Most states rely on paper bureaucracy to ensure that the state can function and provide services. Paper bureaucracy has been part and parcel of how we maintain states and corporations since the Chinese invented the first paper bureaucracy systems of management 3000 years ago. But as you all probably know, bureaucracy kinda sucks. It costs a lot to maintain, and in the worst cases bureaucracy can turn a state into a labyrinthian monstrosity that can be near to impossible to navigate.
Estonia is a Baltic country that in recent years has been embarking on reform programs that are intended to change this. Estonia is a “Paperless state” meaning a state that has effectively removed all paper from it’s bureaucracy and replaced it with a digital state structure. In this short video I would like to introduce you to the digital state and argue for it.
It scares me, honestly. The level of security for this to be viable is insane. Imagine some flaw or accident or attack that would erase me as a citizen. Scary thought.
This is one place where blockchain is actually useful. No one entity is responsible for the integrity of the “ledger”. Of course it wouldn’t be publicly writable so not exactly like the blockchains you normally think of.
I can’t see how the blockchain would be particularly useful here either. The security features of the blockchain come at the cost of extreme energy usage. Storing documents using simple public-private key cryptography is waaaay more than enough imo.
You don’t have to “mine blocks” to have a blockchain. It’s just a continual list of transactions that can’t be modified after the fact. So a hacker couldn’t wipe out your existence from the chain without controlling the majority of the participants (in a consensus algorithm). Not saying it’s an ideal use-case but highlighting that feature. There are many ways to avoid “data wipe” attacks.