Pick 90 - Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)

A distributed ledger is a consensus of replicated, shared, and synchronized digital data geographically spread across multiple sites, countries, or institutions. Unlike with a distributed database, there is no central administrator

 

Peter West-- Open Innovation Team

Human intelligence is so remarkable because it’s collaborative. The social reservoir of knowledge is a result of intelligence interacting with other intelligence. Having barriers between two intelligent systems slows down growth because it inhibits connections from taking place. The more connections that happen, the more intelligent something can become. The more intelligent an AI system becomes, the more value it has.

Several concerns have been raised about using distributed ledgers within government:

1. Who decides who the ledger should be shared with? When dealing with sensitive or confidential information, somebody needs to select people to share the ledger with to ensure information does not fall into the wrong hands. However, that person could select untrustworthy individuals, or otherwise use their power in a corrupt manner, negating the advantages of distributed ledgers over a central storage solution.
2. It is impossible to retroactively change information. This makes the technology appealing to financial transactions where records should be historic, but this makes it unsuitable where information may need to be retroactively changed.
3. It may be unsuitable for large numbers of users. Larger-scale use cases should be considered on their need for growth in the number of users and interactions, because right now these may lead to poor performance and significant energy use. But, technological solutions to these scaling issues are in development.
4. It may disrupt established workflows. End-users will have different working behaviors, digital literacies, and attitudes to technology which must be factored in when considering distributed ledger use cases.
5. It is not yet mainstream. Distributed ledger technology currently lacks established standards and legislation, its conformance to existing and emerging standards is unclear. For example, it is questionable whether a hash of personal information could constitute personal information under the GDPR.
6. Is the data to be stored generated in a decentralised way? If the process generating the data has some other point where a single authority has complete say over what the data will look like, then DLT may add very little in terms of preventing tampering and imbuing trust.

 

  In order to maximize connection in society, by 2030, all of our intelligent systems will need to interact with one another. The mass of data being handled is useless if we humans do not understand its value or how to use it for the common good.. So both data and its value must be unobstructed as it moves from producers to providers around the world.

The model that’s beginning to take form is a world where data is a resource of increasing supply thanks to large data providers, IoT devices, and the Internet. The data can be leveraged by AI algorithms that refine it and use it to take intelligent actions in the real world. These actions are facilitated by DLT technology that connect everything together, trigger the reconciling of trade, and record it all in a shared ledger. Once the networks are put in place, they run themselves and can ever grow smarter over time. This is the fourth industrial revolution.