I am doing some research on the possible uses of Blockchain by Police Services. Could Concordium be used for call handling, victim updates, file building and sharing with other agencies. Really just looking for ideas on how it could be applied. Would you ever forsee a Blockchain containing offender convictions, or medical history which could be accessed by different agencies.
How would something like this be implemented. How do you think Concordium could be used in this area?
For the applications you suggest, I do not expect that a blockchain such as Concordium would be particularly useful. The blockchain is useful for providing a basis of trust where parties cannot or will not generally trust each other or a third party. The main example of this is cryptocurrency, where the blockchain arbitrates the order of transactions, which prevents double spending. With police services, I imagine that a police service can be treated as a trusted party, with respect to the data that it handles, and therefore a blockchain would likely not provide much value.
While we aim to make the Concordium blockchain as fast and efficient as possible, the inherent constraints of a permissionless blockchain mean that it will never be as efficient as a centralised database. It is also not indented to be used as a general database, since the data on the chain is public and replicated across all nodes in the network. However, it is reasonable to record cryptographic hashes of data on the blockchain, where you wish to establish some property of the data that can be proved later.
For example, you could register the hash of a document that you created to prove that you created it before the time that you registered it. This could be useful, for instance, in a copyright dispute. However, it would be better to register the work with a (centralised) copyright office.