Whether it's a good idea or not who knows but your comment misrepresents the concept.
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> your comment misrepresents the concept
Why do you believe this particular politician has a sufficiently firm policy that it is even capable of being mis-represented? [0]
Is there something from his campaign which clearly lays out what he means by that slogan?
> Likely a centrally controlled [blockchain]
Pet peeve: That's not a thing unless we time-travel back to the 1990s when people meant something very different with the word "blockchain." It's a contradiction in terms, along with "private blockchain".
Those paradoxical euphemisms tend show up when people--for reasons of ideology or startup investor money--don't want to admit that the B-word is not actually good for their use case, and they're trying to avoid admitting that they're just doing a classic distributed database instead of the Sexy Thing.
The core feature that sets a modern blockchain apart is unrestricted membership where anybody can spin up any number of nodes/identities to participate. The challenges stemming from that are what cause a whole cascade of compensating algorithms and game-theory incentives, such as using wasted CPU cycles to curb influence.
If you don't have that requirement, everything becomes orders of magnitude faster and cheaper and simpler.
> You would force every payment the goverment makes to go through a blockchain.
Leaving intragovernmental transfers aside, hat also means you would force every private entity that sends or accepts government money to be a counterparty in the same system.
So supposing your great-aunt can't figure out a cold wallet then she can't get any medicaid for food this month. Does that still sound practical and reasonable?
blockchain means many paradigms and implementations, just like databases have many paradigms and implementations, or democracy for that matter
What you are referring to is the "public, permissionless" blockchain variant. There are permissioned blockchains as well, like Hyperledger Fabric, that would form a very efficient system for use in government. The key factors I see here are
- the immutable ledger
- public transparency & audibility
- standardize transaction contracts
- efficiency of transfers between depts or gov't & citizen