Will blockchain change the world?

Blockchain just missed a giant opportunity. Given the immutable nature of the data stored on blockchain, wouldn’t it be one of most reliable technologies to help in tracking Covid related data? The first thought goes to the vaccination records.

What better than a global blockchain could have served as international registry of the Covid vaccination status? Can you imagine? Clicking a link like on Etherscan and prove to any authority in the world the complete history of vaccination?

Moreover, for the countries that have imposed Green Pass systems, can you imagine the spot-on traceability of every single movement to contain the spread? And how to prove with absolute certainty that someone had indeed contracted and subsequently healed from Covid? A blockchain record, of course.

But unfortunately not all the glitters is gold in blockchain, and I got myself into trouble with some die-hard blockchain enthusiasts back in 2018, when I was talking in counterintuitive ways about blockchain. My point was simple. Since blockchain is immutable, once a wrong record is written on it, there it stays, forever.

So, those involved in the dodgy business of faking Covid vaccine could have once for all deceived the system by writing a fake vax on the blockchain. Too many times I attended blockchain presentation where the presenter was painting blockchain as a perfect solution to pretty much everything. But 13 years after its invention, blockchain as yet to become universally acceptable and reliable from inception to transcription of an action.

When it comes to monetary transactions, blockchain offers indeed a very solid solution.

A value is shown as “moving” from a crypto wallet to another, and the block is mined and validated accordingly. It is virtually impossible to fake a crypto transaction on blockchain. Proof of work and proof of stake are specifically designed to avoid such an instance. But when the origination of an action occurs offline, anything could be written on blockchain, even a lie.

So, before we regret that Covid vaccination status did not become the world’s most popular blockchain project, we need to understand what risk we have avoided by using good old database instead of blockchain.

If the original smart contract of Covid vaccination was written for two shots injected two weeks apart, we would have had problems with vaccines that required one shot only, or had a different cooldown period between two shots. Moreover, the introduction of third and in some cases fourth shot, could have complicated things further.

Once a smart contract is issued, it cannot be changed. Therefore, in areas where things are prone to change, such as science and medical research, blockchain might not be the best solution. Also, when offline actions occur entirely in person, but require to be transcribed by human, it is — unfortunately — normal to imagine that some of such records will contain errors or intentional deception. Not all humans are honest after all.

Some of the readers might recall that some three years ago I wrote on these pages an article sharing why I thought that a universal blockchain passport would have never worked.

As a reminder to those who missed the article, how could spies travel around the world under different identities, if blockchain only tracked their real identity? Blockchain will need to wait.