Verizon Enterprise to Launch Blockchain Platform Services in 2018
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Photo credit to Annika Haas. Sources for everything I've talked about in this post will be linked at the end of this post. Since I live in Estonia, I will take every opportunity to proudly talk about this little country in the Baltics.
Estonia is at the forefront of a digital revolution in how countries are run. The benefit of our digital country is that paperwork or a lack thereof in Estonia moves at light speed and almost everything you need to do can be done online, including voting, which is done securely and anonymously. For example, starting a company takes just hours instead of days or even months.
I have seen the speed at which a company can be registered with my own eyes, as I registered my own company back in July of It took me 15 minutes after I was familiar with the terminology and the registration was confirmed in 1 hour after the next workday had started.
Another very exciting topic is how Estonia is becoming a CaaS Country as a Service which I will talk about in a future post.
Here is where we are on the map. Illustration from the Estonian Brand Guardtime blockchain wikipedia. Icons are from the official Estonia guardtime blockchain wikipedia toolboximage is made by me.
Our digital systems are fairly extensive, spanning many fields. Everything from taxes being done in minutes to signing legal documents from anywhere in the world within seconds. I'll give a brief overview guardtime blockchain wikipedia what we have before I talk about how the blockchain fits into this picture.
Unlike in many other countries, every Estonian, irrespective of their location, has a state-issued digital identity. Thanks to this Estonia is years ahead of countries still trying to work out how to authenticate people without physical contact. Every person has a state-issued digital identity. They can use this identity to sign documents online securely. These services include banks, e-school systems built by private companies etc.
For example, if I wanted to log in to my bank account securely to get higher sending limits, I would:. Smart-ID requires the internet to be enabled on your phone and is the quickest to use from guardtime blockchain wikipedia experience. Yes, you read that right. An app on your sim card so it will still work on guardtime blockchain wikipedia cheap phone that doesn't even have a touchscreen.
ID-Card is entirely local to the computer and requires a compatible smart card reader for your computer. Guardtime blockchain wikipedia you want to read more about e-identity, you can do so here.
The only exceptions are marriages, divorces and real-estate transactions — you still have to get out from under the covers on a cold winter day for those.
Part of e-governance guardtime blockchain wikipedia i-Voting, which is an anonymous and secure way to vote in elections from the comfort of your own home or anywhere in the world. It is completely guardtime blockchain wikipedia from almost every other electronic voting system in the world. Internet voting, or i-Voting, is a system that allows guardtime blockchain wikipedia to cast their ballots from any internet-connected computer anywhere in the world.
Completely unrelated to the electronic voting systems used elsewhere, which involve costly and problematic machinery, the Guardtime blockchain wikipedia solution is simple, elegant and guardtime blockchain wikipedia. To learn more about i-Voting, click here. Thanks to e-governance systems, Estonia saves over years of working time annually and has become a hassle-free environment for business and entrepreneurship. This is the concept for providing guardtime blockchain wikipedia, more efficient, convenient and sustainable public services across Estonia.
The aim is to reorganise the public transportation system using self-driven vehicles. The government has adopted a plan guardtime blockchain wikipedia create a fleet management system, integrating such vehicles into the public transport system with journey planning and call-to-order bus stops. Similarly, the government will launch pilots in other public service areas to seek new models of guardtime blockchain wikipedia service delivery based on autonomous mobility.
Like many developed nations, Estonia has introduced a number of Intelligent Transportation Systems solutions designed to make travel safer and logistics more convenient. For example, in MarchEstonia made it legal to test self-driven vehicles on all national and local roads in the country.
Work is underway to create a full legal and cyber-risk management framework for using fully autonomous vehicles in regular road and traffic conditions. Right now, we have had a system for public transport that tracks the location of buses to estimate the arrival time in real time and shows that time on information boards at bus stops.
This information also feeds into Guardtime blockchain wikipedia Maps to get accurate bus arrival times. For tickets, we pay with NFC-enabled cards that are topped guardtime blockchain wikipedia with money. If you have a student id card, then you can tie your bus guardtime blockchain wikipedia to your student guardtime blockchain wikipedia to lessen the number of cards you need to keep with you.
Each year, around 95 percent of all tax declarations in Estonia are filed electronically. This is done using the e-Tax system, which is the electronic tax filing system set up by the Estonian Tax and Customs Board.
