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Which is a shame, as the technology always has been as impressive as claimed. There was for a long while talk of whether or not the blockchain would ultimately

Which is a shame, as the technology always has been as impressive as claimed. There was for a long while talk of whether or not the blockchain would ultimately be adopted for state currencies going forward but it's not clear that this is even an ideal use case. As an example, I would personally view it as a good thing (and I know others have different views on this) that the government for tax and law enforcement purposes can view the global transaction log (it would certainly simplify taxes while increasing compliance), but is it a good thing that everyone else can view the transaction log too? Ideally I would like the police and the tax man to know that people are not up to anything nefarious without everyone in the world knowing when you buy birth control or a pregnancy test. The other issue is obviously money supply. Governments like to be able to manage the supply of currency, but deflationary issuances like Bitcoin are clearly incompatible with that goal.

skohan 6y ago
I would argue that claims about the revolutionary potential of blockchain as a technology have been largely exaggerated, but I agree that it's hard to imagine it replacing the financial system in its current state. It just doesn't seem like it could possibly scale to the number of transactions which have to be made globally every second. That's not to say there aren't technical solutions to some of these problems, but currently it seems like even if less than 1% of the population tried to start using bitcoin as their only currency, the system would collapse under its own weight. I actually think it might be interesting for something like voting. Here having a completely public, verifiable record would add a lot to what is currently a very opaque system in a lot of places.
- headmelted 6y ago
  I thought about how it would be good for voting in the past - again though, not as a public transaction log (how you vote being public could get you killed in some places).
  - skohan 6y ago
    I'm not an expert, but it seems as if you could make this process both anonymous and verifiable. I.e. the number and authenticity of votes is verifiable through cryptography, but the identity of the voter is not accessible.

skohan 6y ago

I would argue that claims about the revolutionary potential of blockchain as a technology have been largely exaggerated, but I agree that it's hard to imagine it replacing the financial system in its current state. It just doesn't seem like it could possibly scale to the number of transactions which have to be made globally every second. That's not to say there aren't technical solutions to some of these problems, but currently it seems like even if less than 1% of the population tried to start using bitcoin as their only currency, the system would collapse under its own weight. I actually think it might be interesting for something like voting. Here having a completely public, verifiable record would add a lot to what is currently a very opaque system in a lot of places.

headmelted 6y ago
I thought about how it would be good for voting in the past - again though, not as a public transaction log (how you vote being public could get you killed in some places).
- skohan 6y ago
  I'm not an expert, but it seems as if you could make this process both anonymous and verifiable. I.e. the number and authenticity of votes is verifiable through cryptography, but the identity of the voter is not accessible.