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China's provincial officials are potentially adversarial parties vs the central government. Officially they must do as they are told, but unofficially they have

by not2b 4y ago

China's provincial officials are potentially adversarial parties vs the central government. Officially they must do as they are told, but unofficially they have considerable independent power as long as they aren't caught. Only a guess, but I suspect that Covid got as bad as it did partly because Wuhan officials didn't want the central government to know how bad things were (at least at first).

vkou 4y ago
This is partially correct, China is not a monolithic entity that fully marches in lockstep with Beijing. But the solution to the problem of uncooperative governors is the application of soft power (media, agitprop, appointments, rewards, threats, denunciations and disappearances, liquidation of problem people, their families, their friends, their pets, etc), not some over-engineered technological non-solution that still relies on the cooperation of all the parties in question to work. A blockchain can't enforce that anyone actually enters data into it, or that the data that is entered isn't garbage. A snail-mail package containing data sent to Beijing has the exact same immutability property for the only party that cares about it - the national government. Something like a blockchain is useful when peers don't trust eachother, but all care to build a shared consensus. When the peers don't care about consensus, and a central authority with the power of pit and gallows exists, none of those usecases hold.
- not2b 4y ago
  I didn't mean to imply that a blockchain is a good solution here. And in a system where it's considered sometimes desirable to erase inconvenient history, an immutable ledger doesn't help with that.
  - vkou 4y ago
    The 21st century in the Western world has taught us that we don't need to physically erase inconvenient history, you just need to shout the new version of history loudly enough. George Orwell was mistaken when he thought that anyone would care about facts, figures, and how much sugar was rationed every week. You just need to tell people that it's raining while you piss on them, and they'll believe you.
SkyPuncher 4y ago
A block chain doesn't help with this situation though since only the central authority matters. If a adversarial party submits false data, blockchain doesn't do anything to address that. The situation you describe can be handled via a write-only log with cryptographic signing of each change.

by not2b 4y ago

vkou 4y ago

This is partially correct, China is not a monolithic entity that fully marches in lockstep with Beijing. But the solution to the problem of uncooperative governors is the application of soft power (media, agitprop, appointments, rewards, threats, denunciations and disappearances, liquidation of problem people, their families, their friends, their pets, etc), not some over-engineered technological non-solution that still relies on the cooperation of all the parties in question to work. A blockchain can't enforce that anyone actually enters data into it, or that the data that is entered isn't garbage. A snail-mail package containing data sent to Beijing has the exact same immutability property for the only party that cares about it - the national government. Something like a blockchain is useful when peers don't trust eachother, but all care to build a shared consensus. When the peers don't care about consensus, and a central authority with the power of pit and gallows exists, none of those usecases hold.

not2b 4y ago
I didn't mean to imply that a blockchain is a good solution here. And in a system where it's considered sometimes desirable to erase inconvenient history, an immutable ledger doesn't help with that.
- vkou 4y ago
  The 21st century in the Western world has taught us that we don't need to physically erase inconvenient history, you just need to shout the new version of history loudly enough. George Orwell was mistaken when he thought that anyone would care about facts, figures, and how much sugar was rationed every week. You just need to tell people that it's raining while you piss on them, and they'll believe you.

SkyPuncher 4y ago

A block chain doesn't help with this situation though since only the central authority matters. If a adversarial party submits false data, blockchain doesn't do anything to address that. The situation you describe can be handled via a write-only log with cryptographic signing of each change.