Bitfury was one of the first companies built around the process of bitcoin mining, but the startup also now works on private blockchain software. Some would assume this might have a negative impact on the bitcoin-focused aspects of their business. But, while it’s true that the development of private, permissioned ledger systems means there could be less activity on public blockchains over the short term, Bitfury views private blockchains as an intermediate step for governments and other large entities to use public blockchains like Bitcoin.
Bitfury CEO Valery Vavilov and Executive Vice Chairman George Kikvadze recently discussed their use of private blockchains for the advancement of public blockchains on an episode of Laura Shin’s Unchained podcast[1].
Why Should Governments Use Blockchain Technology?
During their interview with Shin, Vavilov and Kikvadze covered the reasons why it’s important for governments and other large organizations around the world to move a large portion of their activities onto the blockchain.
“You could put the government as one of the biggest service providers for the citizens because every government provides thousands of different services to its citizens,” said Vavilov.
In Bitfury’s view, these services provided by governments tend to be inefficient. Vavilov pointed to land-title systems as a specific example, where various third parties are used to prove ownership over the course of a few days or a few months (depending on the country).
“Why [are the delays and other inefficiencies] happening? Because you don’t trust the systems. You don’t trust the data in the systems. And every time you do this transaction, you need to do these checks again and again and again,” added Vavilov. “Once you place data on a blockchain, it cannot be deleted and it cannot be altered. [With] this, you don’t need to check the same operation
