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US to put economic data on 9 blockchains
- imaginaryunit01 1y agoSee previous https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45031689 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45031689
- msgodel 1y agoHow is this an improvement over just publishing the data on the web so we can wget it? Which is how it works now.
- RiverCrochet 1y agoI guess the data can't be altered if it's on a blockchain unless a 51% attack on the network occurs, right? Along with the data would be signatures or something similar of who entered the data, so if foul play is suspected, blame can be assigned.
- recursivecaveat 1y agoPutting it on a blockchain doesn't do anything. Suppose one piece of data is how many businesses filed for bankruptcy with the IRS last quarter. How are you going to read a bunch of private tax documents to confirm they are correct? How will you verify that there is no ommitted data? The only way would be some kind of giant panopticon of the entire relevant federal government and the daily activities of every employee. No amount of signing will increase the trustworthiness of the source. Secretly altering the data is not a thing either. It's like trying to secretly alter last week's print NYT headline. You can push out all the new copies you want, but lots and lots of people remember the old one, there are a million old copies sitting in archives, and once somebody notices the jig is up forever. You can issue errata if you want, but that is orthogonal to storage mechanism. This is just some combination of a flood-the-zone BS answer to criticism of interference with the BLS and a gift to the crypto industry donors of the admin.
- yasp 1y agoCrypto apps running in eg smart contracts will be able to interact directly with it and trust it, rather than needing to trust a third party oracle that retrieves the data externally.
- sniffers 1y agoThey asked how it would be an improvement. You've described how it would be different...
- yasp 1y agoIt improves one flow without affecting another. You might not like what it improves but it does improve something.
- sniffers 1y agoYou haven't articulated how. You've explained that it is different but not what end goal that enables that actually improves anything. Like, I can store this data on a server in a yaml file and that would be different. But it wouldn't improve anything. Taking an action and using a technology are not improvements in and of themselves.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- msgodel 1y agoActually that does sound like an improvement, I hadn't considered the need for trusted publishers interacting directly with the blockchain making smart contracts more meaningful.
- glitchc 1y agoAll third-party oracles are simply contracts on other blockchains. The new blockchain is yet another third-party oracle for the contract to interact with.
- LargeWu 1y agoOnly possible thing I can think of is they won't be able to just pull down data that is "not aligned with the current administration". I'm not sure that would be an intended side effect, though.
- yencabulator 1y agoThe people who do that will be fired/ridiculed/charged and the people in power will pretend none of that happened and flood the 24h news cycle with something unrelated. We've already seen this happen, multiple times. It's not like a published stat from 2024 would have disappeared without bitcoin mining.
- imaginaryunit01 1y ago“The plan is to put a so-called cryptographic hash of the data — essentially, a tool to verify its integrity — on those blockchains.” Seems like you could get away with a centralized signing mechanism - am I missing something?
- miltonlost 1y agoBlockchain is a buzzword technology, mostly, for grifters. This administration is corrupt and grifting. Don't look for coherent positive policy. Does this produce chaos, unnecessary churn, and slow down the economy/government? Then it's doing what the administration wants: nothing good.
- morkalork 1y agoNo. Whenever someone starts to pitch blockchain as a solution I check this flowchart to see if they're full of shit. Never fails! https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mohammad-Chowdhury-14/publication/327483781/figure/fig3/AS:701857081073665@1544347176952/Decision-Tree-to-determine-the-use-of-blockchain.png https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mohammad-Chowdhury-14/p...
- IsTom 1y ago> am I missing something? Probably just money-laundering through crypto tokens.
- scroot 1y agoIt's not an improvement.
- hedora 1y agoMaybe because Trump can’t fire the blockchain if number goes down? My guess is that he’s not quite dumb enough to take that capability away from himself. I predict an article detailing all the technical/security flaws about a week after the implementation details are public.
- delfinom 1y agoIt's misdirection. They are planning to intentionally publish false data. They are going to say LOOK ITS CRYPTO IT CANT BE CHANGED. And they are going to poker face it.
- slipperydippery 1y agoYeah this is entirely pointless. You can put anything "on a blockchain" but the cases in which that does anything useful versus any of several simpler and cheaper solutions are fairly narrow.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago“American Bitcoin, the bitcoin miner backed by two of U.S. President Donald Trump's sons, has locked in crypto and traditional investors to back an all-stock merger that will allow the firm to soon start trading on the Nasdaq, the company's largest investor said.” It aims “to start trading in early September” [1]. [1] https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/american-bitcoin-backed-by-trump-sons-aims-start-trading-september-2025-08-28/ https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/american-bitcoin-...
- bdcravens 1y agoThe conspiracy theorists like to posit that the data is changed over time.
- Daviey 1y agoSure, for a traditional (non-blockchain) application this makes sense. However, to use it with blockchain smart contracts, you'd need to run an oracle to retrieve the data from the authoritative source then submit it to a blockchain, constantly. This moves the responsibility of this back to the government. If you don't have a blockchain project, then this doesn't add value to you.
- Workaccount2 1y agoNo details on the implementation, but something like this would be great, because currently the fastest way to find out if an economic data print is good or bad is to watch the stock market, and then the numbers turn up in the news and tweets ~2 minutes later. It's not clear where (and maybe not easily accessible) to get these numbers at -exactly- the moment they release.
