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The case against patents can be summarized briefly: there is no empirical evidence that they serve to increase innovation and productivity, unless evidence that they serve to increase innovation and productivity, unless productivity is identified with the number of patents awarded—which, as evidence shows, has no correlation with measured productivity. This disconnect is at the root of what is called the “patent puzzle”: in spite of the enormous increase in the number of patents and in the strength of their legal protection, the US economy has seen neither a dramatic acceleration in the rate of technological progress nor a major increase in the levels of research and development expenditure.

Both theory and evidence suggest that while patents can have a partial equilibrium effect of improving incentives to invent, the general equilibrium effect on innovation can be negative. The historical and international evidence suggests that while weak patent systems may mildly increase innovation with limited side effects, strong patent systems retard [slow] innovation with many negative side effects. More generally, the initial eruption of innovations leading to the creation of a new industry—from chemicals to cars, from radio and television to personal computers and investment banking—is seldom, if ever, born out of patent protection and is instead the fruit of a competitive environment. It is only after the initial stage of rampant growth ends that mature industries turn toward the legal protection of patents, usually because their internal growth potential diminishes and they become more concentrated. These observations, supported by a steadily increasing body of evidence, are consistent with theories of innovation emphasizing competition and first-mover advantage as the main drivers of innovation, and they directly contradict “Schumpeterian” theories postulating that government-granted monopolies are crucial to provide incentives for innovation. A properly designed patent system might serve to increase innovation at a certain time and place—and some patent systems, such as the late-nineteenth century German system allowing only process but not final product patents, have been associated with rapid innovation. Unfortunately, the political economy of government-operated patent systems indicates that such systems are susceptible to pressures that cause the ill effects of patents to grow over time. The political economy pressures tend to benefit those who own patents and are in a good position to lobby for stronger patent protection, but disadvantage current and future innovators as well as ultimate consumers. This explains why the political demand for stronger patent protection comes from old and stagnant industries and firms, not from new and innovative ones. Our preferred policy solution is to abolish patents entirely and to find other legislative instruments, less open to lobbying and rent seeking, to foster innovation when there is clear evidence that laissez-faire undersupplies it. However, if that policy change seems too large to swallow, we discuss in the conclusion a set of partial reforms that could be implemented as part of an incremental strategy of reducing the harm done by the patent system

There are actually a variety of alternative ways of financing and incentivising research, within the current dispensation, many of which are in use today in different countries and contexts.

For simplicity, these approaches can be categorised as:

Like many believers, proponents of hegemonic stability theory base their view on faith alone.41 There is precious little evidence to suggest that the United States is responsible for the pacific trends that have swept across the system. In fact, the world remained equally peaceful, relatively speaking, while the United States cut its forces throughout the 1990s, as well as while it doubled its military spending in the first decade of the new century.42 Complex statistical methods should not be needed to demonstrate that levels of U.S. military spending have been essentially unrelated to global stability.

Hegemonic stability theory’s flaws go way beyond the absence of simple correlations to support them, however. The theory’s supporters have never been able to explain adequately how precisely 5 percent of the world’s population could force peace on the other 95 percent, unless, of course, the rest of the world was simply not intent on fighting. Most states are quite free to go to war without U.S. involvement but choose not to. The United States can be counted on, especially after Iraq, to steer well clear of most civil wars and ethnic conflicts. It took years, hundreds of thousands of casualties, and the use of chemical weapons to spur even limited interest in the events in Syria, for example; surely internal violence in, say, most of Africa would be unlikely to attract serious attention of the world’s policeman, much less intervention. The continent is, nevertheless, more peaceful today than at any other time in its history, something for which U.S. hegemony cannot take credit.43 Stability exists today in many such places to which U.S. hegemony simply does not extend.

The US Army has been the world’s most dominant ground combat force for decades. But it now faces an uncertain question as to whether it can retain that dominance in the decades to come. To do so, it must take a hard look at the service’s priorities. For years, the service’s top priority has been readiness. While that remains important, it now needs to drop to the number two spot on the Army’s priority list, replaced by something else: the future fight. Specifically, developing future capabilities, technologies, and concepts should be the Army’s number one priority. Without considering such a change, the Army’s continued ability to fight well today will come at the cost of its ability to fight supremely tomorrow.