The time required for filing taxes is now down to 3 minutes - on average. Using a secure ID, a taxpayer logs onto the system, reviews their data in pre-filled forms, makes any necessary changes, and approves the declaration form. The process typically takes three to five minutes. Even one-click tax returns have been possible since — the data that is already in the system is displayed guardtime blockchain wikipedia the user along guardtime blockchain wikipedia the calculated result, then all the users have to do is click on the confirmation button.
All this can take less than a minute. Banks not only wholeheartedly embraced e-ID, encouraging customers to use their ID cards for secure transactions, even giving away free card readers, they also helped move the population online by developing and offering high-quality internet banking services. Banks are working hard to develop technical solutions that will allow them to welcome clients from anywhere without a face-to-face meeting by enhancing the security of customer identification. From my personal experience, I can't imagine a world where I'd need to go to a bank to carry out a smaller transaction.
It seems insane to me after having lived with this all my life. I set up my own company last year online. It took me 15 minutes after I had become familiar with the terminology and the company was confirmed in under an hour after the start of the next workday.
It was guardtime blockchain wikipedia simple to do. The tool used for this is e-Business register which is a system developed by the government. It allows people to set up a new business without having to go to a notary in minutes. Since the process has gone down from 5 days to just 18 minutes. With this tool, you can file annual reports, change business data or make detailed inquiries about other companies. Education in Estonia is a mixed bag. I'll only be talking about the good parts of it in this post but I might talk about the bad parts in a post in the future.
We have two main applications used by schools are called e-School and Stuudium. These are platforms that connect teachers, students and parents on one guardtime blockchain wikipedia.
More specifically, these innovative tools provide an easy way for parents, teachers and children to collaborate and organize all guardtime blockchain wikipedia information necessary for teaching and learning. Having personally used these systems in my daily life for close to 10 years, I can honestly say that it's amazing.
I can count the times the system has been down using only one hand's fingers. In Estonia, your health record is digital. Your prescriptions, x-rays and other data is available to doctors and you as a patient from an online portal. While the system guardtime blockchain wikipedia function similarly to a centralized database for the users, in reality, all data is gathered from different healthcare providers as necessary.
This information is then presented to doctors and patients in a standard format, even though the healthcare providers may be using different systems. As one might guess, you need need to be sure of the integrity of this data. This will be talked about in the last two sections of this post. The system also compiles data for national statistics, so the ministry can measure health trends, track epidemics, and make sure that its health resources are being spent wisely.
Patients have access to their own records, as well as those of their children. By logging into the e-Patient portal with an electronic ID-card, the patient can review doctor visits and current prescriptions, and check which doctors have had access to guardtime blockchain wikipedia files. Nowadays, life is fast and justice procedures — the cornerstones of a democracy — should be just as prompt.
Thanks to fully automated court processes and electronic communication tools, Estonia has one of the most effective court systems in the world. The e-Court system is a fully comprehensive system for managing all court procedures. The solution has been implemented for Estonian courts under the Ministry of Justice and paperless proceedings have been held since If the case is simple, the hearing will guardtime blockchain wikipedia held electronically with no need to visit the courthouse.
All participants will be sent the guardtime blockchain wikipedia through the public portal using X-Road technologies. Finally, the concluding or bailiff procedures are also automated — the fine is collected automatically without any need to physically attend to the payment. To keep everything secure, KSI blockchain, which guardtime blockchain wikipedia developed by Guardtime, is used, which guardtime blockchain wikipedia be talked more about in the next two sections.
There is a very good reason why Guardtime blockchain wikipedia left this part of our digital system as guardtime blockchain wikipedia last one I talk about. Interoperability services guardtime blockchain wikipedia the part that ties everything together. Guardtime blockchain wikipedia the massive database of information is not held in one place but fragmented between all the institutions responsible for the services, there needs to be some way to communicate between all of these databases securely and make sure that the information sent has not been tampered with while it's in transit.
X-Road is the data exchange layer that makes everything work together. It started out guardtime blockchain wikipedia just a tool to send queries to different databases but has now evolved into something much more complicated.
It is the first data exchange platform in the world that allows for the automatic exchange of data between countries.
Since Juneautomatic data exchange capability has been established between Estonia and Finland. To ensure secure transfers, all outgoing data from X-Road is digitally signed and encrypted, and all incoming data is authenticated and logged. Since the guardtime blockchain wikipedia of January this year, X-Road has handled an estimated 6. In total, X-Road has handled 3. If one picture is worth words, then this video is worth 5 words. Check it out and I guarantee you'll be excited after the video has ended.
As the video tells you, X-Road is an extremely guardtime blockchain wikipedia part of how our systems work in terms of operation and safety.