“ Screven County, Georgia made history on November 5, 2024 when it became the first county in the United States to use the Bitcoin blockchain to safeguard the results of its elections.

The Screven County Board of Elections worked with Simple Proof, a U.S. company that protects digital records using the Bitcoin blockchain, to ensure that their election results couldn’t be altered.”

Very cool. If there is one thing I don’t think people appreciate is its ability to act as an independent system of record immune to the influence of, ell, everyone and thing. I expect to see a lot more of this in the future.

In a similar vein as AI and deepfakes continue to proliferate I could see a person’s reputation being what differentiates them from all the fakes done in their name. And they would prove their work belongs to them, by signing digital artefacts whatever they may be with their public key, a bit like a big, public, voluntary identity provider, not dissimilar to how pgp works.

I’m sure this is happening already but I can see it grow in the future as it gets more and more difficult to confirm who said what and attempting to distinguish what a person actually said vs what 100 extremely accurate deep fakes made it look like a person said. Hopefully still many years away from that though.

Thanks for posting!