Posted on 01/04/2018 5:29:54 AM PST by bananaman22
The Roman historian Tacitus once famously quipped “the more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws”.
Every year, roughly 2 percent of global GDP is lost to public sector corruption alone – at a hefty $2 trillion this equals to Italy’s GDP.
The total cost of corruption stands even higher, at 4-5 percent of global GDP. Countries across all continents lose substantial parts of their budgets to corruption. Some African nations see up to a third of their budgets go down the corruption drain.
After thousands of years of fighting against corruption, blockchain might just be the answer everyone was searching for.
(Excerpt) Read more at oilprice.com ...
Blockchain reminds me of the certainty that every time somebody comes up with a way to make computers process faster, communicate faster, and increase capacity, some wisenheimer has to come up with a way to use it all up, and more!
Similarly, the further you move from the Ten Commandments and simple courtesy the result is not freedom but endless inscrutable uncatalogueable laws and rules and uncertainty and hypocrisy.
Until someone finds a way to use it to their advantage.
I have been telling my friends who look upon cryptocurrencies askance that the underlying technology is the real revolution, and that blockchain can make government completely transparent and accountable.
Which is why it will NEVER happen.
When I think blockchain I think bitcoin. When I think bitcoin I think black market. When I think black market and untraceable cash I think Clinton. When I think Clinton I think corruption.
When you think photography do you think pornography?
Depends if slick willie is in the picture.
Eventually we might apply this to the money system. We can buy or sell with confidence that our account number will never be hacked.
Of course, if the government considers us a criminal, it just has to erase our number, and then we can’t buy or sell anything; because our total identity is wrapped up in that account number.
They cant stop that from happening.
They cant even stop people from watching stuff downloaded off of BitTorrent.
Funny thing is: BitCoin and blockchain are the polar opposite of untraceable. Blockchain is an indelible register of a transaction. It's impossible to not trace, as you'd have to erase the transaction from every system in the blockchain and faster than the modified registers could be updated from others in the system.
There's a certain degree of anonymity, but once they know who committed the transaction, every other transaction by that same entity is known.
A dumb question. Where there are politicians, there is corruption. “Blockchain” will change nothing.
From that article the only thing blockchain can’t do is cure cancer.
It would have been nice had some explanation of just how blockchain could achieve everything ascribed to it in the article.
I’d like to think it could.
Increased transparency in political processes reduces the risk of tax evasion, thanks to which the risk that short-received government revenues will be rerouted from investments in infrastructure or education towards to band-aiding state finances ought to be nullified.
An Hurculean effort to avoid the dangling preposition.
Nope.
I am of the opinion that blockchain could be used to stop “on book” corruption but it would not be useful for “off book” corruption. For example:
Blockchain could be used to make the accounting locked and unchangeable. So no cooking of the books or changing of the book entries after the fact. You could even include scanned images of invoices or receipts or shipping logs etc.
HOWEVER
If the receipt itself is fraudulent - i.e. a receipt for the full shipment when only a partial shipment was received due to someone skimming off the product, then blockchain is of little use.
A question: does blockchain depend on public key encryption?And if so, what is your estimate of the probability that quantum computing will disrupt it utterly?
Blockchain also uses hashing (one-way encryption) and the data is distributed over multiple servers in disparate locations.
The hash would have to be broken and you would have to change the data on thousands of servers simultaneously to perpetrate fraud.
Very unlikely.
The BitCoin frauds you have heard about weren’t really BitCoin frauds. Instead of maintaining your own wallet you can put your BitCoins in a “bank” like CoinBase. Doing so completely eliminates all the advantages of blockchain and puts you at the mercy of the bank’s fraud prevention procedures.
No.
Unless humans will no longer be around...
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