Upon assuming the duties of US Army chief of staff in August 2015, Gen. Mark Milley announced that “readiness is the number one priority, and there is no other number one.” In short, he directed that funding for the current fight (i.e., training at home station, rotations at combat training centers, and unit equipment) would take precedence over developing the future Army (his number two priority) and taking care of troops (number three). This prioritization made sense given the state of the Army and the context of the time. In Europe, the Army had withdrawn all remaining armored forces and cased the colors of its remaining Europe-based Corps command just prior to the 2014 Russian intervention in eastern Ukraine and annexation of Crimea. At the same time, ISIS emerged as a force that pillaged its way through much of war-torn Syria and a weak Iraq. All the while, North Korea, Iran, and China continued to defy the international community on things ranging from weapons development to malicious cyber activity. Prioritizing readiness made sense at the time and given that context. But as Gen. Milley prepares to depart his post, his successor as chief of staff of the Army must consider a new context, the conditions of which argue for transitioning to capability development for the future fight as the number one priority.

Unable to demonstrate that observed climate trends are due to anthropogenic climate change — or even that these events are particularly unusual or concerning — climate catastrophists will often turn to dire predictions about prospective climate phenomena. The problem with such predictions is that they are almost always generated by climate models driven by highly complex sets of assumptions about which there is significant dispute. Worse, these models are notorious for failing to accurately predict already documented changes in climate. As climatologist Patrick Michaels of the Competitive Enterprise Institute notes:

During all periods from 10 years (2006-2015) to 65 (1951-2015) years in length, the observed temperature trend lies in the lower half of the collection of climate model simulations, and for several periods it lies very close (or even below) the 2.5th percentile of all the model runs. Over shorter periods, such as the last two decades, a plethora of mechanisms have been put forth to explain the observed/modeled divergence, but none do so completely and many of the explanations are inconsistent with each other.

First, the good news: climate scientists, as a whole, are not warning us to prepare for the apocalypse. The most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—a group of hundreds of scientists working with the United Nations to analyze climate change research from around the world—names many serious risks brought on by the warming of our planet, but human extinction is not among them.1

“If I had to rate odds, I would say the chances of climate change driving us to the point of human extinction are very low, if not zero,” says Adam Schlosser, the Deputy Director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and a climate scientist who studies future climate change and its impact on human societies.

Brun et al. (2022) found that a few tall, high-SLA plant species had stronger effects on primary productivity than any measure of functional diversity. We add data on species rarity to show that ongoing biodiversity loss is unlikely to hamper ecosystem productivity, a core insight we feel the authors missed.

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The interesting question is whether any of the planetary thresholds other than CO2 could also portend existential risks. Here the answer is not clear. One boundary often mentioned as a concern for the fate of global civilization is biodiversity (Ehrlich & Ehrlich, 2012), with the proposed safety threshold being a loss of greater than 0.001% per year (Rockström et al., 2009). There is little evidence that this particular 0.001% annual loss is a threshold—and it is hard to imagine any data that would allow one to identify where the threshold was (Brook, Ellis, Perring, Mackay, & Blomqvist, 2013; Lenton & Williams, 2013). A better question is whether one can imagine any scenario by which the loss of too many species leads to the collapse of societies and environmental disasters, even though one cannot know the absolute number of extinctions that would be required to create this dystopia.

While there are data that relate local reductions in species richness to altered ecosystem function, these results do not point to substantial existential risks. The data are small-scale experiments in which plant productivity, or nutrient retention is reduced as species numbers decline locally (Vellend, 2017), or are local observations of increased variability in fisheries yield when stock diversity is lost (Schindler et al., 2010). Those are not existential risks. To make the link even more tenuous, there is little evidence that biodiversity is even declining at local scales (Vellend et al., 2013, Vellend et al., 2017). Total planetary biodiversity may be in decline, but local and regional biodiversity is often staying the same because species from elsewhere replace local losses, albeit homogenizing the world in the process. Although the majority of conservation scientists are likely to flinch at this conclusion, there is growing skepticism regarding the strength of evidence linking trends in biodiversity loss to an existential risk for humans (Maier, 2012; Vellend, 2014). Obviously if all biodiversity disappeared civilization would end—but no one is forecasting the loss of all species. It seems plausible that the loss of 90% of the world’s species could also be apocalyptic, but not one is predicting that degree of biodiversity loss either. Tragic, but plausible is the possibility of our planet suffering a loss of as many as half of its species. If global biodiversity were halved, but at the same time locally the number of species stayed relatively stable, what would be the mechanism for an end-of-civilization or even end of human prosperity scenario? Extinctions and biodiversity loss are ethical and spiritual losses, but perhaps not an existential risk.

