Some Nevada Governments Are Using Blockchain For Public Records (apnews.com) 95
Some northern Nevada counties are using blockchain, the online ledger best known for helping secure virtual currencies such as bitcoin, to store digital versions of government records like birth and marriage certificates. From a report: The Reno Gazette-Journal reports that as of December in Washoe County, about 950 couples had received secure digital marriage certificates to home computers and smartphones since the program debuted in April 2018. The newspaper found that Elko County is trying similar technology for certified digital birth certificates. Phil Dhingra at San Francisco-based Titan Seal said the Washoe County digital marriage certificate program uses the Ethereum blockchain because it has computing power that makes it hard to hack. He said he believes the number of digital certificates per year in the United States could at least match the billions of paper records that get a certificate or embossed seal of some kind.
Really? (Score:1, Interesting)
How can a government put "Official" records on a free service that could vanish or fail at any time???
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Energy (Score:3)
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Does it also use 1.21 jigawatts of power to pull up the record and send it to you?
Appending information to a blockchain can be energy intensive. Reading it is not.
Even appending is not inherently energy intensive. If there is only one authorized writer, then no "proof of work" is needed.
Re: Energy (Score:1)
When only one authorized writer exists, is blockchain the best solution?
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The best solution would be a database where you use authentication to control access
You are assuming that authorization equals trust, and that all future authorized users will also be trusted, by everyone.
"Trust" means confidence in competence and diligence as well as trust in honesty.
If there is a lack of trust, then you need a database plus an audit trail, and automatic external backups. That is what a blockchain provides.
Re: Energy (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Energy (Score:4, Informative)
The audit trail is provided by making the list public. You can make any list public and then anyone who has a copy can check whether you changed something.
Hash trees/lists make integrity checking quicker, and revision a bit harder. If I want to change an earlier entry in a regular list I just do it. If I want to change an earlier entry in a hash list I have to recalculate and update the hashes from that point forward.
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If there's only one authorized writer then you have a bog standard hash list. The "novelty" of blockchain is that you can put it on the Internet and let any idiot write to it.
Even the hashes just make things a bit more convenient. If you decide you can use a mirrored copy for verification instead you have, um, a web page.
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If there's only one authorized writer then you have a bog standard hash list.
You also want automatic distributed backups and integrity checks. Blockchain = hash list + distribution + integrity checks. If it makes you feel better, maybe we could call it something else.
The "novelty" of blockchain is that you can put it on the Internet and let any idiot write to it.
No. There is no requirement that a blockchain be publicly writable.
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The novelty of a blockchain is that you can put it on the Internet. You can do that because it has some sort of procedure to decide who gets to write to it.
Integrity checking, that's not already part of a hash tree, is accomplished by having many copies, in different hands. There's nothing magic about blockchain integrity. If the Nevada government has a private one and decides to delete someone's birth certificate they can go ahead and do that.
Distribution? If you mean that blockchain requires being distrib
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End of this year Ethereum switches to 'Proof of Stake' consensus which reduces the power consumption by 99% points. A protocol update next week starts the transition.
Worst idea ever (Score:5, Informative)
When you are issuing a birth certificate, you already have an entity that must be trusted to issue birth certificates (the state, and doctors). There is thus no benefit for putting that info in a blockchain, you might as well use a standard database.
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No reason to use a blockchain here. A blockchain is great because it is a public database without the need of a trusted entity.
If you consider the government to be, and always remain, a "trusted entity", then you are correct. If you think that corruption is possible, and public records may be destroyed or altered someday, then a blockchain makes that more difficult.
The tradeoff is, it is extremely inefficient.
Blockchains are not inherently inefficient. Cryptocurrencies are designed to be inefficient to throttle the generation of new coins. But there is no reason for a county clerk to use the same algorithm.
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it much more closely resembles git than a cryptocurrency and talking about it like it's based on the latter instead of the former is just talking in buzzwords.
Blockchains are not "based" on cryptocurrencies. It is the other way around. Cryptocurrencies are based on blockchains, but they are not the only applications, and non-CC blockchains can have very different characteristics. The one thing they have in common is that "trust" is distributed.
Comparing blockchains to git is a useful analogy, but there are significant differences. Git is designed to distribute content rather than "trust", commits can be spoofed, and there is no concept of resolving conflictin
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Blockchains are like git except you put the password on the Internet and let people race to make commits. Then you take the longest continuous chain of commits and call that the correct one.
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Blockchains are not inherently inefficient
Blockchain will always be several orders of magnitude slower than mysql.
