Singapore’s Smart Nation project

Smart Nation is Singapore’s national effort to create a future of better living for all its citizens and inhabitants. People, businesses, and government are working together. The project spans from digital identity all the way to IoT sensors that optimize public records.

Singapore believes that people empowered by technology can lead more meaningful and fulfilled lives. It’s exploiting new technologies, networks, and big data to its fullest and actively seeking innovation through regulator sandboxes and active recruitment and incentivizing innovation by startups.

You can see a depiction of the Smart Nation initiative at https://goo.gl/EGmF4X.

Singapore has been able to quickly test and deploy new technology because it has a single layer government. It coordinates policies and efforts across institutions quickly. Smart Nation is an excellent example of this philosophy that new technology trumps politics as usual.

Estonia’s e-Residency

Estonia is a small country in the European Union with 1.3 million inhabitants. It has limited resources to meet the needs of its citizens, but through technology, it has been able to exceed the capabilities of many larger nations. Estonia launched digital ID cards for online services and was the first country to offer e-Residency, a digital identity, available to anyone in the world interested in operating a business online.

Signing up for an Estonia e-Residency takes a few minutes, and the background check costs about $100. Having an e-Residency card does not make you a citizen of Estonia, but it does give you a lot of benefits.

You can also become an Estonia e-Resident. Apply online at www.e-resident.gov.ee/become-an-e-resident/.

After it exited the Soviet Union, Estonia invested heavily in new technology. It shifted completely away from traditional government to one where it utilizes a single-window principle (one point of access for citizens). The single-window principle enables access to all tax and customs services for citizens with a single secure log-in anywhere in the world. Straightforward and paper-free transactions are made possible through this system. Everything, except marriage and real estate purchases, can be done completely online. Estonian citizens can make bank transfers or pay tax in a few minutes.

The Estonian people have come to expect their government to simplify and use more IT solutions. The active development of e-services has reduced the number of visits to the Estonian Tax and Customs Board service bureaus by more than 60 percent between 2009 and 2016, lowering the overall cost.

Estonia upgraded its income and social tax returns environment in 2015 and collected €125 million more in value-added tax (VAT) than the previous year due to the development and extensive usage of e-services. The Estonian government added a tax liability calculator that pulls data from incorporated banking systems of citizens. It also made it easy to submit invoices to the system.

The Estonians have embraced blockchain technologies. The next big development will be a blockchain-enabled cloud. Estonia has hired Ericsson, Apcera, and Guardtime to jointly develop and operate a hybrid cloud platform that will enhance the scalability, resilience, and data security of tax reporting and online health-care advice.

Nasdaq is developing blockchain services in Estonia as well. It’s building a market for private companies that keeps track of the shares they issue and enables them to settle transactions immediately. It’s focused on improving the proxy voting process for enterprises. It will be a way to register your business.

The Bitnation project is collaborating with Estonia to offer a public notary to Estonian e-Residents, which will allow Estonia’s e-Residents, regardless of where they live or do business, to notarize their marriages, birth certificates, and business contracts on a blockchain. Blockchain notarized documents aren’t legally binding in the Estonian jurisdiction, or in any other nation or state, but it will allow citizens to prove the age of these documents.

Better notarization in China

China has a love–hate relationship with cryptocurrency. On the one hand, Chinese citizens have been trying to use tokens as a means to launder money out of the country or hide profits from taxation. This has caused the Chinese government to tighten regulation around the use of cryptocurrencies. However, as the usefulness of the underlying blockchain technology has expanded beyond the movement of value, China has begun to embrace blockchain technology.

An interesting example of its early use was by Ancun Zhengxin Co., which is leading the shift to electronic data notarization services in China through partnerships with more than 100 traditional notarial offices in 28 provinces. It’s also offering electronic data storage and blockchain notarization solution through traditional offices.

Ancun publishes thousands of records in a publicly searchable blockchain that allow users to go back and check the authenticity and age of notarized documents.

Many startups are working on similar concepts in the United States. For example, WordProof (https://wordproof.com) lets you hash and timestamp dates on your website.

Web 3.0 email

Mailchain (https://mailchain.com) is a new blockchain-based email platform that allows you to send fully encrypted messages to other Mailchain accounts and to ETH and NEAR wallet holders. Mailchain gives you complete ownership of your data and is working to make the Internet a little more private. (Unencrypted email is a major vulnerability.)

