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Blockchain for government: Building trust, demolishing bureaucracy

To build trust, governments strive to be as open, transparent and collaborative as possible and blockchain may be a key tool. To demolish bureaucracy, they seek to streamline citizen interaction, financial transactions and contract management. All too often, they fall short of their own ambitions on both counts.

In a recent IBV Study “Building trust in government: Exploring the potential of blockchain for government200 government leaders in 16 countries were surveyed on their experience and expectations for blockchain. The study concluded that this technology offers the opportunity to tackle the trust and bureaucracy challenges head on. Researchers found a significant percentage of trailblazer governments are launching projects that apply blockchain to transform regulatory compliance, contract management, identity management and citizen services.

Blockchain offers a new approach to enhancing transparency and collaboration between governments, business and citizens. By registering assets and recording ownership changes on a distributed shared ledger, the quest for transparency and right to privacy needn’t be at odds. Important information can be shared widely, seamlessly engendering true openness. Transactions can be verified close to real time and combined with the extensive use of privacy services make fraud and cybercrime very difficult. Smart contracts — once verified and deployed — will always execute. Reneging on a contract becomes a thing of the past. This all goes towards amplifying transparency, building trust and breaking down bureaucracy between government, business and citizens.

A common theme raised by the trailblazers is their expectation that distributed ledgers will reduce the innovation frictions cited in the recent IBV study “Fast forward: Rethinking enterprises, ecosystems and economies with blockchain”.

Let’s now take these three innovation frictions and consider how governments can address and resolve the underlying issues and blockages.

 

Governments must create, update and enforce regulations, which often cross departmental and national borders. Once agreed through consensus and deployed as smart contracts onto the blockchain, they can be automatically enforced.

ConsensusAll relevant departments (cross-border where needed) would agree regulation creation, deployment and subsequent changes.
ProvenanceThere would be a complete audit trail of regulation creation and changes, and which departments approved them.
ImmutabilityNo one could alter the regulations once changes are approved, nor tamper with the change agreement process.
FinalityRegulation disputes would be eliminated or resolved much faster
 

Governments are often slow to move, bound in bureaucracy. Blockchain can help overcome this institutional inertia by removing friction in key citizen interactions such as changing vehicle or property ownership. Let’s take this as an example:

ConsensusAll relevant organizations — within government & beyond — agree when a change of ownership is valid.
ProvenanceThere is a complete audit trail of who’s owned what, when.
ImmutabilityNo one can tamper with the ownership record once its agreed and committed to the distributed ledger
FinalityAsset ownership disputes will be virtually eliminated and much quicker to resolve when they occur.
 

Governments are acutely aware of the consequence of invisible threats such as fraud and cybersecurity. Extensive use of privacy services ensure that blockchain solutions are inherently more secure than traditional transaction processing systems.

ConsensusSince members of the business network must agree to any transaction, the network is more resilient to cybercrime and fraud.
ProvenanceIf problems occur with a network member, the complete history of transactions eases problem isolation & forensic analysis.
ImmutabilitySince privacy services are used to bind blocks of transactions together, it’s impossible to corrupt the history of truth maintained on the blockchain.
FinalityThere is one tamper proof, complete & replicated system of record improving the threat resilience of citizen, government & business transactions.

 

This short analysis shows how a distributed ledger can help governments build trust and demolish bureaucracy.

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