Elon Musk proposes putting the U.S. Treasury on blockchain for full transparency

From an engineering perspective, this is stupid, although not quite as bad as "casting votes on the blockchain."

You want a tamper-proof record? We can make something orders of magnitude better in almost every way [0] with a regular distributed database! There's a predefined closed set of member-nodes, variously controlled by the 50 different US state governments, a handful of federal agencies, and maybe even few reputable private organizations if you really want to.

This gives you 95% of the benefits, 5% of the drawbacks. Modifying the records would require a ridiculously large conspiracy, and the result wouldn't even be secret. Modifying it secretly would require such a total takeover that if that happens your country has much bigger problems.

In either case, remember that there are no assurances the data being appended is actually true in the first place, only that someone didn't change or delete it later. [1]

___________

[0] Ex: Much less CPU power; lower latency/clearing-delays; no transaction fees; less disk space; easier to upgrade protocols; separate from external crazy crypto-drama like hard forks; and basically immune to a country like China barging in with a conscripted botnet. (See also: "Great Cannon of China.")

[1] Data-integrity is clearly not what Republicans and their tool Musk actually care about implementing, you can tell because they're busy stealth-deleting records willy-nilly across the entire federal government right now.

How would this work for sensitive spending like defense or national security type stuff?

FedNow supports ILP Interledger Protocol, which is an open spec that works with traditional ledgers and distributed cryptoasset ledgers.

> In addition to Peering, Clearing, and Settlement, ILP Interledger Protocol Specifies Addresses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503888

>> ILP is not tied to a single company, payment network, or currency

ILP Addresses - v2.0.0 > Allocation Schemes: https://github.com/interledger/rfcs/blob/main/0015-ilp-addre...

People that argue for transaction privacy in blockchains: large investment banks, money launderers, the US Government when avoiding accountability because natsec.

Whereas today presumably there are database(s) of checks sent to contractors for the US Gvmt; and maybe auditing later.

Re: apparently trillions missing re: seasonal calls to "Audit the Fed! Audit DoD!" and "The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006" which passed after Illinois started tracking grants: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25893860

DHS helped develop W3C DIDs, which can be decentralizedly generated and optionally centrally registered or centrally generated and registered.

W3C Verifiable Credentials support DIDs Decentralized Identifiers.

Do not pay for closed source or closed spec capabilities; especially for inter-industry systems that would need to integrate around an API spec.

Do not develop another blockchain; given the government's inability to attract and retain talent in this space, it is unlikely that a few million dollars and government management would exceed the progress of billions invested in existing blockchains.

There's a lot of anti-blockchain FUD. Ask them to explain the difference between multi-primary SQL database synchronization system with off-site nodes (and Merkle hashes between rows), and a blockchain.

Why are there Merkle hashes in the centralized Trillian and now PostgreSQL databases that back CT Certificate Transparency logs (the logs of X.509 cert granting and revocations)?

Why did Google stop hosting a query endpoint for CT logs? How can single points of failure be eliminated in decentralized systems?

Blockchains are vulnerable to DoS Denial of Service like all other transaction systems. Adaptive difficulty and transaction fees that equitably go to miners or are just burnt are blockchain solutions to Denial of Service.

"Stress testing" to a web dev means something different than "stress testing" the banks of the Federal Reserve system, for example.

A webdev should know that as soon as your app runs out of (SQL) database connections, it will start throwing 500 Internal Server error. MySQL, for example, defaults to 150+1 max connections.

Stress testing for large banks does not really test for infosec resource exhaustion. Stress testing banks involves them making lots of typically large transactions; not lots of small transactions.

Web Monetization is designed to support micro payments, could support any ledger, and is built on ILP.

ILP makes it possible for e.g. 5x $100 transactions to be auditably grouped together. Normal, non bank of the US government payers must source liquidity from counter parties; which is easier to do with many smaller transactions.

Why do blockchains require additional counterparties in two party (payer-payee) transactions?

To get from USD to EUR, for example, sometimes it's less costly to go through CAD. Alice holds USD, Bob wants EUR, and Charlie holds CAD and EUR and accepts USD, but will only extend $100 of credit per party.

ripplenet was designed for that from the start. Interledger was contributed by ripplecorp to W3C as an open standard, and ILP has undergone significant revision since being open sources.

ILP does not require XRP, which - like XLM - is premined and has a transaction fee less than $0.01.

Ripplenet does not have Proof of Work mining: the list of transaction validator server IPs is maintained by pull request merge consensus in the GitHub repo.

The global Visa network claims to do something like 60,000 TPS. Bitcoin can do 6-7 TPS, and is even slower if you try and build it without blocks.

I thought I read that a stellar benchmark reached 10,000 TPS but they predicted that the TPS would be significantly greater with faster more expensive validation servers.

E.g. Crypto Kitties NFT smart contract game effectively DoS'd pre-sharding Ethereum, which originally did 15-30 TPS IIRC. Ethereum 2.0 reportedly intends to handles 100,000 TPS.

US Contractor payees would probably want to receive a stablecoin instead of a cryptoasset with high volatility.

Some citizens received a relief check to cash out or deposit, and others received a debit card for an account created for them.

I've heard that the relief loan program is the worst fraud in the history of the US government. Could any KYC or AML practices also help prevent such fraud? Does uploading a scan of a photo ID and/or routing and account numbers on a cheque make exchanges more accountable?

FWIU, only Canadian banks give customers the option to require approval for all deposits. Account holders do not have the option to deny deposits in the US, FWIU.

I don't think the US Government can acquire USDC. Awhile back stablecoin providers were audited and admonished.

A reasonable person should expect US Government backing of a cryptoasset to reduce volatility.

Large investment banks claimed to be saving the day on cryptoasset volatility.

High-frequency market makers claim to be creating value by creating liquidity at volatile prices.

They eventually added shorting to Bitcoin, which doesn't account for debt obligations; there is no debt within the Bitcoin network: either a transaction clears within the confirmation time or it doesn't.

There are no chargebacks in Bitcoin; a refund is an optional transaction between B and A, possibly with the same amount less fees.

There is no automatic rebilling in Bitcoin (and by extension other blockchains) because the payer does not disclose the private key necessary to withdraw funds in their account to payees.

Escrow can be done with multisig ("multi signature") transactions or with smart contracts; if at least e .g. 2 out of 3 parties approve, the escrowed transaction completes. So if Alice escrows $100 for Bob conditional upon receipt of a product from Bob, and Bob says she sent it and third-party Charlie says it was received, that's 2 out of 3 approving so Alice's $100 would then be sent to Bob.

All blockchains must eventually hard fork to PQ Post Quantum hashing and encryption, or keep hard forking to keep doubling non-PQ key sizes (if they are not already PQ).

PQ Post Quantum algos typically have a different number of characters, so any hard fork to PQ account keys and addresses will probably require changing data validation routines in webapps that handle transactions.

The coinbase field in a Bitcoin transaction struct can be used for correlating between blockchain transactions and rows in SQL database that claim to have valid data or metadata about a transaction; you put a unique signed value in the coinbase field when you create transactions, and your e.g. SQL or Accumulo database references the value stored in the coinbase field as a foreign key.

Crypto tax prep services can't just read transactions from public blockchains; they need exchange API access to get the price of the asset on that exchange at the time of that transaction: there's no on-chain price oracle.