#9: Rhodri Davies — How Blockchain Will Impact Charity

3 min readAug 10, 2017

In podcast episode #9 of Creating a Humanist Blockchain Future (Youtube, Soundcloud, iTunes), we focus on Blockchain for Social Good by exploring how blockchain impacts charity with Rhodri Davies. Rhodri is the program director of Giving Thought, a department at the Charities Aid Foundation that focuses on future-facing policy work within philanthropy. He also has this awesome podcast on the #FutureOfCharity, called Giving Thought. My favorite quotes:

- “All of the big projects in this space have transparency as a key feature.”
- “Using private means to affect public good is a pretty fundamental concept.”
- “In a DAO future, people will have an elevated status as oracles for outcomes.”
- “Charities will probably be a lot smaller in the future and their role will shift to curation, collaboration, and convening.”

Show notes below:

Tech for Good is an Intellectually Fascinating Space (1:00)

“Private means to affect public good is pretty fundamental.”
“Value for others is more complicated than value for self.”
FutureOfX. FutureDoingGood, Museum of the Future, #FutureOfWork
People who work in FutureOfX general have a 3x intersection cross-applied to their field. [AI + AR/VR + Blockchain] x [Speciality].
Difficulty with nonprofits is that half of them probably don’t even have websites ;).
The rate of change is high. 1 year ago, Rhodri was still a “crazy”, now he’s speaking at 5 conferences in the next month.
Words matter. Instead of using the word “acceleration”, use “jerk”.

For Charities: Short-Term Value Propositions and Long-Term Trends (12:00)

Short-term Value Proposition—Cross border payments and reducing costs through disintermediation.
Long-Term Trends—Automate giving though AI and decentralize charity through DAOs.
“All of the big projects in this space have transparency as a key feature.”

Charity-Based DAOs (17:00)

“There are many products and services that exist around companies, but few that exist around DAOs.”
Machine, Platform, Crowd (which I feel like I reference every interview :).
For delivery of services, and even things like disaster response, DAOs have a role.

Unbundling of the Charity (22:00)

Coordination. 38 Degrees and Change.org.
“People will have an elevated status as oracles for outcomes or for expertise.”
“Charities will probably be a lot smaller in the future and their role will shift to curation, collaboration, or convening.”
Humans work on coordination questions first, then AI DAOs do them later as we build systems for them.

Inequality from Tech (25:00)

Concern 1—Concentration of power with the creators of AI. What happens to those outside the Job Loop?
Concern 2—Machines as black boxes. M2M transactions that we can’t track quickly enough (see the “Second Economy”) and decisions we can’t understand (see Is Artificial Intelligence Permanently Inscrutable?).
Solutions—Platform cooperativism, tax on robots, UBI.
Convergence of Sci-Fi and Tech, i.e. BoostVC.
Recent talk from EthLondon on Charity DAOs.

Thanks to Keith Klundt, John Desmond, Colin Wielga, Harry Lindmark, John Lindmark, Veronica Stamats, Jacob Zax, Katie Powell, Jonathan Isaac, Ryan X Charles, Chris Edmonds, Ramsay Devereux, Ned Mills, Kenji Williams, David Long, Scott Levi, Peter Rodgers, Kenzie Jacobs, Nathan Schneider, Jon Frechin and Kash Dhanda for supporting me on Patreon!

About Me: My name is Rhys Lindmark and I’m a social entrepreneur. I’m creating a humanist blockchain future by writing, speaking, and advising at the intersection of Effective Altruism, UBI, the Attention Economy, and Blockchain. I lead the Colorado chapters of Effective Altruism and the Blockchain for Social Impact Coalition. I’m an alumnus of Techstars Boulder 2015. Please reach out if you’d like to connect or have feedback! I’m curious about what you’re working on. You can support me on Patreon, follow me on Twitter, or connect on LinkedIn.

Disclaimer: I own less than $100 of any given cryptocurrency, so my monetary incentive is not directly aligned with Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.