Last month the U.S. State Department launched the " American Innovation Roadshow " with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Senior members of U.S. Secretary of State’s John Kerry’s economic team led business delegations from financial investors, U.S. multinational and early stage companies. In two stunning speeches, the State Department began advocating the adoption blockchain technology.
Ambassador David H. Thorne , senior adviser to the secretary of state, was among those attending the roadshow. The ambassador leads a departmentwide effort to “position economic and commercial issues more prominently within the U.S. foreign policy landscape” and to “elevate the importance of entrepreneurship, technology and innovation in the State Department’s promotion of global prosperity.”
Thorne gave speeches at both the March 3 @America Innovation at Innovation and Entrepreneurship Presentations at Pacific Place in Jakarta, Indonesia and the March 7 Vietnam Ministry of Science and Technology Innovation Conference in Hanoi.
Speeches given by the ambassador encouraged these countries to adopt blockchain and distributed ledger technologies.
Both the Vietnam and Indonesia (prepared) remarks included the following similar, if not identical, recommendations: “…[W]e would like to encourage the development of new financial technology or ‘FinTech’ innovations – blockchain and distributed ledgers, mobile banking, etc – which will provide a backbone to the e-commerce activity … These kinds of tools naturally encourage fiscal and business transparency, not just for start-ups but for everyone, which is a key for reducing corruption and improving efficiency.” Bitcoin Blockchain Advances
Last year the White House named Dr. Ed Felten deputy U.S. chief technology officer. Felten was previously the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) at Princeton University, and is a well regarded Bitcoin researcher.
Felten previously stated in CITP’s “Freedom to Tinker” blog that Bitcoin is “a new kind of thing: a currency whose rules are determined by open-source governance… […]
