The British government is considering paying out research grants with bitcoinhttp://qz.com/670708/the-british-government-is-considering-paying-out-research-grants-with-bitcoin/The United Kingdom’s government is exploring using bitcoin, or some permutation of the blockchain technology that underpins it, to pay out and monitor taxpayer-funded research grants.
Matthew Hancock, the minister for the Cabinet Office and paymaster general, said today the cabinet had begun exploring ways to use blockchains in the government, with a particular interest in how it could be used in the disbursal of government research grants.
“Monitoring and controlling the use of grants is incredibly complex. A blockchain, accessible to all the parties involved, might be a better way of solving that problem,” Hancock said in a speech at Digital Catapult, a government-funded think tank. Hancock cited bitcoin as a successful example of “distributed ledgers,” another phrase for blockchains, being used to track currency.
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