Blockchain Revolution

Streaming Open and Trusted Data
Perianne Boring, founder and president of the Chamber of Digital Commerce,
champions the idea that distributed ledgers open up government for the better. To her,
“Blockchain enables radical transparency because it provides everyone with provable
facts. Anyone can view any transaction that has ever happened on the blockchain.”
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Governments can easily provide data that others can use for public or private
good. This differs from so-called Freedom of Information legislation where citizens
must request access to important government information. Rather this involves the
release of assets—actual data. Governments could release thousands of categories of
data in raw format, stripped of personal identifiers: traffic patterns, health monitoring,
environmental changes, government property, energy usage, government budget and
expenditures, expense accounts. Citizens, companies, NGOs, academics, and others
could analyze these data, put them into applications, map them, and otherwise use
them for, say, understanding consumer demographic trends, researching patterns in
human health, or knowing whether the bus is going to be on time.
As of August 2015, the U.S. government has already published 165,000 data sets
and tools on its Open Government Web site.
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The U.S. government’s philosophy that
government-held data is public data has made it a pioneer in transparency. Other
governments are following suit. As of August 2015, the U.K. government has released
22,000 data sets.
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Releasing data through peer-to-peer networks and the blockchain will introduce
even greater levels of efficiency, uniformity, utility, and trust. Making data public is
an incentive for ensuring data accuracy. People can view and flag data when they find
an error or can prove that data have been altered or corrupted.
If you register a complete data set in a blockchain network, then the network can
log additions and changes to the data set and can block efforts to tamper with the data.
No need for a central administrator. Governments could release more programmatic
data to help the public and analysts understand these programs and their impact.