I found this to be very interesting. Someone at Duke shared this on LinkedIn and I thought others would enjoy the ingenuity associated with Validity.id. Ultimately, Validity allows higher education institutions to store credentials (degrees, etc.) on the blockchain instead of using a 3rd party database according to Co-Founder Michael Cutro. https://registrar.duke.edu/student-resources/validity-registry/
I remember a number of ed tech startups pushing this a few years ago, at the peak of when "blockchain!" was the easiest way to separate VCs from their money. I didn't see any advantage to using a blockchain for this over a normal database then, and I still don't see one now.
As Steve informed us, it's certainly not new, for colleges / universities. Here's something from 2018. https://www.highereddive.com/news/more-colleges-are-using-the-blockchain-for-student-records/542093/
I have to do more research but I think the ingenuity and such make the product pretty nifty over a normal database. I will certainly read this. This was my first hearing of such a thing. My apologies that it appears to not be something super new.
My local Uni is doing it too. First in Canada. https://dailynews.mcmaster.ca/articles/mcmaster-becomes-the-first-major-institution-to-offer-digital-degrees/ And of course, so is MIT. Since 2017! They use Bitcoin's blockchain. https://news.mit.edu/2017/mit-debuts-secure-digital-diploma-using-bitcoin-blockchain-technology-1017
I don't think it'll be long before we see the first degree mill that will offer Blockchain verification of its "degrees." It will proclaim the degrees to be "genuine" bogus degrees - not forgeries. No more Apostilles -- Blockchain. At twice or three times the price. Good little money-maker, I suppose. Buy your fake degree with crypto - verify it with Blockchain. Whatever happened to money?
Yeah - I kinda remember them --- Chainbuster, right? In the series, Tony Soprano's 18-19 y.o. son A.J. worked there part-time.
Josh wrote ingenuity but I wonder if he meant immutability, which would be a good reason to store graduation records there where they can never be edited by unscrupulous employees. (Not that that is a major risk.) An immutable log of awarded credentials does seem to be a use case according to that chart. At the same time, there's literally nothing that bitcoin does so much better than existing solutions that it makes sense to switch. Bitcoin is not a "killer app" for any specific use case, IMO.
No, but it's a public and available blockchain. Ready-made. You can use it without having to build & maintain your own. The "Easy Button." There are certainly other available chains, though - just as "easy."
True! And I realize I wrote bitcoin but I really meant blockchain. Bitcoin being one interesting use of the blockchain. University of the Cumblerlands seems to have blockchain as a specialty. Not my thing but learning about it is integrated into each of the core IT courses.
Immutability would mean that schools could update records based on new information, which to put it mildly is not a feature. Note that we're talking about blockchains, not Bitcoin and that they're not the same thing.
Immutability, as in the state of being unchangeable, could be useful for graduation records. Obviously there are rare situations where degrees may be revoked but blockchain would prevent the backdating of degree records by unscrupulous people. Yes, I misspoke and corrected myself after about 5 minutes As it is, I don't think there's anything that blockchain does better than existing options despite the hype.
