[mfarris]

That is an awful lot of words to say "Hey anybody got any ideas how to make 'blockchain' useful to people not interested in bilking cryptocurrency speculators? Sure, we've got homeless on the streets but ALSO $200 million burning a hole in our city's pockets, and saying 'blockchain' is much cooler than 'hunger' or 'poverty' or 'infrastructure.' Ooh look, blockchain!"

Please somebody suggest an even remotely plausible way that "blockchain" could possibly improve "turn-around times for government services."

[etherael]

Instead of waiting for a bureaucratic notary to update a centralised government database 9am to midday Monday to Friday except public holidays, strikes, or other unforeseen circumstances, you interact with a distributed app hosted on a blockchain 24/7/365 which does exactly the same thing, except immediately and with no other human in the loop to slow it down or add errors.

In fact, all of the above plus all the benefits of just destroying the state completely and interacting with all the functions it used to compulsorily provide terribly only by voluntary smart contracts, much more efficiently.

[mfarris]

Ah, so "blockchain" is a Libertarian Trojan horse that will obviate government. Man, "blockchain" can do ANYTHING.

"voluntary smart contracts"... more buzzwords that sound great but mean nothing. What's so smart about contracts that lose hundreds of millions of dollars because someone put a semicolon in the wrong place? I'm not volunteering for that.

Can't wait for the first time the soon-to-be-obsolete government has to "fork" the Social Security "blockchain" because a few $$$BILLION "went missing" when some 25-year-old, third-tier programmer/consultant screwed up the "smart" contract. Oops.

[etherael]

Blockchains can't do everything.

All hype aside, what they really are is simply a useful platform for permissionless cooperation at scale. That happens to be a pretty useful thing to do, things like economies, religions, and nation states are typically employed to do much the same things, and as such when a blockchain can be used instead of those things and there are gains to be had, it makes sense to do it.

Voluntary is not a buzz word, it has a very specific and important meaning, especially when it comes to questions of the state, where the core force is coercive rather than voluntary. Smart contracts may be a buzzword, but they do in fact mean something very specific that actually once again is useful, which is effectively just an implementation of an application using a platform for permissionless cooperation at scale as the underlying technology. I get that it's cool to be cynical and complete paradigm shifts to the way things have been done for hundreds of years, especially when those things are both extremely morally questionable as well as so vast in scale as to be almost society defining, and typically justified in terms of "necessary evils" are scary, but none of that invalidates the very real gains to be made from these advancements.

That applications can have bugs should be as about as controversial as the statement that water can be a liquid on a forum like this, that doesn't mean they absolutely have to, anymore than it means water absolutely has to be a liquid, either. The truth is this is potentially the first widely visible platform where bugs really, really matter, as in they can't just be rolled back and we pretend everything is OK and a human comes along and fixes it, because that invalidates the entire purpose of disintermediated permissionless peer to peer cooperation. I actually think it's good that bugs matter so much, it is about time that security and software development were taken as seriously as they deserve, rather than treated as a cost centre and just going back and papering over inevitable failures. There's plenty of other areas where that's really not an acceptable modus operandi, either, but because they're not so visible as the failures in this area they've historically been allowed to slide under the radar. That doesn't mean the people that died because of bugs in x-ray software deserved it, though, or that it was alright in any way.

And finally, they're not at all a trojan horse. In the very first block of the very first blockchain a very loud declaration was made as to precisely why the creation was being bought into existence. The real irony in this charge is that the very forces they were designed to disintermediate ended up trying to trojan horse that exact same blockchain barely nine years later to subvert it away from the original vision and back to enslaving the very people it was designed to free.