By David Jenkin

“This presentation is very broad, my head is hurting,” Spratt began; “It’s seven presentations rolled into one in forty-five or fifty minutes.” He also warned his audience that he’d be swearing a bit and apologised in advance.

He began by highlighting the fact that Africa’s progress is being essentially bottlenecked by a shortfall in spending on infrastructure, which urgently needs to be resolved in the years to come. “Without it, we’re not going to be able to unlock the economic potential,” he said. He cited Burkina Faso as an example of the problem’s severity, where in 2014 it took 25% of the average citizen’s income just to charge the battery on their phones. However, average GDP per capita has been increasing sharply since the 1980’s, illustrating that plenty of growth opportunities exist.

He emphasised the prescience of a quote by US entrepreneur and software developer, Marc Andreesen, who said: “Software is eating the world.” He framed this in the context of disruption in business, as the world has witnessed with the Internet’s impact on a range of industries. The financial industry was one set to be disrupted soon, he said, and this was necessary. He used the term “brute force balance sheet” to describe larger companies that have a lot of money in the bank dominating their industries, and said this would start changing owing to the fact that ‘software is eating the world’ – essentially creating a level playing field.

It’s a major global concern, he said, that the fourth estate, the realm of journalism, is dying and that could lead to serious cultural problems unless a proper business model could be established. He expressed regret about not having more time to speak on that topic.

Augmented reality is worth discussing, he said, because it likely means some profound changes for Africa by delivering information to people. He pointed out a big problem on the continent for farmers in that they are price takers at every point through the distribution with no pricing power, and traders were forcing them to live hand-to-mouth. “Now what happens if African rural farmers were able to get the current market price three or four hundred kilometres away and then could use that as a negotiating tool? This is increasing information symmetry which is a big thing in macro-economics.”

He explained that one of the biggest problems facing Africa and frontier markets generally is that the West has a long head-start on education and industrialisation. “So if we follow the same rules as them we will never catch them. But what happens if we change the rules of the game and compress that learning curve? And we can accelerate it through technology. And this is what the Internet does – it democratises information. So as we get better at distributing that information we will make the world more equal.”

Virtual reality could mean improved access to educational experiences and it could even revolutionise healthcare with a combination of robotics, enabling the best doctors in the world to perform surgery remotely.

He turned his attention to Bitcoin, which he said is receiving a lot of love at the moment because, firstly, it’s working. “But also because there’s this thing called quantitative easing in the macro-economy where the value of money and the ability to stimulate the economy through money, is dead. So there’s huge concern that global currencies are going to go through a deflationary environment.” Bitcoin, on the other hand, is a currency with a fixed stock and can’t just be printed, he said, and so the thinking is that it cannot be manipulated and its value will be as good as the trust in the system, which is what money should be but isn’t. Exorbitant interchange fees can also, therefore, be squashed to fractions of a percent.

“It’s an immutable record of accounts, essentially a database, that’s all it is. It’s a crypto-currency that sits on a technology that is essentially a database which is open-sourced, and peer-to-peer, so it’s decentralised. So you have a ton of people making sure that record of account doesn’t change and isn’t broken. So instead of a central bank having complete dominion over that information and that record, it is now set free.”

He described the future of digital currency as “the plumbing of the internet for currency”, the internet’s open currency standard, the way in which all systems will communicate on a financial basis on the web. “That’s a good thing for anyone but the shareholders of big investment banks. It’s really good for everybody because it’s going to carve out a huge amount of costs.”

After his concluding remark, the room erupted with applause. He welcomed attendees to discuss points further over a beer.

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