[Cryptography] Blockchained/digitally signed *MAPS* ?

[Henry Baker]

The recent incident with Lake Ontario has proven how weak our digital maps are from censorship/manipulation/hacking.


Two $4+ trillion market cap companies folded in less than few days last week to pressure from the US White House to make certain modifications to their (our ?) maps.


So far, MaqQuest has not folded, but it remains to be seen how long Google and Apple will deign to allow MapQuest to remain available in their app stores.


I haven't heard the kind of backlash about this mapping issue that it deserves.


1. If a Great Lake can be renamed overnight, what other changes *that we don't know about* have already been made to Google and Apple maps ?  It might appear that such changes are *routine*, and the machinery was already in place to accede to government interference.


Some possibilities come to mind, some quite nasty: if you fall out of favor, your business disappears from the map so your customers can't find you; if your precinct voted the wrong way in the last election, your precinct disappears from the map (so much for trying to vote in-person instead of by-mail).


2. The vast majority of wars since civilization invented maps in the first place have been fought over what those maps should say. Just ask an Israeli, a Palestinian, a Czech, a Taiwanese, a Ukrainian.


We're talking about *billions* of people killed, maimed or displaced by casual changes to maps.


3. Digital maps have completely replaced paper maps, and most of us are literally lost without them. We routinely allow our GPS's to guide us to school, to a grocery store, to a gas station, to visit our relatives. People worry about LPR's surveilling us, but don't (yet) worry about a bigger problem: can we continue *trusting* our maps that guide us around in the first place ?


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What can we do, when governments -- the traditional makers of "official" maps -- can no longer be trusted to provide accurate information ?


There is OSM ("Open Street Map"), which is a crowd-sourced effort independent (as far as I can tell) of government censorship/manipulation/hacking.


But given the stakes, it would appear that OSM's maps will require some sort of block-chaining and digital signatures to prove that they haven't been censored/manipulated/hacked.


What can this crypto community do to develop *trusted* crowd-sourced maps like OSM ?


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