of at least ten different nations I'm opting intonation like a service and opting out if I don't like that nation I can choose the nations where I want to belong to myself some because of the good services it can be health care it can be business environment some because the values of the nation matches my values I wouldn't become digital citizen of many nations today because the values don't match your residents like this environment because of hashtag transparency encryption and environment suits them face number five which happened few years ago is moving to the cloud meaning that it goes of Vienna and different laws governments need to keep their citizens data inside the government what we did to hack this system is that now we have embassies internationally but in the in those embassies we don't have people who work there as usually because in embassies it's a stone and land and regulations in that foreign land but we have data centers so if something happens let's say politically correctly national disaster and then we can just switch one click one button and not the only our service data is backed up but all our services would keep up and run so without physically Estonia being there I would still register my marriage there I would still elect on during voting pace who will be representing me and my voice I will still pay taxes even to my nation so you can't eliminate one nation anymore all the rest of the five phases between I haven't exactly achieved yet but so you can be much more critical about those phases but I just see that in some form they can happen next what I want to do is building an app store of a nation-state and here of course together with your help also nations are very bad in R&T and in development and in engineering in the first place like most of the services in in Estonia like they are nothing compared to what you can do and because the progress and the systems are not not built for that so what we have done and starting now is offering a wide range of API so that you can build all the services for nations instead of nations themselves we have API is to authenticate the digital design to establish a company you can have your own website very establish you company through your residency and have your own environment in different languages you name it and I want to do that all the services which nation offers should be offered to api's as well face number seven I believe is the first phase when actually nations don't harass you and you don't feel that they demand something from you he's becoming invisible if you give allowance to do something with your data then there are many things which we can automate today if my child was born I logged in and I still registered the kindergarten posite place I still registered social welfare systems all of those things can be made automatically if I become 65 pensions can be and should be done automatically I don't need to apply those things all the life cycle a person can be automated so that you don't feel at all the nation is on back face number eight tokenizing the eco system this is what i wrote on a blog last summer launching our tokens called s coins and I had three four different use cases how to use that somewhere that has companies and organizations want to raise funds the same way I feel that people could be part of a society actually and have staked on that if society develops and if we believe in society you buy those tokens those tokens then good be used inside the ecosystem to exchange value the same way those tokens could be used even to authenticate instead of plastic ID cards and I wrote many different use cases and and we try to search more what and how to evolve with that face number nine is empowering nation through AI like AI is natural part of our lives in private life already lost I much move it was a a who recommended me on Netflix watched a lot of watch last time I ordered a pizza Hosea who recommended me pizza place went to restaurant who say etc my emails are answered now why I say I the same way there's no reason to believe that most important national government decisions wouldn't be done or empower true AI and there I totally agree with you that so many important decisions are based and undone on some few people which sometimes are based on emotion some very short-term prospects and I believe that after 50 or so years we look back and we do laugh about the situation how the government is making laws to happen and how the decision-making processes actually are taking place there's so much which we can do already today in real time even when comes the taxation which nation start love to do where the lower were to increase regarding to demand but also more complex decision making process I feel and I do believe that codec and AI pace decision-making tools for Carmen's will be very big things in coming years and we already started to use some of them and and one day if the AI recommends you what to do and you just click the green button I agree I agree I agree and I do believe that one crazy day we don't need those people to click that red or Korean patent and force it but the system can work on background and if the system is built on legislation which we support which which is done by citizens and if it is supported by AI and global then I do believe that like we have started with some nations like Finland today already we help each other to offer those services then it's not like we can see this two ways whether it's like Big Brother coming and going to conquer the world or it's just some software which helps citizens and the decision making process and we can use this same software a player for other nations also we don't need 100 different software's whichever works best we can start using with our partner nations so in very tall ends up as one possibility if nations don't totally fail I believe it's nations are becoming independent from its own physical and citizens services and start serving humans as never before thank you so yeah as told not me mostly maybe so popular amongst yours but if you see that there is a way for not destroying nations but helping to grow and peel them join the community becoming residents help to build the central stepped creations on top of that help to build applications which matter also more in real world I where legislation is supporting those and and help me to help your nation as well thank you [Applause] you