How blockchain is reshaping our economy and personal freedoms

Cryptocurrencies and blockchain enabled technologies are reshaping the economic and financial landscape from how markets function, how supply chains are managed, how culture is produced and consumed, and even the relationship between citizen and state.

Associate Professor Chris Berg is a Principal Research Fellow and Co-Director of the RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub, the world’s first dedicated social science research centre studying blockchain technology, based at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a Research Fellow with the University College London Centre for Blockchain Technologies, a Founding Board Member of the Worldwide Blockchain Innovation Association and the International Society for the Study of Decentralised Governance, is an Academic Fellow with the Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance, and is on the Academic Board of the Samuel Griffiths Society. Chris is a member of the Steering Committee of the Australian government’s National Blockchain Roadmap, and is co-chair of the committee’s working group into blockchain for credentials.

Chris will draw on his extensive understanding and research in the blockchain economy to demystify that this new innovation is all about and outline the potential opportunities and risks, winners, and losers and how we can best manage it.

Chris is one of Australia’s most prominent voices for free markets and individual liberty, and a leading authority on regulation, technological change, and civil liberties. Chris has been an Adjunct Fellow of the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) a policy think tank focusing on economic and political freedom and is the author of eleven books, including most recently The New Technologies of Freedom.