[Discussion] Is Blockchain necessary for our future?

[Welsh]

You don't need blockchain to have transparency, simple public reporting and maybe a bit of cryptography is enough. Corruption happens when the government is unwilling to fight it, in that case transparency doesn't help, because even when everyone knows exactly who and how much is stealing, no one gets punished.

Public reporting is easily manipulated, if we could implement something along with the Blockchain which can't be manipulated as easy, it would be the better solution. You don't absolutely require the Blockchain, but the Blockchain is a way of trying to prevent corruption. The government, and any other organization for that matter will always have a few bad eggs, so while public reporting sounds good, it doesn't necessarily mean it will be carried out by everyone. If every action of government representatives was automatically recorded to the Blockchain, there would be less corruption.

However, there are major issues before we can implement this. I don't exactly know how it could be implemented, but something like the Blockchain is definitely helpful in a situation like this. The issue is, preventing manipulation or corruption before it enters the Blockchain.

[Pmalek]

And sure, you can use blockchains for other things. But the question is — is it actually necessary? I don't think blockchains should be used for almost everything.

That is one of the reasons that many startups/ICOs (call them whatever you want) fail. They don't need a blockchain for their use case at all. The developers only make one to earn money from it. I remember reading about an ICO that wanted to build movie theatres and you would have to buy tickets with their tokens. Why would I want to go through that hassle if we already have other cryptos that can be used for the same thing or we can just stick to fiat!?

And while I think there might be other good uses of a blockchain besides Bitcoin, I'm yet to be impressed.

A decentralized and open-source voting system seems like a good use case. Blockchains are used in the shipping industry to show the movement and origins of goods. A database that can show you where each component of your item came from. I think Walmart tracks the shipment of pork through an IBM-developed blockchain.   

[hatshepsut93]

You don't need blockchain to have transparency, simple public reporting and maybe a bit of cryptography is enough. Corruption happens when the government is unwilling to fight it, in that case transparency doesn't help, because even when everyone knows exactly who and how much is stealing, no one gets punished.

While I'm still going to stand for my previous statement in this thread, I think you actually need blockchain(unless there's a different solution I'm not aware of) to have true transparency. Yes, public reporting could happen, but how to we know if they're faking it to some extent? Whereas with blockchain, we can make the verifications ourselves.

The most popular for of corruption is when government officials buy something for higher than market price and split the difference with the seller. And they do it even under full transparency, they just say that the price is justified and that's it, they never get prosecuted, because law enforcement and courts can be bribed. I live in a country with high corruption, and detecting corruption was never a problem, as long as journalists aren't being thrown to jail for doing their work, corruption will be uncovered, but what's next?

And blockchain works best when it has a decentralized network of nodes and no trusted input, which is not what most non-crypto blockchains offer. Especially not the blockchains for government.

[stompix]

While I'm still going to stand for my previous statement in this thread, I think you actually need blockchain(unless there's a different solution I'm not aware of) to have true transparency. Yes, public reporting could happen, but how to we know if they're faking it to some extent? Whereas with blockchain, we can make the verifications ourselves.

And what verifications can you make other than what the government is telling you in public reporting?
It's them who are going to insert all that data, it's them who are going to make all the transactions, it's not like they magically take one hundred billion and stash them into their accounts directly and you'll be able to trace that with the blockchain. If they are faking reports they can easily fake transactions in a chain too, it's the same, some numbers are written in an accounting book, no matter what form this might take.

Besides, the strong point of the blockchain is not transparency is the immutability, and that can be easily achieved with any distributed database. You can see that the only real-life usages of blockchain technology that have actually been implemented are aimed at private companies internal settlements, no transparency, no public, no tokens.

[mk4]

And what verifications can you make other than what the government is telling you in public reporting?
It's them who are going to insert all that data, it's them who are going to make all the transactions, it's not like they magically take one hundred billion and stash them into their accounts directly and you'll be able to trace that with the blockchain. If they are faking reports they can easily fake transactions in a chain too, it's the same, some numbers are written in an accounting book, no matter what form this might take.

Besides, the strong point of the blockchain is not transparency is the immutability, and that can be easily achieved with any distributed database. You can see that the only real-life usages of blockchain technology that have actually been implemented are aimed at private companies internal settlements, no transparency, no public, no tokens.

Of course it wouldn't be feasible for literally everything. I think it's just more of the case of finding which ones, and I just think that it's just probable that there's at least one or a few use-cases out there that are bound to be realized.

[ashleyknight]

I guess YES because it provides ways that you might have not thought of otherwise. With the popularity of Quantum computer security, in classical systems, it is still questionable but I am sure that there will be a way out.

[clorasteinberg]

Maybe. Blockchain has been attracting the interests of various people and helping in secure transactions so maybe it can be the future.