Last month we held a session exploring blockchain technology, featuring speakers discussing the technology itself, key applications like smart contracts, legal and governance issues and the management of identity using blockchain technology. Our great thanks to Peter van Garderen, Payal Kapur and Hugo O’Connor for their fascinating and insightful talks.

Ledger book, by edinburghcityofprint on Flickr

We opened the session with some reflections on the relevance of blockchain technology to recordkeeping professionals.

Recordkeeping is all about trust. Trusted records mean trusted transactions, and therefore the ability to do business, provide services, support or object to our governments and understand the world around us. Recordkeepers seek to design systems to ensure that trustworthy evidence may be relied upon by the communities we serve. However current recordkeeping implementations are flawed, and permit imperfect recordkeeping, inequitable access to records and records loss. The emergence of decentralised trust through computation as seen with blockchain technology allows us to imagine new models for recordkeeping that can also bring greater assurance of longevity and availability for records users, and offer new opportunities for the disempowered to interact with and benefit from recordkeeping systems.

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Thanks so much to our fantastic panel of speakers at this week’s session on blockchain. We have slides to share:

Peter Van Garderen: Introduction to blockchain and recordkeeping (Slideshare)

Payal Kapur: Smart Contracts: A deconstruction (PPTX)

To discover more about the cool stuff Hugo O’Connor does, visit http://bittradelabs.com/ 

We hope to do a proper write up and offer some ‘Roundie reflections’ on the fascinating issues raised on the day very soon.

Christopher Watrous Ledger Book, Durham, February 3, 1812 (Vedder Library)

We are pleased to announce that the next Recordkeeping Roundtable event will be an exploration of blockchain technology, its applications and its implications for recordkeeping and archives.

When:
9.30am for a 10am start – 12.30pm
Wednesday, March 9, 2016

Where: 
Seminar Room
ATP Innovations
Ground Floor, National Innovation Centre
Australian Technology Park
Redfern

Register now

About the event

Many people regard bitcoin and its foundational technology blockchain as the most exciting online innovations we have seen since the invention World Wide Web. Banks, governments and others are clamouring to use it as a basis for new, simple and low cost ways of doing business. Others see its potential for breaking down barriers of entry to marketplaces and the commons, bringing about a potentially fairer society in which value can be exchanged without the need for intermediaries. Continue reading →

This week I was lucky enough to attend the Sydney Blockchain Workshops, organised by the formidable women of COALA and held at the Powerhouse Museum. Before going on, I should say I will not be attempting here to explain the detail of how blockchain technology works and what its features are. Others are much better at this. Try this article from ex banker Antony Lewis A gentle introduction to blockchain technology if you would like to understand the basics.

Anyway, in no particular order, here are some of the things I saw and learned.

This wasn’t a tech conference. It was a conference about possibility and change – on almost every level of society, and across so many disciplines. Yes, banking and finance (there’s a reason the banks were falling over themselves to grab the blockchain experts who were in town this week, find out more here), but so much more. This technology has the potential to change the way we assign value, and transact with each other in almost every way. Continue reading →