Blockchain and Government Unnatural Partners, Say Experts

It's odd to be talking about blockchain in terms of regulatory policy, said Aaron Arnold, a fellow at Harvard University who studies trade controls to prevent proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The technology is designed to remove the intermediary and decentralize authority, said panelists on blockchain and trade security at the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank on security. A government blockchain verification system is inherently centralized, said Jonathan Tame, manager in Deloitte's technology practice. Arnold gave an example of an instance in which a Massachusetts supplier sent pressure transducers to its Chinese subsidiary, and then an employee there falsified documents about the package's contents and sent the equipment -- used to enrich uranium -- to Iran. If these transactions were on a distributed ledger, “would this have stopped the transshipment to Iran? No," he said. That’s not “to imply that blockchain or distributed ledger technologies have zero applications" here, he said. For a system with items subject to export controls tagged in an unalterable way that goes to a country where it's not allowed, the seller wouldn't be paid.