Tasmania has a chance to lead the nation in adopting emerging technology to reduce red tape, streamline transactions, and make giant leaps in digital connections.
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On Friday, international banking and digital currency leader Loretta Joseph spoke to 29 graduates of the Tasmanian Leaders Program at Entally House, outlining the state’s major opportunities for advancement.
The Fintech Australia Female Leader of 2016, Ms Joseph championed the importance of new technology Blockchain.
Often described as a “digital ledger”, Blockchain publicly records all transactions – not just financially, but in agriculture, retail and more.
Experts use the example of a shared document to explain Blockchain: traditionally a document might be emailed to a coworker, who then edits and returns it.
The downside to this approach is that the creator is locked out of the document and has a significant waiting time to see the results.
Blockchain, originally created to support the digital currency Bitcoin, enables instant and transparent transactions between users, taking away the wait time and single-user control.
“It’s a decentralised database – inherently that’s all it is,” Ms Joseph said.
“I am an advocate of public blockchains because I think if history has taught us anything … it has to be open source.”
Ms Joseph said Tasmania’s size and relative simplicity in bureaucracy means it is ideally situated to adopt Blockchain technology to exchange information and currency across all sectors – government, health, education, agriculture and more.
“If you’re nimble, this works, if you’re not nimble – you’re going to get stuck behind,” she said.
The greatest benefit to Blockchain, Ms Joseph said, is that it’s not a database stored in one location – it’s shared so that no one can take it offline or corrupt it.
“If somebody can shut it down, then it’s not a Blockchain, it’s only a database,” Ms Joseph said.
“The sheer decentralised state and open-source of Blockchain makes it incredibly secure and immutable.”
Ms Joseph said a Tasmanian farmer, for instance, can use Blockchain to tag and record their produce on the farm, and trace it across the world to verify that it is a genuine Tasmanian product.
The downside is the need to unify different Blockchain systems and providers to standardise the technology, and allow all users to exchange information.
Australia is the world leader on an international blockchain standards committee, working to support and develop operational communication between Blockchains – and Ms Joseph believes Tasmania could be the first state to lead Australia into a secure, fast future.
“Tasmania is big enough, but also small enough, to move into this new paradigm of where the world’s going – to do it quicker than some of the larger states that are a little more weighed down in processes and procedures,” Ms Joseph said.