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So let's say that public records do get altered. Then you still have the physical birth certificate.
When there is a difference between public records and physical documents, the physical document may be suspected as a forgery.
The reason it has to get signed by the attending physician and all the other hoops to jump through is precisely so that the physical certificate is self-authenticating.
Signatures can be forged. How else did Obama become president?
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What does blockchain provide in this case that standard digital signatures do not?
Distributed trust. If you trust one entity, and know you will trust that entity's successor, and their successor, etc., then you don't need a blockchain.
With a blockchain, you don't have to trust a single entity, you just need to trust that they will not collude to cheat you. For instance, I don't trust the US government, the Russian government, nor the Chinese government. But they trust each other even less than I trust them. So if all three verify a hash, it is almost certainly valid.
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And how does that apply to a birth certificate?
If the county recorder used a blockchain, it would not help you verify that the original birth certificate was valid. But it would verify that the birth certificate retrieved 40 years later is the same as the original.
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That's correct, but in this case the blockchain is used by a single entity. How would they use it to increase their trust in themselves? Organisations already have procedures, checks and balances to address this problem. I suppose they could set up 50 blockchain servers with separate owners inside the government but it really seems such a system would have to be integrated into those existing audit structures.
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"then a blockchain makes that more difficult."
This is technically true, but trivially so. Computing hashes is not difficult. The resistance to revisions comes because you make the list public. Everyone can see when you make a change.
"Blockchains are not inherently inefficient."
Hash lists aren't inefficient, but if you're going to let anyone write to them (a la a "blockchain") then you have to design it so winning the right to write is difficult.
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Same deal with how wall street was looking at blockchain. You certainly don't need it if you have a trusted relationship, and you probably don't need to prevent double-spending attacks when you have billions in seizable assets and no anonymity.
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Same deal with how wall street was looking at blockchain. You certainly don't need it if you have a trusted relationship
Finalizing a stock transaction can take several days, and involve a third party clearing house. This is because Wall Street organizations don't trust each other.
Blockchains could make this process far faster and more efficient.
If you think Wall Street institutions should trust each other, because, hey, they are big and reputable, then you may want to read up on Bernie Madoff, Lehman Brothers, and LTCM.
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Blockchain verifications can take over a week and be outright rejected because no one wants to spend the CPU cycles to do it.
This is true for cryptocurrencies, but not true for blockchains in general. CCs are based on proof-of-work and anyone can mine. Bitcoin has over 7000 active nodes, and Ethereum has over 25000.
For financial transactions, there would be a limited number of authorized writers, and no proof-of-work would be needed. Transactions could be done in minutes or even seconds, and at little cost.
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Committing to a stock transaction takes milliseconds using third party exchanges. Otherwise, everyone would back out of transactions since prices change frequently over the three days you think it takes to finalize. There's no need to have blockchain do it because authoritative third party exchanges do it.
And I didn't say that Wall Street institutions should trust each other. I said double spending the specific reason Bitcoin uses blockchain, probably isn't an issue. Because the amount of time it would
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Committing to a stock transaction takes milliseconds using third party exchanges.
Committing may take a millisecond. Clearing the transaction can take far longer. Most small transactions are cleared internally within a single brokerage. They just match up buys and sells from their own client base, or make-market from their own account. But if there is a large transaction or an imbalance, and they need to go through the exchange or a dark pool, it can take days to clear.
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It is also highly resilient. City hall burns down or the russians invade and destroy all county offices, there will still be a record you were born.
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But that has nothing to do with "blockchain". That's just backups. You can do that without an extremely wasteful distributed signing mechanism.
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Thousands of them, globally distributed, across third parties in a way that isn't predictable or centrally vulnerable. Which isn't specific to "blockchain" no but is part of the bitcoin decentralized package.
Perhaps not as implemented here but ultimately the advantage is that other parties decide who they trust or not, not merely your own government. The records are highly resilient and publicly available without need to contact any government official or occupy their time making a request. The data is dist
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If the government doesn't own half the servers, they don't control the blockchain.
Your solution opens up the ability to own more servers than the government and tell the government what is real or not.
Still not seeing an advantage to this.
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"If the government doesn't own half the servers, they don't control the blockchain."
Which is of great comfort to those who don't trust your government, such as other governments. Why would they need to control the blockchain? They don't need to control the block chain, they only need to ensure nobody else controls the block chain. It is less about having control of the library of congress, who can view it, and who can shelve books there and more about making sure nobody can ever control it or burn it down.
