China has been a leader in the emerging technology space. If you trace their activities around artificial intelligence, blockchain, and associated autonomous technologies, China has far surpassed other nations in terms of the range of activities and the amount of investment. The efforts they are undertaking — the national digital currency — is another initiative in that space. China has already developed a pretty sophisticated blockchain approach at the national government level. The digital currency is just another layer on top of that effort to advance their position in the emerging technology space.
… China has recognized whoever dominates the next generation of emerging technologies including blockchain, quantum computing, and so on, is going to play the role of leader from an economic perspective. Given their sheer amount of activity, they see the adoption and scaling of national digital currency as a key initiative that will help them show the world that they are able to roll out the next generation technology at scale.
That was from the China Power podcast, “Unveiling China’s Digital Currency Goals: A Conversation with Kevin Desouza.” I don’t know enough about China’s effort to say whether they’ll really unleash the true potential of blockchain, using a wide range of tokens competing along alternative protocols and distributed applications, but they are certainly leaning in with scale. I think it is indicative of China’s ability to move fast and grasp innovation.
All this worries me from a national security point of view not only because blockchain will be just as critical as AI, autonomy, additive manufacturing, quantum, and others, but because it is a major space where national security folks are blind to. It’s hard enough focusing on AI and autonomy. There’s just not the sense of urgency, or the organizational flexibility, for the US federal government to transform across all of the frontiers.
Here’s more on China’s rise in blockchain:
Alibaba Group is the largest blockchain patent holder in 2020 capturing 10x the number of patents held by IBM. The report notes that blockchain patents “are skyrocketing” this year and so far in 2020, there’s been more distributed ledger technology and cryptocurrency patents published than all of 2019.
… The Kisspatent research noted that the list of top blockchain patent holders was not really represented by distributed ledger-specific firms. “Blockchain-only companies are not filing for patents, Fortune500 companies are,” Kisspatent researcher Dr. D’vorah Graeser notes.
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