It is exceptionally useful for the auditing of damn near everything in digital space, as long as shared resources and 3rd parties have access to the blockchain … which is probably the major reason companies and politicians don’t want anything to do with it.
It’d be a lot harder to hide crimes, fraud, grey business dealings, bribery and illegal donations, sanction violations, etc, etc if every event in the entire financial system and supply chain was logged and verifiable.
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
The reason major businesses haven’t bothered using distributed blockchains for auditing is because they fundamentally do not actually help in any way with auditing.
At the end of the day, the blockchain is just a ledger. At some point a person has to enter the information into that ledger.
Now, hear me out here, because this is going to be some totally out there craziness that is going to blow your mind… What happens if that person lies? Like, you’ve built your huge, complicated system to track every banana you buy from the farm to the grocery store… But what happens if the shipper just sends you a different crate or bananas with the wrong label on them? How does your system solve that?
The data in a system is only as good as your ability to verify it. Verifying the integrity of the data within systems was largely a solved problem long before distributed blockchains came along, and was rarely if ever the primary avenue for fraud. It’s the human components of these systems where fraud can most easily occur. And distributed blockchains do absolutely nothing to solve that.
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Counterpoint, having a currency where every token is tied into its own transaction history might be unpopular with large businesses for other reasons. Like maybe they don’t want to be that transparent or accountable. The FBI have made public statements about how much easier it is to track criminals who used Crypto.
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
This is a very poorly expressed argument. Even if we suppose that everything you’ve said is true, the existence of a second plausible explanation doesn’t invalidate the first. You’ve not actually any reason why any of what I said is wrong, you just said “X is possible, therefore Y cannot be true.”
Also, I want to note that this particular digression wasn’t about cryptocurrency at all. The point I was responding to was a claim that blockchains had uses other than as currencies. So you really might want to step back a bit and consider what you think is being discussed here, and what you’re actually trying to say.
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Your suppositions are not infallible, mine do not need to be absolute truths to contend with yours.