[giaour]

> I’ve heard about governments considering using blockchain based tech to thwart internal corruption (immutable public records FTW).

During my time in government, shady contractors pitching blockchain to solve literally every problem was so common and so preposterous that it quickly became a meme. "Immuatble public records" was a common claim, but "blockchain" isn't fundamentally different from a git repository in this regard.

If all you need is a replicated merkle tree, we have easier and more efficient ways of doing that.

[jagtesh]

You’re on point except for one big difference: a block chain is distributed.

I don’t think it is foolproof, as no tech really is. But the concept seems to significantly raise the cost and complexity of an attack to compromise it.

The simplest way I can imagine doing it is - spoofing network requests from the party trying to verify something, or routing that request to a compromised node. I will make a guess that networking equipment in a govt. setting can protect against a low level attack.

Disclaimer: I take a passive interest in this space but have never studied or implemented a block-chain application.

[giaour]

In practice, blockchains tend to be extremely centralized without a deliberate effort to prevent them from becoming so. (Cf https://www.nber.org/papers/w29396) You can get around this in a permissioned blockchain with a minimum quorum size, but at that point, you're basically running a fancy git repository with a number of mirrors.