You are not seeing the whole picture and don't understand the goal of the "coin" in a "blockchain". I would strongly urge you to do some research so that you can make up your mind from a place of knowledge instead.
I understand blockchain and cryptoeconomic angle better than I understand the current system and I suspect that it's the same with you. When I talk to people who understand current finance systems, including clearing and settlement I think my own enthusiasm is party based on my own ignorance of what already exists.
I would gladly spend time explaining this over and over again but it seems all my comments are downvoted so I'm not motivated to provide free content on hacker news.
So how about spreading some light?
https://medium.com/@jpa_of_snc/blockchain-the-revolution-wil...
https://medium.com/@jpa_of_snc/ethereum-the-machinery-of-cha...
edit: at least you could read the definition of cryptoeconomics....
I do however think blockchains are an excellent, useful concept. Verifiable, non-repudiable, write-only audit logs are a fine idea and I can think of many uses for them. I've never heard a reason why they need to be run on inefficient, unscalable, power-hungry, untrusted, adversial public networks, however.
It's true that they could be done with a standard DB which would be managed like most of the other public / government IT throughout the developing world. The key to understanding the use cases is to look at the blockchain capabilities one by one and see where Ghana benefits from having a hard to modify public database.
If there is any subject that you would like to see developed or answered feel free to let me know. I usually write my articles as a way of responding to FAQ I receive in my consulting business.
I am very much on board with that idea. I work in finance and write-only is practically a law. I just don't see why you need ethereum to implement it; in fact it seems a terrible, overly complicated way to do it.
It is good though that the blockchain hysteria is inspiring governments to think about these concepts though.
On your disclosure - despite my criticism they are good articles and do get one thinking.
This to say, we could debate the relative merits of any solution so I'll simply say that transparency is a powerful tool in most government use cases. Ethereum was just a tool.
Thank you for the compliment!
Try something different; show me that you know how a blockchain works and you understand the purpose of the tokens.
The first is the blockchain, which is a technical innovation that allows a client to decide which version of a shared event log to trust, even if it doesn't trust any of the servers attempting to perform the update. The ELI5 version is that the record that took the most total work to generate is correct. Since generating a fraudulent record requires doing more total work than was done to generate the correct one from the point of the fraudulent change forward, creating a fraudulent record quickly becomes computationally infeasable as changes get older.
The second are cryptocurrencies, which are an attempt to mint a currency (a literal, if not physical, coin) independent of any government by, essentially, reintroducing the gold standard. Except instead of gold we're using blockchains, which it turns out can be engineered to behave economically like precious metals do under the right circumstances.
Separating the two concepts, and specifically avoiding putting on your engineer hat when you're thinking about the half that's more political manifesto than anything else, will go a long way in helping you get a toehold on what's going on.
But at the same time, without having that race to have the most mining power, the argument that it is computationally infeasible to change the blockchain becomes incorrect. There is now no guarantee that the amount of 'work' currently keeping the network going is actually enough to be computationally infeasible to change if someone buys enough computers.
Bitcoin technically doesn't guarantee the last detail either, but by paying miners it becomes worth it to them to keep buying the fastest hardware and most hardware they can.
For example, imagine banks wanted to replace their clunky old ACH system with a blockchain. They could design their protocol such that it refuses to process transactions from or to an address that hasn't contributed a block to the chain in, say, the last 24 hours.. That requires each bank to contribute some minimum amount of computing power to maintaining the chain, even though it doesn't directly reward them for it.
(I've spent literally 2 minutes thinking through this example. I'm sure it has some glaring holes in it. Still, I hope it illustrates the point.)
But that is pretty much exactly my point. All that does is encourage people to mine just enough to keep the chain going, which does not ensure the security of the chain. There is no incentive to mine more blocks then anybody else.
With that said, I think the exercise is a bit futile to begin with - if banks have a serious dispute between them, they're going to handle it in the courts, so at the end of the day the existence of the blockchain only serves the purpose of holding the transactions and hopefully allowing then to be done faster and more efficiently. Which, a regular database could do just the same - you could even use Merkle tree to hold the data to ensure you could verify that older data has not been changed (By having banks keep their own synced copy of the database). Basically a blockchain without the mining. It requires a certain amount of centralization, but since the only parties are banks it wouldn't be extremely hard to handle that part. Which, you could technically still call this a blockchain, but without the mining and a decentralized way of deciding which chain is correct I think that's a stretch for what most people think when they're talking about blockchain. Specifically, per your definition, the blockchain requires some type of PoW/proof-of-whatever and a decentralized consensus, which this doesn't have.
And the above isn't actually all that theoretical. Ripple is a blockchain without a coin, but they fix the mining problem by not having any mining at all and instead having a central blockchain that they control. It's basically just an immutable database. So again, per your definition, they aren't really using a blockchain at all. And I'm not saying I disagree with your definition, but currently there are no examples of a decentralized blockchain using PoW that doesn't use a coin, even though there's basically everything else in-between.
I'm honestly not convinced that that there are really any situations that don't involve a coin where the blockchain with mining is a viable option, and where there aren't any better alternatives that would make more sense.
If you are serious about learning cryptoeconomics please feel free to ping me and I'll help in any small way I can.
This quote was in that NYT "Everyone's Getting Rich.." article:
The tone turns somber. “Sometimes I think about what would happen to the future if a bomb went off at one of our meetings,” Mr. Buttram said. Mr. Hummer said, “A bomb would set back civilization for years.”
There's too much of that exaggerated thinking.
The value of the token increases with the number of people who participate in the network (Metcalfe's ...) and due to speculation on the underlying value of having trust and consensus without a centralised authority.
The problem with centralised authority is that, despite the very best intentions of those involved, the centralisation of power reduces the overall ability of a market to operate freely, and the blockchain is the product of Anarcho-Capitalists who believe markets should be free from any central power.
A move from paper copies to a digital format would already be a good enough solution, which I think is your point, but here there is an opportunistic use of a single tool to avoid the costs of a couple of servers with remote backups times the number of locations needed for full coverage.
edit: I was responding to the wrong thread but I'll leave it anyway. This refers to the use of blockchain for land registry in Ghana.