In addition to patent and  trade secret is another way to safeguard inventions. This kind of protection arises automatically and is not restricted in time until the secret behind the technology is independently discovered or disclosed by the owner. Trade secret may be economically preferable  option over others due to “(a) the nascent-stage nature of many of these technologies; (b) the market structure; and (c) the potential business forms (for e.g., quantum cloud-computing as a service)” . These broader advantages and potentially unlimited years of protection for trade secrets provide it a certain edge over other IP protections. There are different reasons behind maintaining vital information a trade secret, it may be of the technological dominance, anthropogenic assessment or any nation protection concerns.

While the protection is automatic, companies can take legal action to ensure the secret is not disclosed, including subjecting those divulging the secrets to criminal penalties. The broader subject matter and potentially unlimited years of protection for trade secrets give it a certain edge over patent protection in the eyes of many companies.

While patents generally have a life of 20 years, quantum computing is currently in its infancy, and quantum computers may not become widely commercially available for over a decade. If inventions may not reach commercial maturity during the lifetime of the patent, trade secret protection may be preferable.

With no real timescale for the arrival of quantum computers, tech companies are keen to get out in front of the potential challenges to current cybersecurity systems, before they become reality. In an announcement on 21 February, 2024, Apple unveiled what it called, “a groundbreaking ”. The company says its “PQ3” security system is designed to protect data sent over its iMessage platform. Apple claims its system offers protection against “even highly sophisticated quantum attacks”. Apple says it’s introducing this post-quantum encryption now to protect against what is known as “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks, where cybercriminals collect masses of data with the intention of decrypting it when the technology becomes available. and has already adopted them to protect the company’s internal communication. Google says that introducing new cryptography systems is in itself risky, citing examples of protocols that were cracked by conventional computers. Protecting the global economy The responsibility to protect essential systems from bad actors using quantum computers will extend far beyond tech companies. In 2022, the World Economic Forum, in partnership with Deloitte, produced . The research states: “Developing a coherent approach for transitioning to a quantum-secure economy requires a broad, collaborative and critical approach from a diverse and global community of business and cybersecurity leaders”. It also addresses the need for a set of governance principles and values as a way of “building trust in the technology and to pre-empt possible risks before the technology is commercialized”. These governance principles include commitments to cybersecurity, privacy and accountability. Building on these principles, designed to help organizations navigate the journey towards cybersecurity in an age of quantum computing. The toolkit urges leaders to factor in quantum-cyber protocols across corporate ecosystems and ensure there is collaboration in identifying risk and adopting protections. There is little doubt that quantum computing has the potential to help us solve some of the greatest challenges we face. But without adequate controls in place, it could also undermine the safety and security of data and communications beyond anything we have seen before.

Aside from the international threat from adversarial actors, technological and infrastructure challenges exist. Most quantum computers being developed worldwide will only work at fractions of a degree above absolute zero.124 This temperature keeps atoms and molecules in a quantum state. Any disruption (for example, a temperature increase), can cause a qubit’s voltage to spike and flip from one state to another,125 requiring multi-million-dollar refrigeration, which is incompatible with conventional electronic circuits as they will instantly overheat. Maintaining quantum computers at temperatures colder than deep space is expensive and daunting, but researchers worldwide are working on innovations. In Finland, researchers from the University of Helsinki have been developing cryostats for quantum computers since 1979.126 When IBM announced its system with 127 qubits, Bluefors, a Finnish start-up, stated that “we can handle that many in one enclosure using the most powerful system we have today.”127 While the compositional structure of quantum machines has traditionally used cryogenic cooling for large-scale quantum computers, DARPA has looked at alternative compositions of quantum machines. Quantum systems traditionally use magnetic traps to isolate ions, and then organize the ions into a chain of qubits. But with DARPA’s recent development, scientists have discovered a configuration optimized for a more efficient process using rare-earth materials.128 In a process called the Penning trap, scientists used a “combination of a magnetic field and an electric field to configure two-dimensional ion crystals that perform quantum operations.”129 Ibid. Rare-earth metals (such as neodymium or samarium cobalt) form powerful and permanent magnets, which the trap uses instead of cryo-cooled superconducting magnets. The research team built an ion chain using this method for the length of 10 qubits, which has promising results for adding more quantum systems to the chain and more accurate computations.130 Ibid. Rare-earth metals mining, development, and processing are essential components of thousands of consumer products to military weapons. China currently leads global trade and the acquisition of exclusive mining licenses worldwide. China has about 35 percent of the world’s reserves of rare-earth metals and refines about 70 percent of rare-earth elements for the rest.131 China has built factories close to the mines so that the raw material can quickly go into production. This increases efficiency and lowers production costs, making China an advantaged supply-chain provider and making it difficult for other countries to compete with it. For example, the country produced 120,000 metric tons (70 percent) of total rare earths in 2018, according to the United States Geological Survey. The U.S. pales in comparison, mining 15,000 metric tons of rare earths in 2018.132

