People in Hong Kong think that “Block Chain” is a technology for the banks. Indeed, banks have much to gain from using Block Chain technology and have cost saving as an incentive and the resources to buy and implement this new technology. In a town that worships Mammon it is understandable everything is thought of as an offering to the money God.

But Block Chain is also a technology that can be used to help the poor. In fact, Block Chain as a technology that cuts out many of the “middle men,” has the potential to help the poor even more than the rich since it is the poor who lack the resources to employ the legal and professional middle men who help the well-off navigate the labyrinthine ways of modern business and government. In Silicon Valley Itself Professors in Berkeley are experimenting with ways to use Block Chain to help the homeless people and other needs of the poor. Even the fabled Silicon Valley is not immune from modern problems such as homelessness. Professor Po Chi Wu, a former Venture Capitalist, now teaching in nearby University of California Berkeley is among those who are trying to apply Block Chain technologies for “humanitarian” rather than commercial purposes.

Block Chain is not just one technology with ‘settled” rules. This can be both a blessing and a curse. It is a curse because universities are reluctant to start courses on technologies which are still evolving and therefore it is difficult to prescribe text books which may be already out of date by the time they hit the bookshelves. It is a blessing because there is still room for growth and flexibility in applications which will allow “new” entrants to extend the Block Chain knowledge and applications. Hong Kong and Hong Kong’s universities, which do not have the scale or history to be leaders in “settled” old technologies, may have room to innovate and lead in applying new technologies such Block Chain.

The fact a technology is changing too fast does not mean one should not try and teach it or implement it now. Just as in love when there may never be a “right time” to pop the question, there may never be “right time” to wait for the technology to settle and become tested and routine before embracing it. At some point one must jump in and embrace the new fully aware that things will change and something new will come along soon. Sometimes this makes one a “pioneer”, but the same move may look like a dinosaur old technology one is stuck with. The “Octopus” card of Hong Kong is a good example. When Hong Kong adopted it in 1990s it looked like the revolutionary adoption of a new technology. Now with mobile phone payments being more useful and cheaper, the Octopus looks more like a dinosaur.

This may well be the time for Hong Kong’s universities to pioneer the teaching of Block Chain technology to its students and grapple with what seems like the intractable social problems of housing and bent old ladies picking up cardboard boxes for a living in this supposedly rich city. As Professor Ikhlaq Sidhu, founding Director and Chief Scientist of the University of California’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology put it in his blog, trying not to not teach Block Chain at the highest levels of University now “would be equivalent to ignoring Internet technology when it emerged twenty-five years ago”.

Hong Kong already has many excellent old school MBA programs. Perhaps too many of them. These “old” MBA programs teach students old style Finance, Marketing and Operations. All three of them are in the process of being disrupted beyond recognition by “Cloud Computing” and Block Chain.

What is less talked about is that the whole of “social services” will also be disrupted and hopefully improved by new technologies. Immediately after a tragedy strikes a poor family in Hong Kong such as an entire family committing suicide together by burning charcoal or an old person lies dead unnoticed fore a few days in his small flat, there is a hue and cry among the public and media about how such people could have slipped through the “monitoring” system of social workers.

The truth is the dedicated, over-worked and under paid social workers of Hong Kong can only knock on so many doors in person. Cloud Computing monitors with instructions in Cantonese and Block Chain ledgers on “field work” among various social and medical service departments can make both the engagement with the poor and monitoring of them a more effective and seamless process. To take an example in housing. If Hong Kong is serious about “vacancy tax” to solve the problem of apartments sitting empty while waiting for capital appreciation while the poor live in sub-divided slums, cloud computing and block chain can come to the rescue by monitoring electricity, water and gas meters for usage patterns to determine whether an apartment is indeed being occupied for someone is just switching on the lights for a few hours a day to give the impression of ‘occupancy”. If the Universities and Hong Kong Government take political decision at the highest levels to find ways to help the poor using Block Chain instead just helping the banks to make more money, the possibilities are endless. The poor of this rich city deserve it. End.