Every bullet this gun fires would be automatically tracked in a database — here’s why

By July 12, 2016Bitcoin Business

Courtesy of IDEO In the midst of horrific shootings happening coast to coast in the US, I stumbled upon a group of people — including a university professor, a project manager, and a software developer — huddled around a laptop, designing a new kind of gun.

Called the Glockchain, the gun would use blockchain technology to track when police guns fire. Every time it’s drawn or fired, it would be recorded on the blockchain — an ultra-secure and transparent distributed database, best known as the ledger for Bitcoin, that tracks transactions. Once something is recorded on the blockchain, it can’t be altered.

A gun that’s tied to the blockchain, then, could force the police into accountability. "Unlike a traditional smart gun, you can see who’s holding the gun. Then you can pair that with video for a time record," says Jing Ling, an IT project manager at Liberty Mutual and member of the Glockchain team.

The Glockchain is one of numerous prototypes created for a new venture called Ideo coLAB, which brings together partner companies (in this case NASDAQ, Citi Ventures, Fidelity and Liberty Mutual), designers from innovation and design firm Ideo , and fellows from a variety of backgrounds to find human-centered applications for emerging technologies like the blockchain over the course of the summer. Ariel Schwartz/Tech Insider During the multi-day design sprints (just two to four days to create a product), teams go all the way from idea to prototype. In the hour I spent watching the teams work, the Glockchain group went from modeling the gun on a computer to laser-cutting an anatomical diagram of the gun in slices.

Other ideas generated during the Ideo design sprints include a smart container that tracks and traces shipping containers and a device that scans trees to make it easy to track carbon […]

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