What the heck is quantum computing? It's a way of computing that is immeasurably faster than what existing computers do. Traditional computers work by adding up 1s and 0s. Quantum computers are, very roughly speaking, able to make finer distinctions between the two, which allows tremendously complex calculations to be done in a fraction of the time it would take using a traditional computer.

There's still a lot of work left to do before Google, or anyone else, can create a reliable quantum computer that works outside of a narrow laboratory setting, but as this recent article by a computer scientist argues, Google's breakthrough is an important milestone on the way there.

As a buzzword, quantum computing probably ranks only below AI in terms of hype. Large tech companies such as Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft now have substantial research and development efforts in quantum computing. A host of startups have sprung up as well, some boasting staggering valuations. IonQ, for example, was valued at $2 billion when through a special-purpose acquisition company. Much of this commercial activity has happened with baffling speed over the past three years.  

I am as pro-quantum-computing as one can be: I’ve published more than 100 technical papers on the subject, and many of my PhD students and postdoctoral fellows are now well-known quantum computing practitioners all over the world. But I’m disturbed by some of the quantum computing hype I see these days, particularly when it comes to claims about how it will be commercialized.

Regulatory uncertainty is another aspect influencing blockchain innovation. Governments and regulatory agencies throughout the world have debated how to categorize and govern cryptocurrency and blockchain initiatives. This lack of clear legislative guidelines has generated confusion for businesses and investors, potentially impeding blockchain technology development and adoption.

Initial coin offers (ICOs), which allowed blockchain projects to raise cash by issuing tokens, were scrutinized by regulators in a number of nations. Some countries outright prohibited ICOs, while others imposed stringent rules. Because of the regulatory context, blockchain projects have had to traverse a complex landscape, limiting their capacity to develop and grow.

