3 Government Domains to Apply Blockchain

Blockchain is capturing the public imagination with its opportunities for the public sector. The technology’s enormous potential is based on its inherent features such as security, speed, and reliability. This post describes three areas of state operations that can become better with blockchain.

National Currencies and Payments

How many cryptocurrencies are there? At the beginning of September 2018, their number was as much as 1,910. However, there has been only one crypto-asset used as a basis for a national currency.

In August 2018, the Venezuelan government announced it would use the oil-backed petro to tie it up to bolívar soberano. This was made to support the teetering bolivar that is demonstrating the 1,000,000% inflation rate in 2018.

How Can Blockchain Improve This Domain?

Cryptocurrencies are fraud-protected. Their inherent decentralization and approach to records storage prevent system hacking and compromising of data. Ownership rights for tokens can’t be illegally transferred because all the activities are witnessed by blockchain nodes. Transactions are speedy and come at a low cost, which is guaranteed by the blockchain bandwidth and its digital ledger.

Land Registration

Have you ever heard about the land tenure chaos in Haiti after the hurricane of 2010? The new property was built amidst the debris of destroyed buildings, which resulted in debates over ownership. Who is the owner of a certain piece of land, the previous landlord or the current one? Where are parcel boundaries? One after another, countries are adopting blockchain in their land registry in order to avoid such problems in the future.

The City of South Burlington, USA, and startup Propy announced their collaboration on digitizing real estate conveyance documents. Meanwhile, the Swedish authorities are cooperating with the local startup ChromaWay in order to adopt blockchain-driven transactions in their land registry. However, struggling with the startup’s poor scalability, the local bodies are going to switch to utilizing the services of another platform, Lantmäteriet. At the same time in the Netherlands, Computable is expected to come in handy for the country’s land registry management. And this list goes on.

How Can Blockchain Improve This Domain?

The enhancement of land registries is based on blockchain-led smart contracts, which trigger financial transactions and the transfer of ownership upon signing a land purchase agreement. In addition, the immutable history of records stored on blockchain protects data from forging and unauthorized access.

When it comes to the countries adopting blockchain, it’s necessary to mention that the domain of the land registry is still roomy for new technological solutions. If you want to develop your Dapp to enter this market quicker, you can go for adopting the goal-scoring opportunity, the pre-designed genEOS blockchain platform. Apart from its inherent blockchain features, it delivers ready-made smart contracts and scales easily.

Taxation

There are two aspects of taxation, generally: how well the system can collect taxes, and how fair it allocates them later.

In 2017, tax avoidance cost the USA almost $200 billion. China followed the US with an almost $70 billion loss. Some people, relying on quite a low detection rate for tax evasion, hide their real income, making the problem nearly unsolvable by traditional means.

Another big issue is whether taxes are allocated properly. As government agencies’ accountability is typically not transparent, how can individuals check for government expenditures on social security, healthcare subsidies, or other directions?

How Can Blockchain Improve This Domain?

Blockchain-driven smart contracts can help to reduce and potentially prevent tax evasion. They can be used to automatically levy relevant taxes on an individual’s income. Furthermore, all the chain members will be able to instantly use and trace real-time information on the transaction details.

When it comes to tax allocation, as there are no chances to forge blockchain-powered data, all the chain users will stay sure of the records authenticity. In addition, the witnessing of transactions will make the distribution system transparent. It means that every penny spent will be visible to taxpayers themselves.

Blockchain for Governments: Takeaways

• Blockchain decentralization prevents data from hacking.
• The append-only way of storage guarantees data immutability and authenticity.
• Witness nodes provide the system with transparency and real-time traceability.
• Blockchain’s public ledger makes transactions less cost- and time-consuming.
• Self-executing smart contracts automate transaction processing, subject to certain conditions.