UK Government explores blockchain for recordkeeping

Within six years of coming into existence, bitcoin and the blockchain technology have shown remarkable growth. Several bitcoin-based companies and exchanges have emerged that have further spread awareness about the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Major banks and investment firms, such as Barclays, have set-up innovation labs to experiment with the blockchain technology and identify its various applications.

The blockchain technology is nothing but a decentralized public ledger that no one person or company owns or controls; users control it directly. The technology is not just limited to bitcoin but has much broader applications.

It seems the UK government is the next in line to start using blockchain technology for record-keeping purposes.

A recent blog post by Paul Downey explains that the Government Digital Service, a branch of the UK Cabinet Office, has been exploring what is meant by "register" for the past few months.

"A register is an authoritative list of information you can trust", he said." We have started thinking about what a register product might look like. It should support registrars, providing them with a standard way to establish and maintain a register and assure them that it's being kept in good order. In particular, it should be able to prove the data hasn't been tampered with." 

While replying to one of the comments, Downey said:

"Technically we are aware of how protocols such as the blockchain demonstrate how proofs could be distributed, and certificate transparency demonstrates how to use distributed copies to highlight where a canonical source of truth has been tampered with, but these are only two of a number of different models for increasing the trust in integrity of record we've started to explore."

The blog post has stirred support from the cryptocurrency community in the UK, as reported by Inside Bitcoins. A spokesman for the UK Digital Currency Association, praised the government's willingness to look into bitcoin technology for its needs, saying that there is "no better way" to deliver a public register than through the blockchain. The spokesman continued to say:

"In the developing world, the blockchain is a necessity to regularize title and ownership, in the developed, it is all about efficiency and ease of access."