RMIT economists are big on investing in teaching and research on the transformative power of the blockchain. As Sinclair Davidson told a CSIRO conference last week; “The blockchain is not just a tech upgrade nor just another general-purpose technology. It is a new institutional technology that will both complement current organisational forms and economic activity and substitute for current organisation forms and economic activity.”

The people CMM suspects it can help most are the dispossessed of the developing world. Professor Davidson mentions Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto who has argued for 30 years that people stay poor when they have no recognised title to what they own or way of recording transactions – both of which blockchains can do. Mr de Soto is now developing a blockchain system to record property rights. There is, as RMIT is demonstrating, far more to the blockchain than crypto-currency.