The battle is on between the dollar and yuan as the world’s reserve currency. Or is there a battle at all? The dollar will remain the world’s top reserve currency—not the yuan any time at all—and for four good reasons to be spelled out in a while. A CNBC report early this year echoed a general sentiment that the greenback is ready for a fall as the top reserve currency by 2015. Meaning, countries will stop using our money to exchange goods, or conversely, we need to change our dollar to another currency to export or import goods. The country’s trillion-dollar debt, the dollar’s diminishing share in global money supply, and the Feds’ quantitative easing program—print more money to stimulate the economy—have doomsters worrying about the dollar’s credibility in the face of the Chinese yuan’s growing influence. But just last week, Reuters reported a rebuttal: the dollar is soaring as consumer spending hits a six-year high and the Feds plans to ease out its stimulus plan. The dollar even hit a three-year high of 84.371 in the US Dollar Index, which pits the dollar against six other major currencies. Notably, the dollar rose because the euro fell during the period, the report said. When Americans spend the US economy gets stronger, as shown in this article why buying stuff is good for the country and stashing cash under your bed is bad. It looks like the dollar has got back to the doubting Thomases whether it still has the power to remain the world’s top reserve currency. What’s going on? Was the dollar even in danger at some point of losing its prominence? Money talk is not enough To be clear, and to the credit of the CNBC report, the dollar is still the major reserve currency. It holds 62% of the world’s aggregated reserve currency. In short, most of the central banks in other countries hold a lot of dollars for the capital market. The yuan is not even among the next top four reserve currencies: the euro, yen, pound sterling, and Swiss franc. The fear of losing the dollar seems to stem from looking at the issue from a purely economic standpoint: the recent recession, diminishing purchasing power of more Americans versus the increasing buying power of more Chinese, the manufacturing migration to China… all these talks about the inflow and outflow of cash make the currency current look like moving away from the US. Although these concerns are rational, but there are non-economic factors to consider and they buttress the dollar. Government transparency How many people truly understand the dynamics behind the yuan? Maybe as many as the 35 members of China’s State Council. The lack of transparency will be the main drawback against the yuan. Stability is the biggest factor why countries gravitate to the dollar, which has not been devalued ever. The yuan, on the other hand, is tightly controlled by China, even as Western countries led by the US call for more liberalization of the yuan. As late as last April, China was insisting on market interventions, sprucing up the yuan to avoid a disruption as the world’s second largest economy shifts from export dependence to domestic consumption. In short, the yuan is yet to grow up, an infant that is vulnerable without the nanny government. Compare that to the dollar, which is a full-grown adult that can confidently walk in the rough streets of open markets. Expecting China to loosen its grip on the yuan is like hoping for its Politburo to hold democratic elections soon. Politics dollar vs yuan The UN Population Division and Goldman Sachs predicted in 2011 that Chinese middle class will be four times larger than the American middle class population by 2030. Sure, but it is not because Americans are getting poorer; the Chinese are just getting richer. And middle class people seem to think along the same line. They want assurance from their leaders. The political silver lining (for the US) in the rise of China’s middle class is that as they accumulate more power, they will challenge their Politburo, the main authority in China. The uncertainty of this situation will likely pressure many rich middle class Chinese to invest in a more transparent environment like the US, not unlike the substantial migration of investments that happened from Hong Kong to Canada before the colony was handed to the mainland in 1997. Yet another simmering issue for China is that most of its middle class are concentrated on the few, rich cities. How much stress these cities can take—we’ve seen the severity of Beijing’s air pollution—we can only imagine. Compare that to the American middle class who are fairly spread out across the country, the opportunity to create dynamic pools of economic activities in more places is one of the country’s unrecognized but true economic strengths. Money-wise, the rising middle class in China will spill over to the US economy. More Chinese are likely to spend in the world’s number one biggest economy (makes sense) and more US companies will sell more in world’s second biggest economy, China. These political, demographics and economic factors only add, not subtract, to the strength of the US economy. Friendly pressure The yuan is already being traded directly between China and two other countries: Australia and Japan. That means, both countries do not need US dollars to trade with China. Does it mean the yuan is gradually encroaching into the dollar reserves of other countries? Yes and no. The encroaching only goes as far as the bilateral trade between China and that other country. In world trade, the US will exert friendly pressure to maintain the dollar as the exchange currency, and the rest of the world other than perhaps North Korea, Iran, and China will not likely mind. A Bloomberg report last February seemed ominous: China’s total trade in goods of $3.87 trillion barely surpassed the US $3.82 trillion. It is a first when taken at face value. But the significance is easily lost when services trade is cost in; the US total trade jumps to $4.93 trillion with a surplus of $195.3 billion in that sector. Manufacturing is China’s main strength, but world trade also involves a big chunk of financial, science, intellectual property, and information technology trade among others. For the yuan to replace the dollar in world trade, China has to go past making cheap products, it seems. Yes, China is embarking in infrastructure development, exporting its construction and engineering to mostly developing countries. But that’s a long road to take and one that will face stiff competition from the US apart from the other reasons we mentioned above. History is on dollar’s side The world’s reserve currency had always gravitated to the country or empire that dominated its neighbors. The ancient Greece’ silver drachma, the Roman-issued coins, the Byzantine’s gold solidus, and the Arabian dinar were some of the dominant currencies during their respective ancient reigns. In modern history, the Spanish silver coin and the British Empire’s pounds had exerted their influence across the globe. There is one underlying common thread among these past reserve currencies: they are distributed mainly across their empires, an unstable grouping of colonies and conquered markets. This means that their reserve currency was dependent on their ability to maintain their empires; once their empire lost power, so did their currency. That exactly what happened to these empires, as when Britain lost most of its colonies after the Second World War, just when the dollar took over. As for the dollar, the landscape cannot be farther from the historical trend. The US dollar is built on the strength of a single, solid market of Americans who buy and sell stuff. That’s a huge starting point; add to that the collective historical, cultural, and political ties of the Western countries to the US. Perhaps it is a historical first that a universal currency is being used by the largest pool of consumers who belong to a country, and more importantly, who will defend this country from outside threats. The US dollar sits on a solid bedrock of its over 310 M population, while the yuan is spread across 1.3 B Chinese who will start demanding more rights from their government as they get richer. Will the dollar dissipate from being a world reserve currency as the sterling pound soon? Only as probable as California declaring war on Nevada. CONCLUSION dollar vs yuan 3 Make no mistake the yuan is destined to be a major world reserve currency, if it is not yet. The farthest it can do to the dollar is eat up a chunk of the world’s dollar reserves through bilateral negotiations. Other than that, the yuan, at best, will elbow out the other major currencies as a world reserve currency, but not the dollar.

