3FOOD

Third Industrial Revolution Consulting Group
important. Rather than “Band-Aid” solutions to increasingly vulnerable centralized databases,
the Blockchain embeds security into its core distributed architecture.
Amid the shift to the device identity model, users will demand a mix of multi-factor
authentication, likely including encrypted biometrics, to secure their exclusive access to each
device. The information and protocols pertaining to those factors cannot reside on the device
itself, but neither can it be stored in centralized database, which would recreate a vulnerable
attack vector for the most sensitive of all personal information. Instead, the Blockchain could be
used to mediate permissions via each actor’s unique private key access, keeping sensitive data
outside of hackers’ reach.
The Blockchain can also greatly enhance security within the data vault infrastructure itself. Data
vault models such as those developed by Oracle rely on the dynamic management of database
access privileges. But decisions to review, revoke and grant access, as well as changes to each
privileged user’s modes of authentication, need to be auditable without giving away the
underlying information. When combined with privacy-enhancing tools such as homomorphic or
zero-proof encryption, the Blockchain’s time-stamped, immutable sequence of ledger entries
can create an automatic, unbreakable audit trail. (It’s also relevant to numerous other
Luxembourg initiatives described below, especially within the context of anchoring.) This will
give citizens the highest level of confidence possible that administrators of the data vault aren’t
abusing their power and that information residing within it can be trusted.
Getting these digital identity principles right is critical. Identity is the bedrock upon which so
much else of Luxembourg’s future digital economy will be based. Securely identifying the digital
actors, be they human or device will be essential for any expansion of smart contracts,
micropayments, programmable money and machine-to-machine transactions. These are the
kinds of interactions that will give rise to smart electricity grids, smart transportation systems
and the other infrastructure components of an Internet of Things ecosystem. But they must be
secure from attack and protect privacy. A blockchain-based model will be a vital part of that.
2.2 Anchoring/Auditability
A key reason why the Blockchain is described as immutable or tamper-proof is because proofof-work
mining is cumulative. In order to persuade the network to change an old transaction on
the Blockchain, a rogue actor would need to present more computational work than the ledger
has benefitted from since that transaction. The current computing power of the Bitcoin
Blockchain’s network is about 15 million petaFLOPS, or 15 zettaFLOPS. The current market price
of computing power, according to Wiikipedia, is $0.08 per gigaflop. If we take this estimate, it
would take roughly $1.2 Trillion ($1,200,000,000,000) worth of computing power to be
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