The
increasing interest in the collaborative or sharing and service
economies can be enabled through blockchain. Through its
transactional capabilities, it is able to help co-ordinate loosely
coupled assets, companies and individuals in order to achieve
collective goals. It can help to dramatically reduce transaction
costs associated with sharing and ‘as a service’ models of
operations. It allows for radically new forms of ownership to
emerge and form within our economic system.
Blockchain can play a
fundamental role in the reconfiguring of how many utility services
are provided – for example, it can redefine how communication
network services are constructed and delivered through changing how
both spectrum and physical infrastructure are delivered, managed
and paid for. Within energy and water systems, it can be used to
create peer-to-peer energy markets with greater flexibility for
end-users and infrastructure owners.
A key challenge in this space
is how to measure GDP in a system with a large number of
decentralised assets. Through capturing a record of the
transactions, blockchain can assist with data collection for
measuring the digital economy.
An increasingly digitalized
world, however, has meant that the number and type of cyber attacks
across the world is growing. In addition, data breaches are
becoming more common as the reduced costs of processing and storage
worldwide mean more data is being stored for longer periods of
time. Additionally, as sensors become more embedded in our
day-to-day lives, the scale and types of possible security attacks
increase.
A clear understanding of the
privacy regulation policies associated with blockchains and similar
digital technologies is required to address this need. In addition,
a key challenge is to ensure the privacy of end-users and the
end-to-end security of the solutions implemented on
blockchains.
