Loading...World Trade Organization (WTO) has published a report featuring the view of this respectable international organization towards blockchain and cryptocurrencies. The authors have written a comprehensive paper trying to depict blockchain and didn’t want focusing on cryptocurrencies but at the same time they failed to omit to state some important points regarding crypto coins.
The paper postulates that the potential use of blockchain goes well beyond the world of cryptocurrencies: “оriginally developed as the technology underpinning the digital currency Bitcoin, blockchain applications soon started to spread beyond cryptocurrencies.” They recall that Bitcoin was established in 2009 year and was “conceptualized by an as-of-yet unidentified individual or group of individuals under the alias Satoshi Nakamoto.”
WTO makes controversial statements that blockchain was not realized as an independent technology of cryptocurrencies because since their start blockchain and cryptocurrencies were intertwined. They also makes a conclusion that “the launch of Bitcoin in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis has caused it to be mistakenly considered as a direct consequence of the latter. The history of cryptocurrencies, however, started before the 2008 financial crisis”, so they want tracing Bitcoin’s history beyond 2009 year when it was launched.
WTO is reluctant to underline the disruptive role of cryptocurrencies but is keen to proclaim the distributed ledger technology as a milestone for to transform international trade: “distributed ledgers offer potential new benefits, including increased cybersecurity, greater transparency, real-time transactions, automatic payments through smart contracts, easy auditability of transactions due to the transparent and immutable nature of the technology, and easy inclusion of additional participants.” The paper states that blockchain adoption process needs an appropriate volume of investments.
