From a Government of Canada perspective, Blockchain is probably not an ideal technology for the following situations:

• Systems requiring high performance (millisecond) transactions
• Small or single organizations (no business network)
• Few contributors to the ledger
• A database replacement
• A messaging solution
• A transaction processing replacement
• Policy Opportunity

The book “The Business Blockchain” outlines a simple method to identify the various areas that blockchain will influence using the acronym ATOMIC:

• Assets – digital assets can be created, managed, and transferred using blockchain
• Trust – rules can be inserted into transactions to represent trust and validation by the network instead of a central authority
• Ownership – timestamping of documents that are cryptographically secure represents irrefutable proof of ownership
• Money – provide a means to make payment in exchange for the value for good and services
• Identity – move beyond document based evidence for identity
• Contracts – insert business logic to manage the conditional flow of enforcing agreements
  

Recourse

The decentralized nature of blockchain raises cross-jurisdiction and multinational questions. For example, if Canada participates in a public ledger and the cause of an issue within the public ledger is external to Canada then what recourse can Canada pursue?

Smart Contracts

There needs to be a clearer understanding of the legal enforceability, liability and accountability of Smart Contracts.

51% Attack Problem

Blockchain transactions are authenticated by consensus. This makes it theoretically vulnerable to an attack - if 51% of the computing power were to collude there is the risk that this majority could control which transactions are accepted into the blockchain.

Know Your Customer

The Government of Canada must ensure that blockchain implementations are capable of meeting any regulation requirements that do not permit anonymous transactions.

In Canada, public sector use of blockchain technology has been limited to proof of concepts e.g.

• Bank of Canada is exploring its application for payment systems
• Natural Resources Canada in relation to the Extractive Sector Transparency Measures Act
• Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada for tracking immigration applications
• The federal government also recently undertook a joint initiative with the province of Ontario and the city of Toronto to explore streamlining business permits and licenses[6]
• National Research Council is exploring use of blockchain for the transparent administration of government contracts
  

There are numerous examples of expressed interest in blockchain and its support for continued research and development outside of Canada:

• The government of Brazil announced its intention to move petitions and popular voting onto Ethereum;
• Chile uses Ethereum to track the data and finances from the energy grid, hoping to combat corruption and exploitation through transparent, immutable data available for every citizen to see;
• Dubai is on the move to become an entirely integrated, blockchain-powered city by 2020;
• Estonia became the poster-child of the distributed ecosystem and matured into a “digital republic” by moving many of its national systems onto the Ethereum blockchain.
• Other countries, such as India[7] and Australia[8], are exploring blockchain to secure citizen’s digital data.
• The city of Zug, Switzerland — a long-time crypto bastion — began offering digital IDs registered on Ethereum in 2017;
• The United Arab Emirates government is exploring a wide range of use cases, including business registration,[9] trade,[10] and central bank operations.[11]
• The United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is creating a virtual currency strategy to address the risk that undetected noncompliance of virtual currency taxable transactions will result in an increase to their tax gap.[12]
• The United States Government is exploring blockchain solutions for IT procurement.[13]
• A number of countries are discussing the creation of national digital currencies. [14]
• The Bank of England’s top economist, Andrew Haldane, has proposed a national digital currency for the United Kingdom.
• The Deputy Chief of the Bank of Russia, Olga Skorobogatova, said that it was “time to develop national cryptocurrencies”.
• The People’s Republic of China has been experimenting with Ethereum to develop a digital yuan.