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- Blockchanging trust:ethical metamorphosis in business and healthcarePublication . Rodrigues, DarioBy cutting transaction costs and streamlining agreements’ execution via “smart contracts,” blockchain technology (BT) turns decentralization into an economic advantage and an antidote against politically harsh decisions that can obliterate privacy, freedom, and democracy. Although BT’s ethical bottom line is still uncertain, its use can smooth out the trade-off between privacy and convenience, reconciling both. BT can also help reconfigure the compromise between intellectual property rights and the common good, opening more ethical routes to the diffusion of innovation. BT’s data security can be translated into straightforward access to information. On the one hand, this signals new inclusion routes for “identityless” and unbanked people, and on the other, it releases society from biased information and fake news providing access to trusted data. BT guarantees contents precision, distributing a consensual tamper-proof “hyperledger” proving transactions’ authenticity and data’s integrity. As consensus should be plural, BT’s decentralization is thought to be a must in ethical terms.
- Blockchanging money: reengineering the free world incentive systemPublication . Rodrigues, DarioBlockchain technology is changing the world incentive system, making programmable money. This kind of money is only fruitful and democratically livable in a transparent political environment. Otherwise, instead of unleashing innovation and collective action with the market’s visible hand of qualified money, the new internet of value will deliver a digital money with the same algorithmic fate that social media met on the previous internet. The latter allows digitizing users’ data and has been used to manipulate consumers and public opinion (possibly in the last two U.S. Presidential elections). Similarly, the former will let states and corporatocracy cross-reference social media and digital money’s data, hurting privacy even more. As blockchains disseminate, having the crucial economic advantage of reducing transaction costs, only free-market competition between private and public blockchains guarantee transparency and democracy. Blockchain technology is the real McCoy, and decentralizing digital money is the free world’s best shot, especially in the new normal triggered by COVID-19.
- Cyber ethics of blockchain, AI and worldcoinPublication . Rodrigues, DarioThis paper discusses the evolution of cyber ethics steered by blockchain technology (BT), artificial intelligence (AI), and, perhaps, Worldcoin, which is an ambitious global project to build a decentralized "proof-of-personhood" encrypted in an anonymous "World ID" for each human being. To investigate the digital conundrum and evaluate the ethical implications of BT, Explainable AI (XAI), and Worldcoin, the "Cyberethics-Mix" framework will be a compass oriented to four cardinal points of ethics in cyberspace: Privacy (data protection), Property (data ownership), Precision (data accuracy), and Pervasiveness (data access). The paper's main conclusion is the ethical desirability of an inclusive and decentralized policy in cyberspace.
- Political and economic implications of blockchain technology in business and healthcare : prefacePublication . Rodrigues, DarioEverything changed after users’ data were made public on the Internet and privately traded by Big Tech companies, and nothing will be the same once such data are made private on the Internet and publicly transacted by their rightful owners. Blockchain Technology (BT) leverages the disruptive capacity of the Internet in what is thought to be an inflection point for humanity. The dawn of the Blockchain Era coincides with a post-Covid-19 new normal that mixes health and economic problems, unleashing an even faster transition to digital society. Knowing that money and health are crucial factors in peoples’ lives and the two greatest human aspirations besideslove, Business and Healthcare are natural choices to envision BT’simpact on society.
- Blockchanging politics:opening a trustworthy but hazardous reforming eraPublication . Rodrigues, Dario; Lopes, Pedro SantanaThere has been a fundamental change in the genesis of political-economic trust, with the arrival of a decentralized but structured way to reach consensuses and automatically implementing decisions through self-executable contracts. Blockchain technology (BT) is a distributed, consensus-based, and secure way for individuals to make enforceable censorship-resistant quantifiable agreements. Every vote is a transaction, and BT is paving the way for decentralizing politics, defending privacy, and streamlining voting procedures. It has the potential to provide much more granular governance that hopefully will preserve freedom and defend democracy. However, especially in an embarrassing post-COVID-19 world, BT’s centralization can, instead, pave the way for citizens’ control, turning cryptographic protocols into an authoritarian digital corset tightened by some to menace the privacy and freedom of many.
- Marketing-Mix metamorphosis and new trusted business practicesPublication . Rodrigues, DarioThis chapter discusses the impact on the marketing-mix due to the confluence of the internet of things and the internet of value which seems to be made possible by the blockchain technology. This “perfect storm” induces a vortex of reliability and business trust between people (“peer-to-peer”) and machines (“bot-to-bot”), without the traditional need of third parties to ensure confidence in a negotiation. This implies innovative business practices and self-executing contracts that will take place in a more decentralized and trustworthy environment, speeding up the metamorphosis of the four marketing-mix elements in such a way that marketers will have to deal with a “product” that is always in a “beta-version”; a dynamic “price” that initially has to be free; an atomized “promotion” of reliable messages found by costumers (not the opposite); and a new virtual secure “place,” which is made possible due to augmented reality and blockchain.