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The most attractive part about blockchain is the decentralized ledger showing each transaction made.
I feel like greater minds than mine could come up with a way to use that to fight government corruption. Every transaction is a matter of public record.
I doubt it's really a practical solution though. Each transaction makes each subsequent transaction more computationally expensive. Plus all these vendors and contractors and everything are accustomed to fiat currency. Likely, they'd just immediately exchange it for cash.
This of course doesn't tackle the issue of under-the-table corruption where you invite a senator out for lunch and kickbacks. I'm also sure that the government would want to maintain their own ledger, or that conniving people will find a way to cook the books anyway.
Thank you. I’ve been saying for years that blockchain should replace government records for all public domain applications.
This is probably the key thing. Let's say that you wanted to purchase a home in Turkey but you live in Canada (just play along). A transaction on the blockchain can show a verified transfer of funds, record the purchase and act as proof of ownership.
As you mentioned, the big issue is computational expense.
But is this actually a problem. Does people go around now and need proof that they bought some property?
To me it seems like blockchain is a solution looking for problems that doesn’t really exist.
Yeah, all the time, obviously. That's literally what a receipt is. If people did not need to prove that they owned things, then receipts, titles and deeds wouldn't exist.
Title fraud is a real thing
Palestinians commonly have to defend their home ownership to settlers claiming their land but i doubt blockchain would help even if it was around long enough to record such a thing. American Indians are another obvious case of "but it's written right here .." where blockchain probably wouldn't help.
Yeah, my original thought was that you could see a record to show that a public works contract put forth by Politician Joe and awarded to ABC Roadwork Inc, and then later you'd see that most of the contract money ended up in Joe's cousin's investment account.
And again, I don't think it's foolproof because ABC would just immediately convert everything into cash to pay their vendors. But it's still nice to think about alternatives even if we know they might be impractical because hey, that's how we come up with better alternatives.
If we're imaging a world where corporations and governments would agree to this level of accountability, wouldn't it be eaiser to just make certain financial transactions into public records?
Currently we consider some things public records (registering a company y, the voting roll) and other things private (income and taxes, bank transactions). If there was the will to chnage things we could just make the financial records of all elected government officials and corporations with government contracts automatically publically accessible. This doesn't need block chain, a law could be passed deeming these "in the public interest" such that banks would have no grounds to refuse a request from journalists or any citizens to access them.
This would be a lot simpler and cheaper than block chain. But its unlikely to happen for the same reason that block chain won't be used for this either.
The only counterpoint I can think of is that the distributed ledger is much harder to fuck with than a physical or digital archive with a couple backups.
Sure, I suppose any public record is a public record. And you're right, as much as I'd love to see it and it'd be good for the world, I don't imagine it happening in my lifetime.
I suppose either way an unscrupulous person might find a way to launder their money.
I believe alternative methods of validating blocks (series of transactions) such as Proof-of-stake, instead of the vastly more computation and energy-intensive proof-of-work that Bitcoin uses would largely address the issue of computational expense. There are other methods of increasing efficiency and speed of processing as well such as the use of more efficient ‘layer 2’ mechanisms for processing blocks. I remember reading about these and their implementation when I was researching cryptocurrencies out of curiosity. I believe Ethereum and some others have largely implemented these. The decentralized applications aspect of Eth was super interesting to me as well. Basically, you can program software to run on the blockchain which can make it nearly impossible to shut down by a centralized authority so long as the network is sufficiently decentralized. Some of the programmable money (so-called decentralized finance or ‘DeFi’) apps are pretty interesting as well in terms of enabling more people to utilize the more complex financial instruments that Wall Street firms have been using for years. Of course, a lot of that has turned into a Wild West of scams and ‘rug pulls’, not to mention massive targets for hackers who try to exploit vulnerabilities to steal millions so buyer beware for sure.