Possibilities of Blockchain, beyond Cryptocurrency
People may know blockchain from the P2P, decentralized cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. But somehow, the technology behind that is what may revolutionize the web 3.0, the way we use internet.
I’ve been learning about Blockchain and it’s related technology for a while, and what makes me amazed by it, beside the cryptocurrency trading which may create fortune to some people, is how the possibility of blockchain implementation can bring a lot of utopian use case, widely across industries, like government, finance, nursing, energy, supply-chain, smart devices even identity & persona sovereignty.
From the last 5 years, the growth of blockchain usage has shown exponential increase, the example is Ethereum, one of the biggest blockchain measured both in the market-cap and also the average block size. Ethereum itself is one of a blockchain environment which provide advance feature compared to the traditional one like Bitcoin. But mostly, the transaction increase has gone into the cryptocurrency payment / trading itself. Think if we utilize it for another important use cases.
These are some good example of how blockchain can revolutionize the internet and digitalization. I take some of the source from books like Blockchain Revolution, The Truth Machine & Bank 4.0 and bunch of papers talking about Blockchain, DLT (Distributed Ledger Tech) and dApps.
1. Money Transaction
Transferring money domestically may rarely become a problem, but for some, there are issues. Cases like inter-bank transaction may have additional fee, money disbursement may only occur during work hour, remittance (international transfer) takes an expensive fee, withdrawing money in some area can be tedious, settlement can takes a minimum of day, opaque fund transmission and others.
Using a blockchain, we can eliminate the middleman of all the stuff that cause those issues. There will be no office-hour as blockchain is running 24/7, distributively, across the globe, so no reason for offline services. It can also increase the transparency of money flowing from one wallet to another. With Blockchain-enabled tech protocol like XRP, we can do real-time remittance which the existing SWIFT protocol can take days.
Another case, by utilizing the transparency, blockchain can solve the issue of corrupt government spending the national money to improper target. Citizen can track the money end-to-end. We can even see our taxes goes into certain government project upstream to downstream.
A monetary aid for developing country can be maximized as the money will directly goes into the needy people without settling into a “Non-profit Organization”. The distribution can be monitored and adjusted in the best way.
2. Secure Digital Identity And Ownership
Ownership can be a broad topic to discuss, by utilizing blockchain, people can take advantage of digitization of ownership document while government do not need to utilize new data storage infrastructure and additional fund to secure the “leaky” data. Blockchain will decrease the potential of data leak that can harm the privacy of people as it store the data in hashed value (scrambled, unreadable unless you can decode it) which can be verified and read only by the holder of the key.
Let’s imagine the condition in Indonesia, our current condition today, we have various of document such as National ID Card, Driver License, Vehicle’s Document of Ownership, Marriage Certificate, Land Certificate and other. All of that data mostly will store the same field of identity such as National ID Number, Name, Address and DOB and other sensitive data. But those document is being handled under different National Bureau / Service. Tremendous amount of duplicity with each handling their own security responsibility.
Now, how if all the data stored in the same blockchain, where each document stored only the necessary information and linked into the citizen ID Number through Public Key (think like ID Number). User can validate their document ownership using asymmetric key algorithm and only the owner can control who can see the data. The data is also temper-proof, so manipulation of document can be troublesome. And government can go digital, with less responsibility.
So, there will be 2 issues solved: Data Duplicity through Integrity and Data Security through One-Central Truth to protect. The only thing to secure now, is only citizen’s private key (think of our main password, the password of our life).
Now, talking about private key, we may lose it, and if we lose it, we may lose our identity. To solve this, government can store this private key using multi-signature and multi-party computation. With trusted party to be involved, user relatives can also be involved. This create a hybrid solution of blockchain while also taking government as the last to rely on.
3. Democracy, Election and Government
In a democratic country, often time the democracy system is delegated by some council or representative which take mandate from the rest of the citizen. Also called as indirect democracy. This kind of democracy is prone to misbehaviour and misuse of power. We often heard the corruption, collusion and nepotism happened inside the parliament, but without knowing clearly who and how. These kind of acts can be prevented or at least suppressed by creating a good monitoring system.
For the case of national budget, as stated at point no. 1, blockchain can be utilized as the stream platform for the fund of nation. With it’s transparency, people can understand better of what the nation budget end to.
Other usage, blockchain can be utilized as a secure, trust and privacy-friendly platform for digital voting. In democratic country, voting is an important instrument to reach national consensus. From the election of Chief of Village to the president election. Blockchain can record the voting data with narrow possibility of the data being tampered. Blockchain can also validate the voter of whom they vote. As in the traditional voting mechanism, often time, we never know what our vote end up to when it enters the ballot. Blockchain enable this without exposing voter identity. All handled by using user’s private key.
In the most idealistic vision, country where it fully utilized public blockchain will not need to promote an Open API initiative anymore as the data can be consumed publicly. Data such as weather, public transportation, demographic pattern or vaccination spread can be used by people, organization or company to create a better personalization product. So there will be no monopoly against data and service can focus more into the consumer instead of racing to gather much data as possible. User win again this time.
4. Distributed Health Record
Health record is one of the important case in human’s life. With the complete health record access, medics have better knowledge when diagnosing someone’s illness. But, until this 2021, in Indonesia specifically. There are no universal system of Interoperability Electronic Medical Record (EMR). Patient medical record is silo to each hospital. While, not all patient will come to the same hospital.
Beside that, the emerging technology such as HaloDoc or any digital doctor consultancy become the important reason of why EMR should be available to all medical facility under patient control.
Some initiative and product may have been promoted, with cloud-based solution, enabling data shared across the internet. Yet some hospital also lacking the digital infrastructure to enable this technology.
Blockchain may be the good alternative that offer a low head cost of infrastructure, but yet reliable enough to provide distributed data. Health facility doesn’t need to invest on the gigantic amount of infrastructure, cloud or on-premises. Even more, Using the p2p connection, facility can connect to the ledger using mesh network where internet connection is limited.
Using the encryption algorithm, patient can control who can have the access to his medical record, keeping the data private, but distributed. Patient can access their medical record from the time they are born to the current point in their life from various check ups and operation from different medical facilities.
###
Those are 4 examples of how blockchain can revolutionize the internet and digitization. Perhaps, in the next article, I will show more use case examples of blockchain.
