In recent days, companies, countries, and entrepreneurs are coming up with more ways to use blockchain to secure and facilitate facets of life and entire industries. Officials from both Great Britain and Russia recently disclosed how the blockchain may be useful in securing digital evidence and for the tourism industry.
Al Davidson is the Digital Technical Architect at Great Britain's Ministry of Justice. He recently wrote an article about "increasing trust in criminal evidence with blockchains."
These days, physical evidence is barely enough to make judgements in criminal cases. Video, audio, email messages, texts, recordings, and other forms of digital media are often instrumental to court cases and charges.
The Blockchain can provide a clever way to verify digital media when necessary.
Blockchains can be used to make sure that digital media such as recordings and messages are not altered and are the same when presented in court, compared to when they were taken.
In the next section, we'll go over a possible blockchain example suggested by Davidson for this use case, but first we need to understand what a hash or hashing function is. A hash is a way to take in some data of any size and return some random-looking output of a fixed size for that data.
The key is that changing even one byte of the input data provides a catastrophically different hash. It's impossible to predict what input will give a certain hash without using brute force. For example, one of the smallest size hashes is SHA-1 though it still satisfies these hash properties.
The SHA-1 hash of apple is d0be2dc421be4fcd0172e5afceea3970e2f3d940. The hash of apples however is 76c2436b593f27aa073f0b2404531b8de04a6ae7. There's clearly no pattern between the two outputs even though I simply added an s to the input.
The first step in the blockchain is to have a data source.
Davidson's data source relies on police officers wearing cameras recording digital footage during all their encounters. When their shift ends, they can connect their camera to a computer which would split the video into smaller chunks of 5 or 10 minutes each.
Once the computer is done splitting the video, it would automatically upload the video to a secure cloud data service. The clips themselves can be retrieved at any time from this secure cloud service.
The computer now generates metadata for the clip, including which officer took the video, what time/date each clip was taken, what location it was taken at, and more. Call this M for metadata.
The computer now generates hashes for every single clip (call these hashes H).
The computer combines M (metadata) and H (hash) for each clip to form a finished dataset. This data gets uploaded to the blockchain and distributed ledger for safekeeping.
Now, what happens if a court case is filed involving an officer and the officer submits a video clip as evidence in court? The court system can now easily and quickly verify that the clip wasn't altered from the original creation time, using this process:
S.H.H and S are identical is enough to ascertain that the clip was not altered in any form or way. This means the clip can be fully trusted in court.Blockchain can also be used, according to Oleg Safonov (Russian Tourism Head), to transform the tourism industry. He recently gave a speech at the 2017 Kazan Tourism Forum available here in English stating his ideas.
We are absolutely convinced in our federal agency that blockchain will seriously change the tourism market, although, in our opinion, it will happen not in two years but in 5-10 years.
Safonov and his agency is convinced blockchain can have many capabilities in tourism. But what can blockchain do for the industry?
Of course, the technologies that are being created now they allow tourists, consumers to work directly with providers (of services) removing all the intermediaries. This makes the product better in quality, less expensive and also increases the provider’s responsibility for the product.
Safonov thinks that blockchain's main attribute of a distributed ledger cutting out the middle man (intermediaries) is what makes it so appealing.
He envisions a blockchain for the tourism industry allowing tourists to transact directly with hotels and service providers.
Blockchains have many attributes that make them amazing for almost every industry. Many governments, countries, and companies are starting to envision blockchains providing support in key facets of their work.
Hopefully, the spread of blockchain will allow for an improved and more decentralized future for all of us.
Thanks for reading,
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