Sign up for our daily Newsletter and stay up to date with all the latest news!

Subscribe I am already a subscriber

You are using software which is blocking our advertisements (adblocker).

As we provide the news for free, we are relying on revenues from our banners. So please disable your adblocker and reload the page to continue using this site.
Thanks!

Click here for a guide on disabling your adblocker.

Sign up for our daily Newsletter and stay up to date with all the latest news!

Subscribe I am already a subscriber

IBM wants British Columbia to track legal pot with blockchain tech

Canada is gearing up for the legalization of weed next year, and the provinces are scrambling to figure out how they're going to manage and sell all that bud. Tech giant IBM recently pitched one possible high-tech solution to the British Columbia government: the blockchain.

Blockchain technology, which is behind cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, can help the BC government to stamp out the black market, the IBM document states.

IBM is heavily invested in the blockchain space, and offers a commercial platform to developers and companies that want to experiment with the technology. Blockchains are public ledgers that record every action occurring within the network. This ledger is distributed across many computers, meaning that it's nigh-impossible to forge an entry without anybody else noticing. For cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, the blockchain keeps track of who owns what units of currency going all the way back to when the system was first switched on in early 2009.

Now, IBM Canada wants the BC government to use blockchain technology to keep track of weed as it goes from the manufacturer to some hoser's bong. Or, as the company put it in a document hosted on the BC government's website and marked November 1, "from seed to sale." The document was submitted as part of the BC government's recent public consultation on how to manage legal pot in the province, which ran from late September to November 1.

Read more at Motherboard (Jordan Pearson)
Publication date: