How New York plans to deploy blockchain technology

NY State Assemblyman Ron Kim tells TechRepublic’s Dan Patterson how blockchain technology offers positive change for New York.

Dan Patterson: The challenge right now is stabilizing the markets, and, differentiating between potential traders, and people who might not be institutional investors, and those who are interested in block-chain development, and creating new ecosystems. How do you help with such a confusing technology? How do you help your constituents understand the benefits and pitfalls of each?

Ron Kim: I see my constituents in this particular matter— not just the people in my district— but the entire state of New York, and the committees that I serve on, corporations, with all these different committees, will have an impact on the entire state of New York.

For me, I’m trying my best to explain to the public, and to all my constituents, that just behind every new technology, there is something deeply positive that can come out of it. It’s our job, as legislators, to foster and fuel that growth.

When we allow blockchain technology to help us decentralize, and keep local entities and governments accountable, those are some long-term impacts which can really transform our democracies in a way, that should function in a healthier way.

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The best way to educate the public is to use case studies to better understand what the positive impact of this technology can be.

One of the initiatives that I’m putting forward has to do with helping local community currencies. This is something experimented in the Netherlands. There have been cases of community currencies without the crypto currencies, for many years, many decades, in places like Massachusetts, in Ithaca.

But now that we have a technology, we can seamlessly trade in our dollar to invest in a local ecosystem that allows mom-and-pop stores to trade in local currencies, keeping that dollar circulating in the local economy, helping the dollar grow even more by supporting the community, and, also being able to reward tangible points, and give people loyalty points through the form of crypto currencies to doing positive local behavior.

These are things already being executed in a broadened place like Netherlands. If we can bring this type of concept to the public now, locally, they can understand it. They can understand, “Oh, wow, we can support mom-and-pop stores, by applying the best technologies behind cryptocurrency, and create a local economy that’s robust.”

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Source: New feed 2