All Mailchain messages are encrypted end-to-end by default. Your private keys used to encrypt your messages are never revealed to the Mailchain protocol. Your secret recovery phrase is used to create a series of private keys, each of which perform independent actions that allow you to register addresses and authenticate, store, and save messages privately.

The Mailchain application encrypts your data from within your web browser. The encrypted files are then stored in Mailchain. Only you can decrypt these files via your private keys. Mailchain can’t decrypt your secret recovery phrase, messages, or registered addresses.

Mailchain uses a messaging key in place of your wallet key to encrypt and decrypt messages for each address. Messaging keys are more secure for encryption and mean you don’t expose your wallet’s private key.

When you register a wallet address with your Mailchain account, a new messaging key is created. With your wallet, you sign a confirmation to indicate that this key should be used for messaging. Signing this confirmation creates proof that users can independently verify. You only know the private key for messaging.

Registered addresses are encrypted before being stored, and you only need to verify ownership of your wallet address once. Mailchain disconnects your wallet after your wallet has created the proof. Your wallet private key is never exposed.

Each time an email is sent, a new encryption key is created to encrypt the message and its location. The encryption key is then uniquely encrypted for each address receiving the message. A new key is created for each recipient and for each new message. This is important to ensure that only the intended recipient reads the message’s contents.

When a message is sent, the message is encrypted and stored on distributed storage. An encrypted “delivery request” holds information for the message recipient to be able to collect their encrypted message. Your messages are held on what is called an ephemeral transport layer, which is temporary and only exists until your message has been retrieved or your email expires.

When you receive a new message, it’s saved in your private inbox. Before being stored, your new email is re-encrypted with a key that is specific to your inbox.

Your inbox is also secured via a private key. All IDs, filters, and metadata are encrypted. Mailchain can’t identify relationships even if multiple addresses received the same messages.

If this looks like an interesting secure email option, navigate to https://mailchain.com to claim your free email account.

No single Internet security solution is perfect. There are ways to view your data (for example, by using Pegasus spyware) even if you send fully encrypted messages. Developed by the Israeli cyber-arms company NSO Group, Pegasus is covertly installed on all types of devices running iOS and Android. It uses a zero-click attack that exploits existing loopholes in data verification. Pegasus is capable of reading text messages, tracking calls, collecting passwords, tracking your location, accessing your device’s microphone and camera, and harvesting information from other apps.

Owning your identity in web3

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a nonprofit organization established in 2012 that helps develop protocols and guidelines that ensure the long-term growth of the web. The W3C developed the Modern Paradigm for Standards, which is intended to help radically improve the way people around the world develop new technologies and innovate for humanity.

An important initiative has been decentralized identifiers (DIDs). DIDs, also known as self-sovereign identity, are a new type of globally unique identifier. Driven by the flaws of centrally issued identity, these new self-issued IDs allow you to control your identity using digital signatures that use cryptographic proofs.

Most unique identifiers, or models of identity (such as your Social Security number), are not under your control. External authorities such as governments issue your IDs and decide what they mean. They’re valid only in specific contexts and recognized by certain organizations. They may disappear or cease to be valid at any time. These IDs often reveal personal information about you that is not necessary. IDs are also fraudulently replicated by malicious third parties — all without your consent.

Because the generation and assertion of DIDs is entity-controlled by you, you can have as many DIDs as necessary to maintain the separation of personas and interactions online. One of the fundamental tenets that blockchain enthusiasts talk about is the personal responsibility of owning the data that you create and that identifies you uniquely. This concept may seem straightforward, but most people don’t own or control the data that represents their identities.

Most of the control is held by centralized databases that are vulnerable to hacking. These databases hold the information, and certificate authorities validate that the information is correct and unaltered. In the information age, your data is your identity. The more distributed the data is, the greater the likelihood that it will fall into the hands of those who want to misuse it.

Blockchain-based identity places control of identity in the hands of the individuals or corporations that the identity represents. Central databases and certificate authorities aren’t necessarily replaced. Data still needs a secure home, and it still makes sense to have third parties validate the authenticity of documents.

