Bitfury and Ukraine start the largest previous blockchain project in the state
Ukraine and Bitfury show what new territory can look like! The agency for Egovernance, a government department, has signed a memorandum with Bitfury, which is to become the starting signal of the largest and most ambitious use of blockchain technology in a government.
On 13. April, Oleksandr Ryzhenko, head of the Ukrainian State Agency for Egovernance, and Valery Vavilov, CEO of Bitfury, signed a memorandum. This is supposed to begin a large and extensive project that could bring almost the entire data management of the Ukrainian government to the blockchain.
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The “Full-Scale Blockchain Egoverernance Program” will begin with a pilot project to use blockchain technology for the Ukrainian Egovernment platform. The most important areas of the government, which are to be supported by the blockchain, are state registers, public administration, social security, health care and the energy sector. As soon as the pilot project has been completed, the program will pass to all other areas, including cybersecurity.
In addition to other advantages, blockchain technology will help “to protect the state databases against unauthorized interventions, reduce costs for citizens, increase the overall efficiency, bring more investments in Ukraine, and to help reduce corruption,” said Bitfury’s press release. “Our will to reform the public administration is extremely strong,” comments Ryzhenko, “Blockchain technology has proven that it has proven a good basis to reduce the costs, increase the cost and to combat corruption. All of these are our goals. Therefore we are ready to make blockchain partly of the Ukrainian egovernment strategy.”
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Helpful for a variety of reasons
For a large number of reasons, it could actually be extremely helpful for a country like Ukraine to introduce the blockchain into the government. For example, the country, which continued to recover from the economic crisis from 2009, could attract investors with modern public administration, strengthen the IT sector and release resources for more growth. The blockchain could also help that epidemic corruption in Ukraine – the country is considered the most corrupt state of Europe and is in 131 out of 180 in the global corruption index.
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In addition, the government of Ukraine could secure more sovereignty in a difficult historical situation thanks to blockchain technology. The country is geographically not cheaply between a Russia that has demonstrated an appetite for border expansions, and an EU that promises money and membership, but otherwise fails to balance the standard of living in Eastern Europe to Western Europe. There are also possible influences from NATO or the USA, who may try to play Ukraine against Russia in silence.
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The situation is extremely unstable politically. A real blockchain-based management of government data could ensure that the databases literally become unchangeable. This can be useful in many ways. One example is the basic books that capture which country belongs to whom. If these are once on the blockchain, it will hardly be possible to change or change limits unnoticed or. to do this, but to cover it up by taking over the power.
A total loss of autonomy?
The project with Bitfury has great potential and could be a wonderful idea. However, it is difficult to remove a implementation that does not go into the pants with a bullet and sheet.
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So one could imagine that Bitfury uses the Bitcoin Blockchain. However, this does not have the capacity to store all the data that a government produces, and transaction fees alone would make the operation of the public administration many times more expensive. This seems to be an extremely unfavorable variant. It would be possible that Bitfury literally takes its role as a “blockchain infrastructure provider” and uses its share of around 10 percent in global Bitcoin Hashrate to form transactions free of charge for its customers. However, the government of Kyiv would do this depending on Bitfury in order to maintain the normal government company.
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However, the idea that Bitfury uses a privately attached blockchain to manage the government data of Ukraine would be significantly more devastating. In fact, this would only be another name for a cloud storage for government data. It is worrying that the Ukraine hand over its data to the blockchain of a company that is based in the US capital Washington and is generally known to have very close relationships with the US government. It could be called the first digital takeover of the government of another country with a little polemic and fear a total loss of autonomy.
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But it is not that far yet. Time will show what will become of the cooperation between Bitfury and Ukraine.