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Comment by acuster | Hacker News Reader

External Auditing. I can't audit the central bank's server but I can audit the publicly published blockchain.

This can be solved by making all ordinary transactions public. Blockchain is not needed in 100% of the cases when central authority is in place.

There is a difference between deciding all transactions will be published and making them public by design constraint. Blockchains make transactions public by design, and this design cannot be easily subverted by the people running it.

Not really. Ever heard Monero or Zcash fe?

I certainly have. But this system is not designed like them.

All transactions in both Monero and ZCash are public, and we can verify that they're valid.

But what we cannot do is see all transactions details, such as the transaction amount.

These are two different things.

> There is a difference between deciding all transactions will be published and making them public by design constraint.

In a "blockchain" with a centralized validator set, there's no constraint forcing transactions to be public. The network will keep running even if the validators decide to stop publishing transactions. It's very much still a social contract.

Tampering (adding false transactions) is the only thing that could be hampered thanks to the requirement of client signatures: transaction/partial information censoring will still be possible. But in reality such a system will have the design constraint that funds must be seizable by the government, which in turn negates the only remaining technical advantage of a "centralized blockchain".

All that's left is the now empty word "blockchain". It's going to fit perfectly next to "democracy".

Right, but users would know when a secret transaction has been added. And no, your example does not negate the only technical advantage. Governments are not the only entities that might tamper. And most importantly, a blockchain forces even government tampering to be transparent, whereas a private database does not.

Yes, it's less black and white than I suggested, but the improvement is still a minimal increment compared to what someone would expect when hearing "blockchain". I guess I'm afraid the public record would just end up looking like this:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Redacted...

with citizens unable to discern between abusive and reasonable interventions.

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