3 - Data Manipulation: As increasing numbers of governments, militaries, and companies transition to defensive cyber blockchains to protect vital data, secure communication, and other information; it could all be eventually compromised by quantum computing. Data protection through blockchain technology would be established through public key cryptography and the user storing their private key. However, with a weaponized cyber blockchain in conjunction with a quantum computing algorithms, one could infiltrate such cryptographic systems by reverse engineering a private key. (The technology for quantum computing is still many years away from reaching executable performance, but it should be noticed that China is investing significantly in the technology). While it would require the penetration of 51 percent of distributed ledger operating systems to be a successful attack, this could occur in the near-future if adversarial intelligence agencies focused on this. If the weaponization of blockchain manipulation occurs, it means that electronic election systems—reliant on blockchain—in the West could be eventually compromised, allowing foreign adversaries to “pick-and-choose” winners.

Matthew Kroenig 18, Associate Professor of Government and Foreign Service at Georgetown University and Deputy Director for Strategy in the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council, and Bharath Gopalaswamy, Director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council, holds a PhD in mechanical engineering with a specialization in numerical acoustics from Trinity College, Dublin, Nov 2018, “Will disruptive technology cause nuclear war?” [MSDI-JE-wk1]

Moreover, China may have the lead over the United States in emerging technologies that could be decisive for the future of military acquisitions and warfare, including 3D printing, hypersonic missiles, quantum computing, 5G wireless connectivity, and artificial intelligence (AI). And Russian President Vladimir Putin is building new unmanned vehicles while ominously declaring, “Whoever leads in AI will rule the world.”

Resource shortages, including computing power, storage, and bandwidth, is a significant challenge in a tactical network. Nevertheless, blockchain structure needs redundant resources. To store every single state which produces strong int egrity, a blockchain takes up several times the storage space of a typical storage format. In a decentralized consensus, nodes need to confirm the majority of the other nodes, and this can require, for example, in PBFT, O(n 2 ) communications. Also, a previous work [97] pointed out that it is one of the issues for a blockchain-based adaptive resilient cyberdefense system.

Several studies provide blockchain performance evaluation data. Comparative testing on the performance of a blockchain and a database was systemically performed by Chen et al. [98]. Their study compared the performance of a private blockchain using Ethereum with 6 nodes and MySQL, which is a relational database. A part of the analysis is shown in Table 5. Even though the maximum data size in a transaction can be undoubtedly advanced, performance differences in throughput and execution time are substantial. The private blockchain using Ethereum is more than 1,000 times slower than MySQL.

Major challenges of adopting blockchain technology to overcome are slow governance approval speed and long integration processes between legacy and new systems. One of the specific answers is “NATO needs to prevent establishing another "Concept", "Procedural Approach" or "Technological Possibility" which looks good on paper, but, as proven in the current RUS/UKR situation "far off real world" requirements to warfighting.” This shows that adopting blockchain technology efforts can be challenged by the organizational inertia and the mind-set based on continuing the current trajectory. As Tsedal Neeley and Paul Leonardi stated in their “Developing a Digital Mindset” article in Harvard Business Review, “Like any other change initiative, digital transformation often encounters resistance, and early missteps are inevitable. [21, p.51].”

Lack of digitally minded leaders and lack of skilled people are the top two responses regarding the obstacles of the greater adoption of blockchain technology. It is, however, interesting to see that only 25% of the respondents think this is not a minimum military requirement. The other interesting observation is less than 19% thinks the digital toolsets are inadequate.