He talked about it as a "chain of signatures" in the paper, and it is very much the groundbreaking part of bitcoin. It was the necessary component for the creation of a distributed timestamping server, which was the missing piece to make a system like bitcoin fully decentralised.

I agree though that there is a lot of hype for "blockchain technology" and this seems like a weird use of it, since you already have a central third party that everyone has to trust.

It's a Merkle tree [1]. I don't see governments urged to use more B-trees or inverted indexes.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree

"chain of digital signatures" was referring to the method of assigning value between owners via transactions (s2). That's not the blockchain, nor was it a new concept -- see bmoney, Wei Dai, 1998.

They described the blockchain as an "ongoing chain of hash-based proof-of-work, forming a record that cannot be changed without redoing the proof-of-work"

Thanks for the correction re: terminology used, it's been years since I read the paper.

In the UK specifically there is a strong push by the public to prevent the government from being a large holder of public data. That is the reason we don't have a public ID card scheme, instead we have a distributed ID system[1] which is used to identify you. I would assume that this portion would benefit from stronger guarantees as there isn't a single arbiter of truth there.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/introducing-govuk...

I thought the reason we don't have an ID card system was that it was too bloody costly.

That aside, one of the identity partners is Verizon, which don't even do business in the UK. What's their incentive here? Why is giving my passport or driving license details to Verizon better than giving it to Government, a branch of which issued it in the first place? Frankly I think it's nuts and not a win for privacy.

They do a fair bit of enterprise business, but not much in the way to customer facing.