Blockchain technology as s support infrastructure in e-Government

Abstract

The blockchain technology, including Bitcoin and other crypto currencies, has been adopted in many application areas during recent years. However, the main attention has been on the currency and not so much on the underlying blockchain technology, including peer-to-peer networking, security and consensus mechanisms. This paper argues that we need to look beyond the currency applications and investigate the potential use of the blockchain technology in governmental tasks such as digital ID management and secure document handling. The paper discusses the use of blockchain technology as a platform for various applications in e-Government and furthermore as an emerging support infrastructure by showing that blockchain technology demonstrates a potential for authenticating many types of persistent documents.