Blockchain technology for print

Practical applications: Blockchain technology for print

You may already know that blockchain technology provides a secure and immutable shared ledger – a “single version of truth”. How it does this is described later in this article, but first let’s look at why it matters to the print industry. Much of the initial hype around blockchain has settled down, which is probably a good thing. This is an appropriate time to consider the future potential for practical applications built on blockchain technology. Since the printing industry is primarily about communicating information, and so much information is variable and transactional, the concept of an immutable and secure shared ledger to hold that information has a place in the industry. The greatest potential impact is in two areas – protection of data, and synchronization of transactions. Protection of data

When considering how to protect print data from modification and exfiltration, traditional file transfer between servers can be challenging. Consider the security audits that need to be conducted and time spent validating the systems and servers that will house that data, yet there is no guarantee that a server will not be hacked in the future resulting in a data breach.

What if the data was stored in a blockchain and each party could only access the specific parts of the records required for each step in the creation, printing and delivery process? This would effectively be a serverless “pull” of a subset of the data based on the requirements of a specific role. The full dataset would

never be transferred or stored unencrypted on the recipient’s server, and modification would not be possible without immediate detection.

Synchronization of transactions

Think about the nature of the data in a transaction between two businesses. Each party keeps their own accounting records, and printed documents travel between them including quotes, sales orders, invoices, shipping documents, and financial statements. These are essentially notes exchanged with the intent to keep records synchronized. Consider this process in terms of the analogy of betting on a hockey game. Imagine you were at a hockey game and you had a wager based on a number of factors - goals, points. and penalties. Now imagine there is no scoreboard. You and the party you are betting against each keep score independently and occasionally pass notes back and forth. Then at the end of the month you exchange statements. What is the likelihood that they will match, and how much work will be involved in reconciling discrepancies at that point? Of course, in a real game there is a scoreboard. A single version of truth that is visible to both parties. If there is a dispute over what the scoreboard says it is detected immediately. There is no need to pass notes. Currently business has no such scoreboard, which results in a lack of synchronization. With blockchain technology, could the printing industry make the shift from ”passing notes” to providing this scoreboard? How a blockchain works

A blockchain is a chain of blocks, each representing a record or transaction in a shared ledger. These blocks are interlinked through a cryptographic hash calculated based on the data in the block, so that once a block has been added to the chain (or ledger) it is validated by the hash. The blockchain forms a shared ledger on a peer to peer network. The ledger is decentralized or distributed such that every peer has a copy, and new transactions are added in "blocks" to the ledger by consensus. The multiple copies of the ledger mean it is virtually impossible to change the data later - making it immutable. The blockchain concept started in print

Years before the first fully digital blockchain emerged in 2008, a timestamping service called Surety provided a way to timestamp digital documents using a cryptograph hash. They did not use a peer to peer network to store the resulting chain though. Rather than adding the hashes to a digital shared ledger they published the hash weekly in the New York Times classified section. This effectively made the data tamper-proof since there would be no way to modify the hash after it had been printed and distributed in every copy of the paper. Blockchain’s future in print

It’s always difficult to predict the future, so it’s hard to say what specific implementations of blockchain technology will be adopted and when. However, given that the print industry is in the business of communicating information, and blockchain is a shared ledger that stores information with a single version of the truth, we can confidently predict that there will be a place for blockchain in the future of the print industry.

Wally Vogel is a Certified Engineering Technologist and a Certified Blockchain Professional. He has founded multiple software companies specializing in transaction processing for government entities and business enterprises and is currently serving as a director for Sparcblock, a Canadian company helping businesses streamline B2B transactions. E-mail: wvogel@sparcblock.com