44 ROUND TABLE Blockchain
CLIFF FLUET: A number of companies are using it to track and create a register of their existing digital image inventory and to create protocols that allow metadata to be captured the moment a piece of work is put on any online platform. Others are seeking to establish scarcity in the world of digital art by creating the opportunity for authors or photographers to set into the blockchain limits upon how many ‘editions’ there can be for a particular work. In the music industry, a number of companies and artists are looking to use the blockchain to enable payments, collaboration and administration all at the same time, and disseminating monies generated directly to the artists in almost real time. JOE NAYLOR: Bitcoin, in the beginning. Unfortunately, hodlers and wildly volatile transaction fees undermined its ability to serve as a viable payment platform for the masses. MARIA TANJALA: Provenance is a blockchain solution for supply chain transparency, tracking of tuna coming from Indonesia. They use blockchain to track physical products and verify attributes from origin to point of sale. They hit hard with statements such as “When your fish supper supports slavery”.
Others would be Aventus, a protocol that is bringing transparency to the world of fraudulent ticketing, and Alice. si, which is bringing transparency to the very opaque world of charity donations – if they get widely adopted, I will donate to charities again. Lastly, the use of blockchain to provide and track identity for millions of people who don’t have IDs and are unbanked is a great noble cause. FEED: What are some of the inherent risks and problems in blockchain? CLIFF FLUET: Blockchain technologies are inherently robust, but the real risks are a failure to understand its application to the areas of law that the technology touches, from data to intellectual property and financial regulations. One needs a deep understanding of the commercial, legal and regulatory frameworks – or needs to be able to find and hire the experts who have that understanding.
COLLIN MÜLLER: Today, ‘proof-of- work’ algorithms, as used in Bitcoin and Ethereum, are the only secure consensus mechanisms in blockchain systems that are truly open and permissionless, without any central authorities of any kind. Those proof-of-work mechanisms are very inefficient with regards to energy consumption and are not suited for widespread applications with a global scale. The blockchain community is working hard to find alternative consensus algorithms that have less energy demand. While blockchain technology could actually be one of the best tools to enable privacy and data cooperation at the same time, there are a few inherent problems with GDPR compliance. The most prominent is GDPR’s ‘right to be forgotten’, which requires data sets to be deletable. One of the basic principles of blockchain technology is that transactions exist ‘forever’ in a blockchain database once they have been added. The blockchain community should work together with regulators on clever system design and
WHILE BLOCKCHAIN COULD BE ONE OF THE BEST TOOLS TO ENABLE PRIVACY AND DATA COOPERATION AT THE SAME TIME, THERE ARE A FEW INHERENT PROBLEMS WITH GDPR COMPLIANCE
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