
UK government urged to use Bitcoin-style digital ledgers - LedgiNe
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35344843
======
cm2187
Would someone be able to explain why these ledgers are of any use for the gvt?
My understanding is that what they really achieve is to established trust in a
decentralised (p2p) system where none of the parties can be trusted.

But how is that relevant to a gvt? The gvt controls all its servers so what do
these ledgers add? I also see these ledger technologies being proposed for
financial transactions clearing systems. Again, what problem are we trying to
solve here?

The article says security if a central server is hacked. But if a client gets
hacked you are not really better off.

Plus my understanding is that these ledgers do not scale. Each transaction
takes a lot of computing power.

~~~
patio11
The emperor spent a billion dollars on his new clothes. A small child pointed
out that he's naked. He's presently trying his hardest to make naked chic.

Have you heard of the health benefits of being naked? Naked is so easy to
clean. You never need to mend naked. Naked never goes out of style. Naked is
easy to color coordinate.

It isn't entirely relevant to the emperor whether he succeeds in getting naked
accepted as the latest fashion or not, as long as he succeeds in not getting
laughed at. Being naked is ultimately survivable, being tricked is not.

~~~
drpancake
I strongly suspect that you would enjoy the writings of Izabella Kaminska over
at the FT:

    
    
      Techies look upon the financial world and find its messy structures
      hard to reconcile with the physical reality around them.
    
      Which is why we’re going to propose that the blockchain fad is mostly
      about putting finance in terms that are understandable to techies — i.e.
      as something absolute – and having them learn for themselves through
      trial and error why that’s actually a flawed assumption in finance.
    

[http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/10/30/2143506/if-you-call-
it...](http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/10/30/2143506/if-you-call-it-a-
blockchain-its-not-a-single-entry-system/)

~~~
rjknight
It's like how bank accounts are always used as an example when describing
transactional systems, despite not working that way in reality (two near-
simultaneous transactions _can_ result in you having a negative balance, and
this is a feature not a bug). Naive assumptions about how the world works can
certainly produce software that is clear, logical and wrong.

However, what I hear there is "oh sure, you might be able to write software
for all of these other things, but not this thing that I'm an expert in,
that's way too complicated". Many people have been wrong about this in other
domains, and it seems to me that essential complexity can only _delay_ the
point at which software can usefully automate things, not prevent it entirely.

~~~
laotzu
>The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is the one in which
complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it.

-John Kenneth Galbraith, Money: Whence it Came, Where it Went

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robin_reala
We’re already doing this in UK Government (well, minus some of the bits of
blockchain that we don’t want). GDS blogs about our Registers platform
regularly. More info:

[https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2015/09/01/registers-
authoritative-l...](https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2015/09/01/registers-
authoritative-lists-you-can-trust/)

[https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2015/10/13/the-characteristics-
of-a-...](https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2015/10/13/the-characteristics-of-a-
register/)

The specification of our Registers is on the OpenRegister project:
[https://openregister.github.io/specification/](https://openregister.github.io/specification/)

~~~
anon1385
Would you care to comment on why gov.uk is using 3rd party analytics scripts
run by a company based in a foreign country on the online tax assessment form
for UK citizens?

Getting rid of that massive privacy and security hole would be a much better
use of your time and resources than farting around with the blockchain.

~~~
grey-area
Ouch. That is a pretty serious security hole on a tax website, they're using
Google Analytics - google or someone who breached their security could
entirely take over the tax website and record all the data.

Wouldn't it be a lot safer to handle their own analytics with a self-hosted
solution rather than paying google for it? At the very least they could self-
host the js so that they control what is being run on their own domain.

------
pythondz
The goals here seem to be data immutability and protection against tampering
data. (like in spy movies, when someone hacks a government server to add fake
passport data, this should be impossible)

Also as elmar pointed out, they can have a robust network with no single point
of failure.

~~~
cm2187
But in a crypto-ledger system, if a computer in the UK embassy in Kenya is
infected, you will still be issuing fake passports. This is effectively moving
the problem away from a central server to all of the clients, and I am not
sure this improves security.

I would assume that cryptographic signatures are a better protection against
tempering.

