I was reading Matt Levine’s Money stuff today and was struck by a thought. He writes:
“A national customs agency, for instance, might be happier approving shipments on an auditable open blockchain than in the proprietary database of a particular shipping company.”
This is interesting, but I want to take it one step further. Blockchain or not, a record of events that have been cryptographically digitally signed, with references to previous transactions could be very useful.
If you are a company, and a regulator or agency asks you for your view on what happened, and you give the regulator an Excel spreadsheet or a normal database extract saying “Here’s what happened, I promise”, this is very weak evidence and can be tampered easily by deleting rows, or removing key words like the names of sanctioned countries, etc.
Continue reading “Please Believe My Database”