Alternative Blockchain Application in Academia

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Abstract on Alternative Blockchain Application in Academia
“As an HR person I would always get depressed when we had extended a job offer to
someone and their background check came back funky. Most of the time, the problem
was falsification of educational credentials. In other words, a job-seeker would tell us
that they graduated from a college, but the college registrar’s office told us they’d never
heard of the person.”
Liz Ryan- Forbes Contributor

Indeed a surprisingly large percentage of people lie on their resumes to get a plus in a
competitive job market.
Could the cryptocurrency’s authenticating blockchain technology bring massive change to
how employers verify job candidates’ credentials? And to how Universities and Academic
Institutions alleviate fraud ?

The solution would be by recording events that may have occurred on ledgers, and it can be seen
online, by anyone, without compromising the privacy of the parties involved.
These ledgers can be shared and distributed amongst different nodes, and only be changed once
there is a shared consensus among all nodes.
Once information is entered, it cannot be erased, and the distributed nature of these records —
along with a built-in layer of crypto-graphic hash functions— make them impossible to hack or alter
by any one individual.

Discovering Bitcoin and its prevalent innovation – the Blockchain brings us a step further to
the answer.
Bitcoin did not only revolutionize the path to decentralize the global financial system using
a peer-to-peer, open source model but it is proving a significant impact in other applications,
such a decentralized permanent unalterable store of all types of information or assets, not
just as a currency or payment system.

Hence aiming to deter the shocking common practice of job applicants ’spiffing up’ or utter
lying on their resumes , academic certificates , and worst of all forging them ...

Today, i am happy to share with you Design Parameters to issue Academic Certificates
whose authenticity can be verified through the Bitcoin blockchain.
• The process would involve no other services or products other than the Bitcoin blockchain
• The process would allow someone to authenticate a University X certificate without
having to contact the University X itself.
• The process would allow someone to complete the process even if the University X no
longer existed.

“Lying about education credentials is a common problem, and today it is very easy to
counterfeit academic diplomas and certificates . In addition, the process to check someone’s
degree is quite laborious, as you need to get the school’s contact information, reach the
right person and do it again for every candidate. Medium and big companies often delegate
this task to third parties as it’s very time and money consuming.”
Blake Haggerty, a recruiter at CoreOS.

The blockchain is the future of certification, and in the following years, academia will use
the public blockchain to secure their certificates and diplomas. It is much more efficient,
secure, and simple than what you can find today in the industry.

Indeed, authenticating university diplomas may only be the tip of the blockchain iceberg:
some experts believe that the blockchain’s decentralized and distributed consensus model of
record-keeping will also revolutionize the way we vote , create contracts and licenses , or
transfer ownership of assets.

14/02/2016
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