~~~
CyberDildonics
It doesn't move the problem, it prevents it in certain scenarios or makes it
more difficult. The scenario you describe is already a valid method of attack.

------
elmar
There are use cases where a distributed database is a better tool, the big
advantages you can scale multiple nodes and have a very robust network with no
single point of failure and you no longer have to worry about the individual
security of each node.

The downside you have to replicate all the database in each node or at least
in several nodes of the network, you can have a sub-node structure.

If you depend on computation power algo for synchronization you can have very
expensive hardware and electrical bill.

If you use others alternatives like prove of stake you can do it with very
modest hardware.

------
tfgg
Having read the intro the report, I don't think there's anything they're
suggesting that can't simply be implemented with a spreadsheet in git repo.
But that isn't as sexy.

Government has already shown reluctant to share data, c.f. the Open Data
movement. National and local government still use Excel spreadsheets, and you
still come across the occasional scanned-in PDF. Why do people think they're
suddenly going to adopt some flashy distributed ledger tech? _Why do people
think that 's the important problem to solve?_

It's a solution in search of a problem. It doesn't even solve the actual
problems of trust and getting good quality data released. Blockchains often
seem to be an expression of technologists' distrust of government, as though
it'd all be better if other people could be replaced with code, when in fact
it would undermine democracy [1].

The idea of GDS being mandated to explore the use of a specific technology is
ridiculous. They should be using the technology that they choose to solve
problems that people actually have.

Ultimately, this sort of hyperbolic all-in report does serve to pull the
conversation in a particular direction (openness, machine-readable data),
which is good, but it simultaneously undermines it by being likely to fail.

[1] [http://tom.loosemore.com/2015/11/01/blockchain-vs-
democracy-...](http://tom.loosemore.com/2015/11/01/blockchain-vs-democracy-
aka-software-is-politics-now/)

------
anc84
Can this blockchain technology really leverage the big data prospects of the
cloud?

~~~
SuddsMcDuff
^ Not sure if serious or just creating a sentence out of buzz words.

------
jph
Why use blockchains? Blockchains for government make excellent sense for
distributed data entry, such as processing that can happen in many locations.

Imagine many administrative offices that can create many drivers' licenses, or
many city inspectors on many sites, or many doctors in many hospitals -- all
with distributed capabilities to create data that is securely signed, tamper-
resistant, immutable, transparent, accountable, and fault-tolerant.

Kudos to Sir Mark Walport and the UK.

~~~
icebraining
We already have a much simpler model for an immutable database with
distributed data entry: it's a DVCS. With GPG signatures (like git tag -s),
it's also signed, tamper-resistant and accountable.

Blockchains are a solution to a much harder problem, where consensual order is
crucial and nodes are not fully trusted.

------
m-i-l
The BBC article doesn't say much, and probably raises more questions than it
answers. However, it is worth reading the government publication it links to,
which was published today. Link is
[https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/distributed-
ledge...](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/distributed-ledger-
technology-blackett-review) , or more directly
[https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...](https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/492972/gs-16-1-distributed-
ledger-technology.pdf) . This publication does answer some of the questions in
these comments.

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zekevermillion
If you replaced "blockchain" with "encryption" this article would make sense.
Ironically, the UK government is very disinterested -- antagonistic, really --
to using encryption to protect private data.

------
SuddsMcDuff
I'm surprised there's been no mention yet of government transparency and
accountability. This is one of the widely touted advantages of using a
blockchain.

Another good example is George Galloway, who is running for mayor of London.
He has committed to running the city's budget on a blockchain if he gets
elected (he wont get elected but it's a nice idea) -
[https://www.startjoin.com/blockchain](https://www.startjoin.com/blockchain)

------
elmar
The basic advantage of the blockchain is to replace government not to upgrade
it.

~~~
elmar
Looks like people don't like the concept of a society without government :)

~~~
geofft
How do you plan on preventing the existence of governments? Do you intend to
restrict the freedom of me and my friends and business partners to form a
government for our mutual aid? And if you do, with arms, aren't _you_ a
government?

~~~
laotzu
"The government is always the most successful group of gangsters"

