this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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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 corporations 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, secret police slush funds, etc, etc if every event in the entire financial system and supply chain was logged and cryptographically verifiable.
EDIT: NOTE I'm not talking about everyones transactions being in a public ledger (bad). Only enhancing the current system between businesses and orgs so it's exceptionally difficult for any of them to falsify data without the others knowing, as well as having near instant visibility and analytics of the entire market (great for regulators, academics, etc).
A supply-chain wide blockchain could enable individuals to view every raw material that went into every product they consume, down to the location, date — even the exact time in many cases — each was mined, refined, harvested, transported, picked, traded, etc. in a way that no individual corp could hide or falsify dramatically. Each corp and individuals true (embodied energy consumption would be visible to every buyer; developed world politicians and corporations couldn't simply blame China and other developing countries for their own consumption.
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 of bananas with the wrong label on them? How does your system solve that? What happens if the company growing your bananas claims to use only ethical practices but in reality their workers are effectively slaves? How does a blockchain help fix 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.