Blockchain and Government Unnatural Partners, Say Experts
It's odd to be talking about blockchain in terms of regulatory policy, said Aaron Arnold, a fellow at Harvard University who studies trade controls to prevent proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The technology is designed to remove the intermediary…
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and decentralize authority, said panelists on blockchain and trade security at the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank on security. A government blockchain verification system is inherently centralized, said Jonathan Tame, manager in Deloitte's technology practice. Arnold gave an example of an instance in which a Massachusetts supplier sent pressure transducers to its Chinese subsidiary, and then an employee there falsified documents about the package's contents and sent the equipment -- used to enrich uranium -- to Iran. If these transactions were on a distributed ledger, “would this have stopped the transshipment to Iran? No," he said. That’s not “to imply that blockchain or distributed ledger technologies have zero applications" here, he said. For a system with items subject to export controls tagged in an unalterable way that goes to a country where it's not allowed, the seller wouldn't be paid.