May 25, 2018
From the article:
Blockchain technology has generated enormous buzz in the international development community recently, being touted as an elixir to the thorny issues that economic theorists and World Bank technocrats have trudged away at for decades.
Whether it’s solving climate change, curing poverty or bringing financial inclusion and digital identities to billions - no problem is so great that it can’t be tamed by the blockchain, the narrative goes.
But Michael Pisa, a fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C., argues that while blockchain offers the development community an important and powerful new tool, a never-ending echo chamber of hype and unrealistic expectations aren’t going to help anybody.
In a forthcoming essay for CGD, Pisa calls on the blockchain for social impact community to “recalibrate” its expectations of what the technology can and can’t do, to direct focus toward the use cases that offer the most true potential and to deploy greater efforts toward overcoming the substantial barriers to adoption that still exist even in the low-hanging fruit areas.