Blockchained Truth
One common intellectual and technical challenge for humans and machines is to discern the truth from facts. How can I prove who I am to another party? Can I ever control my e-identity information so that only persons or entities authorized by me can access to it?
Data (such as dates and numbers) is raw, general, unorganized, but factual. Datum are just there, to be acknowledged by humans or captured by machines. As such, they may seem random and useless.
Processed and structured data in context, whether done manually or by artificial intelligence, becomes information. Information informs humans or machines about a data subject eg attributes of a person or financial particulars of an entity. Information deriving from data is specific and has meaning.
If information accords with reality, satisfied the test criteria like correspondence, consistency and coherence, we or machines may believe or state that the information is true. Facilitating many-to-many trading of (intangible) goods over the internet requires stakeholders' digital identities and signatures. Applied business ethics also requires that we know our customers, or even the machines!
In the blockchain or decentralized ledger technology (DLT) context, the transaction ledger includes the identity of the person or the entity. Other parties eg identity attestors or financial report auditors can seek permission to access to the data to verify the truth of the relevant information. It appears that the use of hashes to protect data integrity backed up by DLT could be an essential element to advance the common business goal of the 21st C information society!