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Right. I mean, I'm totally hosting a backup copy of Washoe County, Nevada's vital records database and their blockchain thingy. As, so you say, are "thousands" of entities, "globally distributed." In fact, we're eagerly awaiting Esmeralda County, Nevada's blockchain records because we have nothing better to do.
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It is also highly resilient. City hall burns down or the russians invade and destroy all county offices, there will still be a record you were born.
This is like backing up your stuff by putting it on P2P. You hope someone has a copy, but they might not.
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It's even less usable than a standard database if you lookup how this all works (they have bought this service from TitanSeal.com) because they do not store any documents at all. They simply create a sha256 digest of the pdf that they send you and insert that in the metadata field in a Ethereum block, so the "only thing" that you can do here is that you can present the pdf to some one else and they can verify that yep it's in the blockchain.
In the end I don't actually know what exactly that information give
Re: Worst idea ever (Score:2)
Seems people don't grasp ... (Score:2)
Seems they don't grasp what a block chain is. ... one block, no chain.
You get born only once
You marry how often? And how often is your marriage "transferred" elsewhere? Aka as in having a reason to have an old block describing your previous marriage chained to the block of your actual marriage?
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You get born only once ... one block, no chain.
It's one block with a record immutably recorded in a blockchain.
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Oh!? The block chain is not a chain of blocks? Stupid me coming from a germanic/nordic language!
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Yes, the blockchain is a chain of blocks, and some blocks can hold an immutable record like e.g. a birth or marriage certificate or land ownership etc.
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Actually all blocks are immutable, hence you create a new block for every "change" and chain it to its predecessor. It basically is just a digital cryptographic accounting book.
FYI (Score:2)
"Titan Seal said the Washoe County digital marriage certificate program uses the Ethereum blockchain because it has computing power that makes it hard to hack"
Ethereum is the major blockchain just successfully hit by 51% attacks.
I'm not opposed to a public records blockchain, it has integrity, is publicly accessible and verifiable without needing staff to handle requests, and will theoretically be cheaply and easily replicated without spending tax dollars. That said, if there is going to be one it should be
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Ethereum is the major blockchain just successfully hit by 51% attacks.
This is not true.
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No he is right and I was incorrect. "Etherium Classic" was hit and not "Etherium", what makes no sense is that coinbase carried it.
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Your comment would have actually served a useful function if you'd stated the mix-up "Etherium Classic" vs "Etherium" instead of implying it was a lie.
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This is true.
I don't get it (Score:2)
Can somebody enlighten a foreigner to the use of this license, embossed or digital?
In Europe you just need a copy for the IRS and one for the boss to get your free extra week of vacation, that's about it.
Also some Unions give out a couple of hundred bucks for their members who get married.
Do you need it for other stuff too?
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Can somebody enlighten a foreigner to the use of this license, embossed or digital?
In Europe you just need a copy for the IRS and one for the boss to get your free extra week of vacation, that's about it.
Also some Unions give out a couple of hundred bucks for their members who get married.
Do you need it for other stuff too?
Often it is needed if you want to change names after marriage, prove you are married for benefits, apply for US citizenship, etc. There are lots of reasons you may need one and a digital copy won't be of any use.
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"Often it is needed if you want to change names after marriage, "
Thanks for the answer.
So you can change your name at any moment later and are not forced to do it the moment you're getting married?
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So you can change your name at any moment later and are not forced to do it the moment you're getting married?
Yes, but otherwise it costs money (usually in the $100-500 range) to officially change your name with the government. Right after you get married is the only time that they'll do it for free.
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"Yes, but otherwise it costs money (usually in the $100-500 range) to officially change your name with the government. Right after you get married is the only time that they'll do it for free."
Thanks.
That was premeture (Score:4, Insightful)
https://www.theverge.com/2019/... [theverge.com]
Additionally, there's hsitory:
1- Parity Freeze Hack : 512K ETH
2- Party multisig wallet Hack : 150K ETH solen
3-The DAO hack: 15% of ALL in circulation stolen
Stop calling this nonsense secure......
Re:That was premeture (Score:4, Informative)
https://www.theregister.co.uk/... [theregister.co.uk]
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Misguided (Score:2)
Why does this need to be decentralized? Answer: It doesn't
Does this need to be efficient? Answer: Presumably yes, this solution won't scale well
How straightforward is this solution? Answer: Its not, and the maintenance cost is super high
Yes, I can probably do most of my job from a mainframe and cobol too, but that would likely get me fired since its not a responsible choice of technologies. Clearly, a lack of leadership going on here