Many of us have believed that blockchain would give us freedom from centralised bodies like governments. The EU Blockchain Forum’s latest report looking into blockchain technology and as stated by The Next Web, it’s starting to “sound more like 1984 than ever before.”
In the forums latest report, it details that for blockchain to realise its full potential within government institutions, digital identity systems and digital versions of their national currencies must first be looked at in depth.
“Digital identity is the fundamental building block and a key area for governments to focus on. Another important building block … is having digital versions of national currencies on the blockchain, for example through blockchain-based central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).”
In the report, it says that digital currencies should be a necessity before any future institutional blockchains are developed. The forum believes that blockchain could provide a platform where everyone would have a ‘trusted’ digital identity.
Furthermore, in the report, they argue for state-owned blockchains by implying that the government would be a better custodian of our identities on the web than centralised bodies such as the search engine giant, Google and the social network behemoth, Facebook. This is because data breaches and hacks that they have experienced.
Even though the report states that the blockchain identity systems should be a self-sovereign and controlled by the user, this still doesn’t change the fact that your whole identity would be part of a government system which could be used to track everything you do online.
Of course, the government isn’t prevented from tracking data requests just because the user has control of their data. If blockchain was a public entity, anyone would be able to see this information and do whatever they want with it.
Scams, fraud and theft aren’t off the table with this either. The blockchain is commonly seen as the holy grail of everything that will fix the issues that plague the modern world but it doesn’t mean it's always the most ideal solution.
“If the government-owned digital identities exist alongside government-backed tokenized fiat currencies, it would be very easy to attribute spending habits to an individual identity.”
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