Is blockchain in administration the graal or just a highway to hell ?
A very good blog post “Why Geneva wants to be powered by the Blockchain “, with the interview of Gianfranco Moi, deputy general director of economic development in the Republic of Geneva, explain to us how it could be fast and secure to register a company in one day in Geneva.
The concept will be based in the Ethereum blockchain thanks to its well-known smart contracts.
As always when we are speaking of blockchain, the idea seems great but if we focus really on what the blockchain is bringing real, the reality is a little bit different.
Blockchain is viewed as a sure way to “stamp” correctly a chain of the process in the order you need to do it. It’s why supply chain logistic problem to follow items are also a good approach with Blockchain based methods. In the government case, we have in Geneva and in other cities, the blockchain replaces more or less the stamp ensures that the totality of the acts linked to your demand “is correct”.
Well, Well.
Another very good post of the Guardian ” Does blockchain offer hype or hope? “, is resuming my thoughts about these topics.
It’s heavy to manage a blockchain which is growing fast. I already posted a blog post about this subject “The biggest threat of cryptocurrencies are their massive adoption“, and it’s the same problem with all these projects with Ethereum and government stuff (Passport, Companies, whatever you want).
For me, Politics are trapped in the “Hype Curve” and the blockchain of the first generation will bring more problem than they will solve it.
In our precise case, any database with any good crypto protocol, classic ones, is more efficient than any blockchain. You don’t need decentralization and peer to peer nodes when you are running government apps which are sensible then you don’t need blockchain: you need a good database and developers who know security matters. Only that.
Managing blockchain and changing data inside the blockchain itself is a nightmare because you have a great chance to break the unicity of this blockchain.
How can a government handle that?
It will finish with a hybrid model where smart contract will catch data outside the blockchain and they will have to maintain a double infrastructure with a growing need of space, a growing need of speed – to browse the blockchain – and a lot of insecure interface in and out the blockchain.
This kind of project is just a highway to hell, sorry. It’s too early and too “hype”.
A breakthrough of new technology is never done by the first generation of this technology but by the second or even the third’s one which brings us the THIRD project we have here with ThirdBrain SA.