Public records belong on blockchain: VX Technologies CTO Zachary Weiner testifies before Wyoming legislature

The Wyoming State Legislature’s Select Committee on Blockchain, Financial Tech & Digital Innovation Tech on Tuesday heard testimony from Zachary Weiner, founder and CTO of VX Technologies. He urged the legislature to consider adopting digital asset legislation that takes advantage of Bitcoin’s data storage capabilities without compromising information security.

Watch the full testimony here:

Weiner and VX Technologies are cut from a different cloth than many of the other industry participants who testify at these hearings. Rather than concerning itself with coin prices and digital asset exchanges, VX Technologies focuses entirely on how digital asset technologies can be used to empower people. 

In particular, it has used the blockchain to create cutting-edge credentialing technologies, allowing for verifiable records to be stored on-chain without compromising the privacy one would expect to be associated with sensitive data. This has allowed the company to create and launch, for example, VXPass, which creates permanent and private credentials on the blockchain that can be instantly verified by anyone the data owner chooses: think hospitals need to verify that a given treatment took place.

Coming from that background, Weiner gave a different account of blockchain and digital asset technology that is most often presented. He repeated what is often said about Bitcoin: that it is ‘perfect money’ because of several characteristics:

• Decentralization, with no central authority
• Fixed supply of 21 million coins
• Security, thanks to cryptography

But he notes that these factors also allow Bitcoin to be something far more than just money: they make Bitcoin an exceptional platform for data storage. Weiner obviously knows this first-hand from the work being done at VX Technologies. After all, their core business involves dealing with vast amounts of data, and given the nature of the data, it’s imperative that it is able to be stored and managed in a secure and scalable way.

“The Bitcoin blockchain’s capacity for data management is unmistakeably expanding. This trajectory suggests a future where an array of records, including user-specific data, finds a permanent, immutable existence on the blockchain.”

The immutability of that data, however, means that privacy must be a priority. A blockchain can take on all the data you can imagine, but if there’s no way to select which information is publicly available and which is not, then blockchain technology will never be relied on at a wide scale.

Fortunately, data can be hashed, thereby transforming it from sensitive information to a fixed-length alphanumeric value, which can only be translated back into readable data using a signature.

“Lucky for us, Satoshi saw this possible future, and Bitcoin come standard with a signing mechanism, and Bitcoin Signed Messages can prove the technical ownership of specific addresses – without divulging the true content.”

“With this, I wish to make a pivotal assertion: public records belong on the blockchain. By leveraging signatures, we can redact sensitive elements like names and emails while retaining the ability to authenticate the original content. Such an approach guarantees transparency, trustworthiness, and privacy – all in one sweep.”

In light of that, Weiner, in closing, implored the legislature to implement legislation that guards against the ‘hasty’ publication of sensitive information on the blockchain:

“By marrying Bitcoin’s transformative attributes with stringent privacy measures, we chart a course towards a future where innovation and individual security harmoniously coexist.”

Watch: VX Technologies wants to make Bitcoin the global standard