Presentation of the paper "Beyond Bitcoin - Public Sector Innovation Using the Bitcoin Blockchain

1. www.vestforsk.no
Beyond Bitcoin
- Public Sector Innovation Using the
Blockchain Technology
Svein Ølnes, Vestlandsforsking
NOKOBIT 2015, 24. nov. 2015

2. www.vestforsk.no
Content
 Research objectives
 Method
 Literature study
 Case study
 What is Bitcoin?
 Bitcoin as an information infrastructure
 Use case: Academic certificates stored on the blockchain
 Conclusions and further research

3. www.vestforsk.no
Research objectives
1. To give an overview of the Bitcoin literature in general and
Bitcoin in e-Government in particular
2. To study the potential for using Bitcoin technology in public
sector services

4. www.vestforsk.no
Literature overview – in general
Year No. of publications
2011 8
2012 21
2013 63
2014 208

5. www.vestforsk.no
Literature overview – in the eGovernment field
Category EGRL 10.5 Google Scholar Bitcoin
Academic Publ.
Search phrase «bitcoin» «Bitcoin e-
Government»
-
Economy 0 1 114
Technology 0 1 124
Regulation 0 4 59
Other 0 0 17
Irrelevant - 78 0
Total 0 84 314

6. www.vestforsk.no
What is Bitcoin?
1. A crypto currency
 A peer-to-peer electronic cash system
2. An infrastructure
 An open ledger on the Internet

7. www.vestforsk.no
Bitcoin development
 Proposed in a white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto in Oct. 2008
 The Bitcoin system was started 3rd of Jan. 2009
 Has been running almost seven years without any serious errors
 A platform for permissionless innovation, above all in financial
services, but also for use in other sectors
 Based on open source and open standards
 Bitcoin code published on GitHub

8. www.vestforsk.no
Bitcoin key characteristics
 Distributed system (peer-to-peer)
 No central bank (or other central authorities)
 Deterministic money supply
 21 million bitcoin in total
 25 new bitcoin mined every 10 minutes
 Halving of new bitcoin mined every four years

9. www.vestforsk.no
Bitcoin key contributions
 A practical solution to the Byzantine Generals’ problem
 first formulated by Lamport et al. (1982)
 computer systems’ ability to handle conflicting information
 how to establish trust in a distributed system (without a third party)
 An open platform for financial innovation
 But also an open platform for innovation in «trustless» systems
 A fully functional digital cash system

10. www.vestforsk.no
Bitcoin building blocks
 Open source software
 Digital signatures
 Public key cryptography (but not a PKI!)
 Hash functions
 Consensus based trust
 Through Proof of work

11. www.vestforsk.no
Bitcoin as an information infrastructure
Property Information
Infrastructure
Bitcoin as an II
Shared Universally Universally
Open Yes Yes
Heterogenous Increasingly Yes (althoug early)
Evolving Yes Bears the signs of unltd.
evolvement
Organizing principles Recursice composition Yes/No – only one
reference Bitcoin impl.
Control Distributed and
dynamically negotiated
Distr. and dynamically
neg. (by «voting»)

12. www.vestforsk.no
Case study: Bitcoin blockchain in eGovernment
 Certificate from university courses (or degrees) put on the
blockchain
 Simple and cost effective solution
 Ubiquitous access to verification of certificates

13. www.vestforsk.no
Case study: University of Nicosia’s use of
Bitcoin blockchain for storing certificates
1. Prerequisites:
 No other services or products than the Bitcoin blockchain
 Authntication of certificates without contacting Univ. of Nicosia
 Should be possible to perform the authentication even if Univ. of Nicosia
ceases to exist in today’s form (merger, shut down etc.)
2. Storing the index document on the blockchain
3. Verification process
 Verification of the index document itself (retrieved from the web)
 Verification of the certificate(s)

14. www.vestforsk.no
Case study: certifiates on the blockchain

15. www.vestforsk.no
Case study: certifiates on the blockchain

16. www.vestforsk.no
Conclusions
 The Bitcoin technology is absent from eGov literature
 Bitcoin as an information infrastructure has a great potential for
innovative use also in public sector, as the use case indicates
 Important research questions:
 how can Bitcoin help innovation in public sector?
 how should the currency bitcoin and the infrastructure Bitcoin be handled?
 Bitcoin in public sector on the blockchain, sidechain or altchain?
 Important factors determining adoption of this new technology?
 Installed base as a barrier to adoption of the technology
 Many similarities with the development of the Internet and web 25
years ago

17. www.vestforsk.no
Takk for meg!
E-post: sol@vestforsk.no
Bitcoin-adresse:
1HpvvptgrYJh4xUHerm1ruZtvnyUnnnHkU