In the current years, virtualization has been an important subject as birth records, medical records, and even financial transactions are being digitalized to be easily accessed and maintained. This has helped a lot of people as it increases the security and maintenance of the records. It also has an opportunity to make the issuance and the ability to gain it easier, thus making it even more important for government-issued records like the Birth certificate.
Let’s start by first assessing what is the significance of birth certificates as we often take them for granted. We use birth certificates as a regular and sometimes even as the only medium of authentication of our age, it is an iron-clad requirement for college/universities as well as the fundamental for all forms of government documents like Passport, DL, and most forms of social security services also mandates it. See this is why it’s an absolute must for it to be correctly issued and maintained. But an unfortunate and alarming statistic shows that nearly half of the world’s populace isn’t registered for either their birth or death cause of the many issues plaguing the process, hence the unregistered public is excluded from societal benefits and reliefs.
In the current general system, the birth of a kid is mandated to be registered with respected agencies within 21 days and after the submission of the form prescribed by the registrar and authentication of the actual records at the concerned hospital the birth certificate in the current years, virtualization has been an important subject as birth records, medical records, and even financial transactions are being digitalized to be easily accessed and maintained. This has helped a lot of people as it increases the security and maintenance of the records. It also has an opportunity to make the issuance and the ability to gain it easier, thus making it even more important for government-issued records like the Birth certificate.
Let’s start by first assessing what is the significance of birth certificates as we often take them for granted. We use birth certificates as a regular and sometimes even as the only medium of authentication of our age, it is an iron-clad requirement for college/universities as well as the fundamental for all forms of government documents like Passport, DL, and most forms of social security services also mandates it. See this is why it’s an absolute must for it to be correctly issued and maintained. But an unfortunate and alarming statistic shows that nearly half of the world’s populace isn’t registered for either their birth or death cause of the many issues plaguing the process, hence the unregistered public is excluded from societal benefits and reliefs.
The proposed solution to the aforementioned problem is using Blockchain technology for issuing and verifying birth records. As Blockchain isn’t of a monolithic form it uses many different types of frameworks and hashing algorithms like SHA 256, advanced key cryptography for its Public/Private keys, P2P networking, etc. Blockchains are an emerging field in asset-like databases that aggregate transactions/records in blocks, and then these blocks are appended to a chain of existing blocks.
Some of you may argue that the current system of digitalization is good enough and why is the move to an alternative required. It's because despite being a massive upgrade from the previous system, the fraudulent and racketeering activities haven’t quite stopped and keep occurring. Hence the need for an efficient technology to maintain and store data. Blockchain-based solutions seem the best as They create immutable records in a distributed format such that all the data is replicated to all the participators. So, when someone tries to tamper with a record, the person would have to tamper with the data on each client who has participated, thus the possibility of tampering is nearly impossible as the amount of computing power required is very high. This is one of the reasons that this form of technology has the highest security all over the world. Integrating blockchains to secure birth certificates will not only save tons of paperwork but will also more secure as all the fake birth certificate scams will cease to exist as duplicate birth certificates would no longer be valid and neither will they be able to get authenticated.
Now let’s get into the details of how the certificate is issued. The certification is done in 6 simple steps. First, the user submits the mandated info required for the birth certificate. Then a block is created with all the submitted information, the block is then broadcasted to all the clients in the blockchain, furthermore after all the nodes validate the block then only is the new block added to the existing blockchain.
A word synonymous with blockchain is mining and rewards, so obviously we can’t use the most common one which is Proof of Work, which is used on the biggest blockchain i.e., Bitcoin, as the rewards part is quite unnecessary, we substitute it with the non-rewards-based mining techniques like Proof of Stake and Proof of Space. These are quite complex techniques so entire de-fi start-ups are based on them, I will just give a brief overview, Proof of Stake is an Energy-efficient, fast and inexpensive form of mining. While in Proof of Space, the miner does not need to have high computational power, they just need to allocate storage for mining purposes.
S.no | Mining Techniques | Requirements | Application | Reward Based |
1 | Proof Of Work | High Computational Power | Bitcoin | Yes |
2 | Proof Of Stake | Staked | Ethereum | No |
3 | Proof Of Space | High Spatial Requirements | SpaceMint | yes |
In these new mining techniques, there is an important term called Consensus, which states that in the blockchain network a set of nodes are responsible for the addition of a new block in the blockchain, these set of nodes are selected based on various consensus algorithm such as PoW, PoS, etc.
Now for a bit of technicality of the Blockchain, the generation of the certificate is based on public/private key cryptography using hashing algorithms like RSA, which is one of the oldest and yet most secure public-key cryptosystems and also the one most commonly used. There is a sort of magic in the way it works as the Messages can be encrypted by anyone, via the public key, but can only be decoded by someone who knows the prime numbers, which means even if the messages are broadcast in public, it is nearly an impossible task to decrypt them, but for anyone to encrypt them is quite an easy task. The reason for its wide use is the fact that it is an asymmetric algorithm.
Now enough with encryption, let’s get into one of the main functions of the certifications which is to verify its integrity to prevent fraudulent activity, the way this is accomplished without any bulky mechanisms is that it is combined with a hash in its bundle so when it shared the hash is recalculated and compared to verify its integrity.
The cryptographic hash functions are a bit too full of math and have an inherent complexity in them so this will be a bit of an oversimplification, these algorithms produce irreversible and unique hashes. The larger the number of possible hashes, the smaller the chance that two values will create the same hash. The most commonly used algorithm is the SHA 256 algorithm which stands for Secured hash Algorithm 256-bit.
There are tons of material I haven’t discussed to keep this easily understandable for the layperson and I highly encourage you to seek further material on it because apart from the infamous statement “blockchain is the future”, it is truly a marvelous thing to learn and study.
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