Pruden: Blockchain can address economic root causes of war
Alex Pruden · Blockchain in War Zones · Dec 23, 2019 · at 1:05
Former Special Forces officer Alex Pruden speaks at the a16z Summit about how his military deployments shaped his thesis on crypto and blockchain technology.
0:00 / 0:06exact quote · 6.5s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“This is a technological innovation that can help address some of the underlying economic issues that often lead to war and conflict.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Alex Pruden
Pruden: Half of 30,000 Iraqi soldiers defending Mosul were ghost soldiers
“The 30,000 soldiers that were supposed to be defending Mosul, only 15,000 of them were actually physically present. The other 15,000 were just ghost soldiers with the commanders collecting their paychecks.”
Pruden: Lack of land registry hindered Afghan economic development
“And unlike in the United States, or in Europe, or in some developed country, there was no land registry office that we could go to. There was no place where we could go to pull a deed to find out who legally owned what property. This lack of a canonical record…”
Pruden: Iraqi tanks defending Mosul lacked fuel due to black market
“Only when we got there and started talking to some of the survivors, we learned that actually none of those tanks had fuel when ISIS arrived. Because most of the fuel had been sold on the black market.”
Pruden: Centralized record systems fail when institutions are corrupt
“The problem in this case was not that there was no system of record keeping. So USA to the Iraqi army, there was a system of record to keep track of what went where. The problem was, it was just so hopelessly corrupt as to be completely untrustworthy.”
Pruden: Governments are exploring putting land records on blockchain
“In fact, various national, state, and county level governments are looking at actually putting records, land records, on the blockchain because it's far cheaper and more efficient than the alternative, old system.”
Pruden: Blockchain tracking would have exposed aid corruption in Iraq
“Applied to Iraq, this means that the sender of the military aid, which in this case was the US, would have been able to trace along the whole path that that aid took and ensure that it got to its intended recipient. And if anybody tried to siphon it off along …”