- baron816 1y agoWTF are you talking about? All this data is freely available on government websites such as https://www.bls.gov/ https://www.bls.gov/ and in easily downloaded formats. Putting it on the blockchain is pointless.
- longitudinal93 1y agoPutting it into a public blockchain prevents it from being altered after the fact.
- miltonlost 1y agoRevisions to initial economic data is common, though, once other slower statistics are compiled into a final GDP/CPI number. The initial month-over-month or QoQ are estimates.
- elil17 1y agoSo does archive.org
- slipperydippery 1y agoIs that an actual problem we've had? Nb announced revisions aren't a problem at all, and not one that "blockchain" prevents anyway (you can publish new stuff on a blockchain, no problem)
- bogwog 1y agoDo you think the government would be able to get away with altering data after the fact? If they released it, someone downloaded it, and would be able to easily spot changes. It could even be (and probably is) automated. And either way, what does the blockchain offer if the government comes out and says that some previously published numbers were incorrect, and they publish new ones? You'll have two competing versions of the same data, with one considered obsolete because the government says so. And none of this matters if they're altering the data before publishing.
- josefritzishere 1y agoYou can use blockchain with fake data. The problem isn't chain of custody. It's that the source of truth in American financial data has been compeltely undermined and lacks legitimacy.
- DevX101 1y agoYup, the president just fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner when unfavorable jobs numbers were released. Blockchain does absolutely nothing to address this trust issue.
- barbazoo 1y agoIt’ll be good enough probably for his base.
- DevX101 1y agoHis base doesn't read BLS reports.
- barbazoo 1y agoExactly. It’s all a mirage. They read the headline and think something positive has happened. They’ll get a little dopamine and forget about it.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> They read the headline I doubt even this.
- phatskat 1y agoWhomever replaced Alex Jones will read the headline and then make up the story to sound good to the base and that’s that. I’ve been listening to Knowledge Fight, and in the way my brain needs it which is from the beginning so I’m at about 2019 and the playbook written by Jones/Stone/et al is in full swing - it used to be fun to laugh at him, and now I can see how he really paved the way for the hell we currently exist in.
- ratelimitsteve 1y agoverifying data hasn't been tampered with is useless if you don't trust the original source, and no one in their right mind would trust this data.
- mason_mpls 1y agoIf it’s not open source, it’s fraud in disguise
- lordofgibbons 1y agoEven if it's open source but a single entity/foundation has full control of the blockchain, it's a fraud in disguise.
- karmakurtisaani 1y agoAlso an idiotic way to implement a database.
- lifty 1y agoThe reason why this is useful is for DeFi applications that are blockchain native. If an applications needs to rely on the economic data, it will be able to use it natively without using an oracle. This doesn't improve the integrity of the data or replace the old ways of getting the data, just makes it more accessible to the blockchain ecosystem.
- xenotux 1y agoSo... how is it useful? You're trading one oracle for another. Either of these oracles can be manipulated or compromised. I think one could argue that it's more elegant from the point of view of blockchain maximalism. But I don't quite understand the utility in any other sense.
- lifty 1y agoIt's useful because it's coming from the original source, instead of having an oracle network made up of 3rd parties which vote on it.
- barbazoo 1y agoSounds like a database with an API would have done the trick. Slap a MCP server on top and you can use it with AI and people would have been ecstatic.
- blitzar 1y agoIf you are raising funds I am in for 10mil at a valuation of 1B.
- lifty 1y agoYou're missing the point. A database or a normal http API is great if you're accessing the data from outside a blockchain. If you want smart contracts to access the data, it's better if the data is available natively inside the blockchain. You're probably not interested in smart contract, but there are other people that are trying to build smart contracts which use that data. One simple example would be a prediction market.
- imaginaryunit01 1y agoThe 9 blockchains: “Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, TRON, Stellar, Avalanche, Arbitrum One, Polygon PoS, and Optimism.”
- OutOfHere 1y agohttps://archive.ph/c8HRk https://archive.ph/c8HRk
- znpy 1y agoA blockchain at least implies the possibility running a data node and this having a local copy of all the data. If that’s the case, this is a great step forward for transparency and accountability. We’ll see how it goes!
- sunshine-o 1y agoPutting a hash of the PDF report is useless but this is probably just the first step. One has to understand it is very hard to bring data on the blockchain. The system being in a way fully isolated to the external world (no http GET query possible on xxx.gov, a trusted source has to bring it in). If they will next publish actual data through an oracle as the official source it is actually a revolution (I do not have access to the Bloomberg article, not sure they talk about this). They are probably about to plug those blockhains as legitimate financial systems and it is gonna be hard to revert. Whether we like or dislike blockchains, the US and others decided to dump their currencies on it to save them. Probably not Trump idea, nor it was pitched to him by a crypto bro. He is just executing a move that is as big as Bretton Woods or the end the convertibility of the US dollar to gold.
- puppycodes 1y agoWhy 9? Seems arbitrary... or an insider trading scheme.
- outside2344 1y agoFor the thousandth time: Why?