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Comment by msgodel | Hacker News Reader

How is this an improvement over just publishing the data on the web so we can wget it? Which is how it works now.

“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?

No. 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/p...

> am I missing something?

Probably just money-laundering through crypto tokens.

Blockchain 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.

It'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.

Only 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.

The 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.

Yeah 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.

Sure, 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.

“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-...

I 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.

Putting 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.

It's not an improvement.

Crypto 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.

They asked how it would be an improvement. You've described how it would be different...

It improves one flow without affecting another. You might not like what it improves but it does improve something.

You 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.

Actually 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.

All third-party oracles are simply contracts on other blockchains. The new blockchain is yet another third-party oracle for the contract to interact with.

The conspiracy theorists like to posit that the data is changed over time.

Maybe 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.

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