IBM’s plan to regulate pot with blockchains isn’t as crazy as it sounds

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Canada is legalizing marijuana and leaving it up to provincial governments to regulate its sale and distribution. The government of British Columbia asked for comments on the best way to manage the province's marijuana market. In a regulatory filing, IBM argued that the province should use a blockchain to manage its legal marijuana market.

That is probably not a sentence that you ever expected to read. But it's not as crazy as it sounds.

IBM helped build a different kind of blockchain

The idea of a blockchain originated with Bitcoin. The Bitcoin blockchain is the public, shared ledger that keeps track of payments in the Bitcoin network. The volatility of Bitcoin's virtual currency has hampered its mainstream adoption as a payment network. But companies quickly realized that the core concept of the blockchain could be repurposed for other applications.

Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments