Читать книгу Cryptocurrency All-in-One For Dummies - Peter Kent, Kiana Danial - Страница 176

Data sovereignty and digital privacy are going to be huge topics in the future. Fraud prevention will be easier because if the entire economy is utilizing a cryptocurrency, then there will always be an auditable trail inside the blockchain that secures it. This is enticing for law enforcement but a nightmare for consumer privacy.

From a customer perspective, there’s already an audit trail for everything you purchase with a credit or debit card. From an institutional perspective, it’s beneficial to have audit trails because it increases transparency of documentation and life cycles of the movements of these assets between different regions. It adds legitimacy to the trading of assets and allows them to bake compliance into their day-to-day transactions.

The “right to be forgotten” rules in Europe, which allow citizens the right to not have their data forever propagated on the Internet, are a difficult challenge for blockchains, because blockchains can never forget. Governments and corporations would have permanent historical records of every transaction, which could be devastating to national security if they were exposed to the public. In a company’s case, it may allow their competitors to have an inside scoop on how that company is investing.

The biggest challenge to using a permissionless blockchain such as Ethereum or Bitcoin would be in guaranteeing that you haven’t sent money to an OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) country to support terrorism. The answer is that you can’t, because they are somewhat anonymous and anyone can open a wallet. It is possible to create algorithms to trace transaction movement — the U.S. government has been doing this for years — but anyone can move value in a permissionless world.

The OFAC maintains sanctions on specific organizations or individuals in what are considered high-threat countries. The government is unable to track the history of transactions when people and organizations use permissionless platforms anonymously.

The need for KYC and AML makes a case for the permissioned blockchain in the shared ledger space. The software company R3 developed Corda, a private and permissioned blockchain-like platform, to meet many of these challenges directly. They specifically do not globally broadcast the data from their participants. This keeps the data within the Corda blockchain private, and it was the primary nonfunctional requirement requested by the more than 75 banks that worked with R3 to adopt blockchain technology. They need to maintain their privacy and meet strong regulatory demands.