Blockchain based electronic health record (EHR) and health insurance

[HeptaSean]

@7.4d4

As for trust, I trust that the blockchain proof of a university degree, signed by the renowned university professor’s key on the correct date, buried deep in the Cardano ledger, will be much harder to forge than a piece of paper with a handwritten signature and an official looking stamp. It will also be much easier to verify the blockchain proof from the other side of the world.

We will still need people, processes and institutions. But reputations can be built from a strong and immutable “root of trust”.

@7.4d4

But the blockchain can be the root of trust used to control access to the database information.

I still don’t see, what makes the blockchain an adequate “root of trust”.

If I know the public key of the “renowned professor”, I can check the signature on a diploma without any blockchain in between.
If I don’t know their public key, I cannot distinguish between a diploma signed by them and a diploma signed by some random John Doe, even if it is recorded on the blockchain.

The point I wanted to make is elaborated a bit better by this blog post:

SSI-on-Blockchain is Objectively a Bad Thing

Regarding Ethiopia, they seem to have settled for another digital identity solution (apparently without any blockchain shenanigans) on a national scale: https://id.gov.et/ (Cardano/Atala/IOG not found among the partners: https://id.gov.et/international/)

There is very little to be found if they continue to pursue the Atala Prism solution in the education sector in parallel. Would only make sense if it is somehow interoperable.

If it is good to sell Prism in developing countries, given that – by what is publicly available – it still more looks like vapourware than a production-ready solution, is at least questionable. Questions on more detailed technical specs, open-sourced parts of the software, etc. pp. have been posed here for months, actually at least almost two years:

Is Atala Prism Open Source? If not, will it ever be?

Was talking to some friends who were versed in the privacy and security space, and introduced them to Atala Prism. The immediate red flags they brought up was the lack of open source information and concentrated data storage. So i was wondering if there’s more information on this that could be shared that i don’t already know. First, is Atala Prism Open Source? Second, would someone be capable of creating multiple accounts so to speak, or separating their data so as to avoid Meta-Data leaks?

By the way: Even if the Ethiopian government does continue to pursue Atala Prism, they probably won’t boost Cardano in the process: “Ethiopia’s central bank warns against trading in digital currencies” https://www.africanews.com/2022/06/06/ethiopia-s-central-bank-warns-against-trading-in-digital-currencies/
(Due to the lack of information above, the relationship between Prism and Cardano is also quite unclear, might well be that it is – like Catalyst voting – just another permissioned blockchain running inside of IOG, having very little if anything to do with us.)