Online accountability and cyber-cover must be a priority

Between The Lines Bill Magee

Scotland is joining other digital leaders like Estonia and Switzerland by advancing Blockchain and associated Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) aimed at bringing a new era of online accountability and cybercover, and lasting economic and social benefits.

It comes after hackers made repeated attempts to break into the Scottish Government’s computer networks plus the country’s health service, crippling some systems for days and leading to the government spending a reported £2 million over the last three years to fend off the cyber criminals.

The government has engaged Wallet. Services, as the Edinburgh-based fledgling tech outfit’s first client, to research and write a DLT way forward to underpin its digital strategy. Blockchains provide more honest, transparent and efficient frameworks for business and governance online, and leading computer scientist Professor Bill Buchanan of Edinburgh Napier University and a prolific author on all things cyber, says there should be no delay in developing blockchain/dlt for Scotland.

Buchanan describes the situation as especially crucial when it comes towards providing an online “circle of trust” through such transparency and secure proof of ownership, actions and contracts as an unchangeable public record.

Wallet.services operates out of Edinburgh’s Codebase incubator hub, and commercial director Peter Ferry says they’re researching the use of DLT around the world to assess the capability and capacity available to support the government’s digital ambitions.

Ferry is one of a global panel of experts at Scotchain17 on 13 October at RBS Gogaburn when it will be made clear how blockchain technology, and all that this means to data integrity and privacy, has moved well beyond the financial world into industry and the public arena.

An idea of the financial scale is revealed in latest reports that blockchain technology can save the global financial industry alone £15bn per annum by 2020. Reports have focused on the bitcoin cryptocurrency appearing in a state of flux, to put it mildly, where coupling blockchain with bitcoin kind of misses the point. l Bill Magee is an industry commentator