Jaan Tallinn, the Estonian creator of the most popular video chat, has announced his work on a blockchain project that could help solving global problems impossible to be sorted out without reaching a consensus.

Tallinn professes “effective altruism”, which is, as he puts it, “compassion guided by data and reason.” The philanthropist and entrepreneur believes that a number of problems humanity faces nowadays, including crime, corruption, deforestation and over-fishing, can be overcome if the humanity reaches a consensus without a central authority that could in any way influence it. And that is exactly what the blockchain technology provides for.

“Imagine if you could use this to solve bigger problems that require global co-ordination, ” Tallinn told The Telegraph. Taking over-fishing as an example, he went on explaining:

“No single fisherman can stand up and say, ‘That’s enough, let’s fix this.’ An individual fisherman, or a group of individuals, can quit, but that just leaves more fish for the rest of the fishermen. The only way to fix this is through co-ordination mechanisms.”

Tallinn believes that the blockchain technology is a perfect solution for creating such coordination mechanisms, as it has all the necessary features, of which the most important one is its decentralised nature. Without decentralisation, according to Jaan Tallinn, people are “all locked in an equilibrium where the players cannot change the outcome of the game.”

Jaan Tallin was an active member of the team that released a pilot version of Skype back in 2003. Two years later, the platform which is now owned by Windows was sold to eBay for $2.6 bln. The money was partly awarded to Tallinn (the exact sum was not disclosed). As of today, Tallinn is known as a researcher and philanthropist, working, inter alia, at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.



Maria Rudina