Blockchain, the technology underpinning Bitcoin and other digital currencies, offers promise to shift the gathering and sharing of information in profound ways. It could help form a new kind offinancial system that limits current inefficiencies, or even radically change how parties enter into contract, or monitor supply chains. The technology's distributed ledger allows users in a network to monitor and access peer-to-peer digital transactions in real time. This digital ledger allows users to maintain this information securely by encrypting and allowing access only to those who have permission, given by cryptographic keys. For the art market, blockchain offers a tantalizing possibility. a verifiable provenance research platform that would eliminate or minimize the problems with title history, authenticity, and looting, which have long-plagued the art and antiquities market. This essay examines whether blockchain might offer a chance for the antiquities market to remedy its persistent problems. The antiquities market has been beleaguered by the sale of forgeries, allowed stolen material to find a market, been hampered by market inefficiencies, and even been a haven for looted archaeological material. Distributed ledgers and blockchain could alleviate or eliminate these problems, but only if the market and those who shape it want to utilize them. No technology, no matter how ingenious or elegant, can end problems caused by the unprincipled actors in the antiquities trade. Such change has to come about with a culture shift and continued pressure by regulators and cultural heritage advocates.
This article provides a brief overview of blockchain or distributed ledger technology for archivists and records managers. While in the nascent stage, records are already being created or managed by blockchains. Therefore, it is necessary for archivists and records managers to become familiar with the basics of the technology, along with its benefits and shortcomings, in order to make informed decisions regarding the accessioning of blockchain systems and/or their use in managing record authenticity.
Mark Bell, Alex Green, John Sheridan, John Collomosse · 8 authors
Archives have well-established practices which have been developed over years of working with analogue records. Now they face huge challenges due to the inexorable development of digital technologies. Not only is the heterogeneous nature of the records, their instability and the rapid pace of technological development a threat to the records’ survival, but the ease with which digital records can be altered has put archives in a technology arms race with those parties who would seek to falsify our digital inheritance and undermine democracy.In order to tackle these challenges, the ARCHANGEL project is breaking new ground by using blockchain to record checksums (cryptographic hashes) and other metadata derived from either scanned physical records or born-digital records to allow verification of their integrity over decade- or century-long time spans. This data is permanently preserved through peer-to-peer distribution and consensus checking without the need for a trusted third party, thereby enabling archives to prove the authenticity of the records in their custody.