Can Public Ledgers Fix the Trust Gap in Online Services?

ByRonny Alexander Hours

Can Public Ledgers Fix the Trust Gap in Online Services? Every week there's a fresh reason to wonder who's telling the truth online. A five-star review written by someone paid in vouchers. A delivery app insisting your order arrived when it plainly didn't. An energy firm that can't find the meter reading you sent in March. I've got a folder on my phone that's basically just screenshots of order confirmations, and I doubt I'm the only one. Oddly, gambling is one of the more interesting places to look. Behind the scenes, a regulated UK online casino gets its games checked by approved test labs, and the Gambling Commission can ask for its records more or less whenever it fancies. Players almost never see any of it, mind. So there's been the odd bit of chatter in the industry about sticking those test results on-chain where anyone could look them up. Not a bad thought, and it isn't really a gaming question either. Where Trust Breaks Down Online Most online disputes come down to one awkward fact. They've got the records. You haven't. Your parcel tracker says "delivered, 14:02" and that's that, it's sitting on some server you'll never visit, and if the courier wants to tweak it or just not hand it over, good luck. Reviews are a similar mess. The Competition and Markets Authority has spent the past few years going after fake and incentivised reviews, and new consumer law now treats them as banned practice. Spotting a fake still comes down to instinct, mostly. Six exclamation marks in a row is usually a clue. A reviewer whose only other post praises a garden hose. Then there's the slow drip of data breaches. Each one chips away at the idea that a big brand's database is a safe place to keep anything. People haven't stopped using these services, they just trust them a bit less every time an apology email lands. What an Auditable Record Actually Looks Like You wouldn't put actual customer details on a blockchain, by the way. UK GDPR would have something to say about it, and so would the customers. What firms can publish is a fingerprint. Take the file, a fairness audit, say, or a day's worth of delivery confirmations, run it through what's called a hashing function, and out comes a short jumble of letters and numbers. Post that jumble on-chain. Months later anyone with the original file can run the same process, and if the jumble matches, nobody's touched it. None of this is hypothetical. There are supply chain pilots following coffee beans and tuna from farm or boat to supermarket this way, and after FTX went under, a handful of crypto exchanges started putting out proof-of-reserves snapshots so customers could check the money was actually there. Neither is perfect. A snapshot only shows one moment, and a ledger can't tell you whether the data going in was honest to begin with. It does make quiet edits after the fact a lot harder to get away with, though. Why Regulators Still Hold the Keys Here's the slightly unfashionable bit for a blockchain audience. A public ledger proves a record hasn't changed. It doesn't prove the record was right, and it can't force a company to pay up when something goes wrong. For that, people still lean on the Financial Conduct Authority, Ofcom, the Gambling Commission and the rest of the alphabet. What a ledger can do is make a regulator's job quicker. Trust online won't be fixed by one technology, and anyone selling that line deserves a raised eyebrow. A tamper-proof receipt sitting in public view is still a decent start, especially compared with "please allow 28 days for a response."

Every week there’s a fresh reason to wonder who’s telling the truth online. A five-star review written by someone paid in vouchers.

A delivery app insisting your order arrived when it plainly didn’t. An energy firm that can’t find the meter reading you sent in March. I’ve got a folder on my phone that’s basically just screenshots of order confirmations, and I doubt I’m the only one.

Oddly, gambling is one of the more interesting places to look. Behind the scenes, a regulated UK online casino gets its games checked by approved test labs, and the Gambling Commission can ask for its records more or less whenever it fancies. Players almost never see any of it, mind.

So there’s been the odd bit of chatter in the industry about sticking those test results on-chain where anyone could look them up. Not a bad thought, and it isn’t really a gaming question either.

Where Trust Breaks Down Online?

Most online disputes come down to one awkward fact. They’ve got the records. You haven’t. Your parcel tracker says “delivered, 14:02” and that’s that, it’s sitting on some server you’ll never visit, and if the courier wants to tweak it or just not hand it over, good luck.

Reviews are a similar mess. The Competition and Markets Authority has spent the past few years going after fake and incentivised reviews, and new consumer law now treats them as banned practice. Spotting a fake still comes down to instinct, mostly. Six exclamation marks in a row is usually a clue. A reviewer whose only other post praises a garden hose.

Then there’s the slow drip of data breaches. Each one chips away at the idea that a big brand’s database is a safe place to keep anything. People haven’t stopped using these services, they just trust them a bit less every time an apology email lands.

What an Auditable Record Actually Looks Like?

You wouldn’t put actual customer details on a blockchain, by the way. UK GDPR would have something to say about it, and so would the customers.

What firms can publish is a fingerprint. Take the file, a fairness audit, say, or a day’s worth of delivery confirmations, run it through what’s called a hashing function, and out comes a short jumble of letters and numbers.

Post that jumble on-chain. Months later anyone with the original file can run the same process, and if the jumble matches, nobody’s touched it.

None of this is hypothetical. There are supply chain pilots following coffee beans and tuna from farm or boat to supermarket this way, and after FTX went under, a handful of crypto exchanges started putting out proof-of-reserves snapshots so customers could check the money was actually there. Neither is perfect.

A snapshot only shows one moment, and a ledger can’t tell you whether the data going in was honest to begin with. It does make quiet edits after the fact a lot harder to get away with, though.

Why Regulators Still Hold the Keys?

Here’s the slightly unfashionable bit for a blockchain audience. A public ledger proves a record hasn’t changed. It doesn’t prove the record was right, and it can’t force a company to pay up when something goes wrong. For that, people still lean on the Financial Conduct Authority, Ofcom, the Gambling Commission and the rest of the alphabet.

What a ledger can do is make a regulator’s job quicker. Trust online won’t be fixed by one technology, and anyone selling that line deserves a raised eyebrow.

A tamper-proof receipt sitting in public view is still a decent start, especially compared with “please allow 28 days for a response.”

Ronny Alexander is the founder and lead writer of Co-op Board Games, a site he launched in 2016 to celebrate the fun, challenge, and creativity of cooperative tabletop gaming. A lifelong board gamer, Ronny has spent over 15 years playing co-op games with a core group of friends—along with several other gaming groups—giving him a broad, real-world perspective on what works (and what doesn’t) at the table.