The "diplomas on blockchain" movement is slowly gathering speed.
It's been more than 5 years since Antonopoulos helped the University of Nicosia to upload Merkle trees of many Univeristy diplomas to the bitcoin blockchain.
Already in 2017 a number of initiatives launched in order to use the Ethereum blockchain and its higher data capacity to store individual diploma hashes.
Alas, Ethereum has a number of serious drawbacks for this use case:
- unpredictable and often significant transaction fees
- high cost to store data which makes storing more than a diploma hash impractical at scale
From 2 it follows that "diplomas on Ethereum" are "injections": you can prove that a diploma has been hashed to Ethereum but that diploma is not "discoverable": you cannot search the blockchain data to find someone holding the kind of qualification you are seeking to hire.
Here is where steem and hive are so much more powerful. Let's look at a practical example: a respected blockchain architect with Fujitsu, Chris Pilling has just uploaded his "blockchain developer - ethereum" diploma hash ... on Ethereum. So he can prove that he's the owner of that certification.
But note the irony: someone looking to hire a certified Ethereum blockchain developer cannot search the Ethereum data for Chris's diploma but instead needs to turn to LinkedIn, a centralized platform!
That would not have been the case had Chris instead uploaded his diploma to steem or hive.
First of all, note that steem and hive have by design no transaction fees (as in "zero fees, always zero").
Second, let's quickly get some inspiration from the W3C specification for Verifiable Credentials and write some pseudo-JSON in order to make the certification machine readable and hence discoverable:
{
"@context": [
"https://www.w3.org/2018/credentials/v1",
"https://www.w3.org/2018/credentials/examples/v1"
],
"id": "https://lnkd.in/dPQ2b4g",
"type": ["VerifiableCredential", "AlumniCredential"],
"issuer": "https://blockchaintrainingalliance.com",
"issuanceDate": "2021-03-03T19:73:24Z",
"credentialSubject": {
// This would be a DID of Chris Pilling
"id": "did:example:ebfeb1f712ebc6f1c276e12ec21",
"alumniOf": {
// This would be a DID of the Blockchain Training Alliance
"id": "did:example:c276e12ec21ebfeb1f712ebc6f1",
"name": {
"value": "BTA Certified Blockchain Developer - Hive",
"lang": "en"
}
}
}
}
To top it off, here is also a human-friendly picture of the actual cardboard diploma
The wealth of functionalities does not stop there, with steem and hive. Instead, once I published something, I can come back and update a publication with additional information (voiding a diploma if needed or marking the fact that it expired).
Here's for instance blockchain information that can serve in building proofs:
Chris's diploma has been saved in:
Transaction a43052dab070a20b585243a8176340a1c2302023
Included in block 52,053,660
(click to see the transaction in a block explorer)
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