The value in changing the order of responsibility around identity is that it becomes harder to steal, hold hostage, or manipulate the underlying documents that represent your identity. Information is shared as needed without exposing unnecessary information. An irrevocable and globally accessible identity may not always be a good thing. Those building identity platforms will need to be mindful of consumer protection such as credit forgiveness, the right to be forgotten, and voter anonymity.

Trusted authorship

Smart contracts and chaincodes have created a new opportunity for knowledgeable individuals and corporations to monetize their information. These types of systems need trusted sources of information to execute against. These trusted sources could be rating agencies, weather outlets, or just about anything else.

You could also connect IoT devices to a blockchain infrastructure and have them create their own voices and identities on a blockchain network. They need to build trust over time and can still be corrupted at any given point. Past honesty doesn’t prevent future dishonesty or the corruption of a source of information.

Not all smart contracts or chaincodes are self-contained or execute against infallible sources. The more practical and applicable business use case requires information to be derived from sources outside the known universe of any given blockchain network. Several startups are attacking this problem from different angles.

OpenSea is a startup that is building a decentralized protocol for content ownership, discovery, and monetization. It does this via an NFT marketplace. Its system is designed to record and timestamp metadata and ownership information about creative assets, such as writing and music.

Factom has created Acolyte, a service that allows users to build a reputation over time for the information they provide to the network. Smart contract builders can subscribe and compensate oracles that are created. They can also rate them for their trustworthiness.

From a dramatically different angle, Augur, another blockchain startup, has pioneered the idea of prediction markets. Augur is a platform that rewards users for predicting future real-world events such as election or corporate buyouts. The bets are made by trading virtual shares in the outcome of events. Users make money by buying shares in the correct outcomes. The cost of the shares fluctuates based on how the community feels about the likelihood of the event acutely happening. Augur is similar to a betting website. Anyone can make a prediction. Anyone can create a prediction market for any given event. This would allow you as a business owner, for example, to take a poll on what people think is most likely to occur. It may also uncover inside information that authors would like to be able to capitalize on.

Intellectual property rights

One of the hardest-hit industries that is struggling with intellectual property rights is the music industry. Artists at the top are squeezed out economically by the many intermediaries that rely on their creative work. Small artists can’t make music a primary source of income because they only see a small fraction of the revenue. Mega-stars make it on the sheer volume of fans.

The Internet has made it easier for artists of all sizes to share their work. At the same time, it has made it even harder for people to make a comfortable living doing what they love. The music industry food chain is long, and each intermediary takes a small piece of the pie and adds to the length of time that it takes for funds to finally reach the artist. Often, the artist will wait up to 18 months or more to see any money and may only get $0.000035 per instance of her music being streamed. This situation is a best-case scenario in our current market, with no one defrauding the artist.

Blockchain has been introduced as a way to help lighten the massive financial burden on creatives. Cryptocurrency could be used to reduce transaction fees associated with credit cards and fraud. It would also open up new markets in developing countries that don’t have regular access to credit cards.

An even more interesting but less straightforward possibility would be migrating the whole music industry ecosystem onto a blockchain system that utilized smart contracts or chaincode to facilitate immediate payment for utilization. It could also clarify ownership of licenses and make it easier for consumers to license music for commercial use.

Several projects are working on this issue and looking to promote a healthy, sustainable, and frictionless ecosystem — one that does not displace market player but does allow artists to gain a bit more from their hard work.

UjoMusic is beta testing its platform that lets users sell and license music directly. It utilizes the Ethereum network, smart contracts for execution, and Ether (the Ethereum cryptocurrency) for payment. You can download a whole song or just the vocal and instrumental stems for commercial or noncommercial use. The musicians are then paid immediately with Ether.

Peertracks is an early blockchain startup that’s working on changing the music industry. It’s a music streaming website that allows users to download and discover new artists. It does this through its peer-to-peer network called MUSE and the creation of individual artist tokens. These tokens work like other cryptocurrency and fluctuate in value depending on the popularity of the artist. Since 2020 however there has been a proliferation of platforms that let you discover artists including OpenSea, SuperRare, Nifty Gateway, and Mintable just to name a few. Artists themselves have also gotten into the game, Snoop Dogg launching his own NFTs on MakersPlace.

Blockchain technology doesn’t remove the need for music labels and distributors. However, they’ll need to act quickly if they don’t want to be displaced by new companies that adapt this more efficient model, just as Netflix disrupted Blockbuster.