Advances in the Internet and related technologies have revolutionized communication and commerce, which in turn challenge our social, legal, and cultural practices and policies.  Given the deluge of ambient and invited information streams in our lives, a key challenge each of us faces daily is who and what to trust.  Trust is not a technical issue; however, people leverage technology to influence the trust of others, which gives rise to alternative uses of technology to understand and manage those influences.  Blockchain technology (distributed ledger) has generated considerable interest for managing the trust of information and transactions.  The application that has garnered most attention are the various cryptocurrencies (e.g., Bitcoin), however, publishers, governments, corporations, artists, and archives are investigating blockchain technology for primacy and authenticity purposes.  These applications range from authenticating electronic medical records to insuring primacy or exchange of public or private digital assets.  Although there are no shortage of ideas for applying blockchain techniques, many technical, theoretical, and practical questions arise.  Consider this case for example:

Use blockchain to maintain the provenance of digital objects.  Phone cameras and other apps (e.g., notepads) immediately compute a checksum upon creation of a digital object and form a triple (checksum, timestamp, device ID) with optional personal identifier (only if creator of object wants to be identified) and this triple gets added to a blockchain.  What are the technical requirements for establishing such a practice?  What kinds of infrastructure must be developed to support it as it scales?  Does this strategy insure primacy for an original object?  Authenticity of adversarial or alternative objects?  Should the blockchain be fully distributed or maintained by trusted parties? What are the security risks? What are the legal or regulatory issues within and across national boundaries?  Will this save resources for public record creators or for-profit entities?  Will the public trust the computed primacy or authenticity?  These and other questions apply to this application as well as to others that depend on blockchain.  To begin to address some of these questions, the Symposium on Blockchain and Trusted Repositories at UNC-Chapel Hill will host a set of speakers and discussions from technical, financial, and legal/regulatory perspectives. 

For the symposium agenda please go to the Knowledge Trust website.

Registration: $100 Regular; $50 Student

IMPORTANT: A refund will be offered, minus a $10.00 processing fee, for refund inquiries submitted before October 29, 2018. NO REFUNDS ARE PERMITTED AFTER OCTOBER 29, 2018. For refund inquiries, please contact Susan Sylvester at ssylvest@email.unc.edu