Publicly accessible digital ledgers using linked cryptographic identification technology, a.k.a. Blockchain, might economically be applied when the technology fits either an existing or a new application. To use the redundant and overused expression, a “use case” must exist.
Such an application would likely require:
- Participants who don’t have a shared private mechanism for trading data.
- Third party involvement in data trading relationships, or supply chains, between participants that is uneconomical.
- A need for public visibility of the substantive data content.
- Linearity: a requirement that each new addition to the chain be calculated with metadata from the previous contribution to the chain.
These are just a few factors that come to mind that might argue in favor of a blockchain application, assuming tools to implement the tech are economically available. Obviously, not every application, and perhaps not most applications for data trading, will fit blockchain technology.
But now comes Jared Polis with his platform declaration of support for blockchain – see: https://polisforcolorado.com/blockchain/
This is analogous to a declaration of support for double entry bookkeeping. Or maybe, “I like computers.”
Technology does not require a political disposition. In fact, the introduction of politics will likely harm, through needless state level encumbrances, a developing accounting technology.
I hope voters take the time to see through Polis’ panderings on this issue. He’s a big government guy who appears challenged about thinking outside of the big government box.
There seems to be an anti-capitalist bias, or distrust, of value-added intermediaries in long-established markets held by proponents in the blockchain movement. And there seems to be a corollary assumption they make that blockchain technology will pave the way for a utopian market scheme of purely economic transactions with minimal or zero profit potential through market verticals, and markets that run through entirely automated mechanisms.
If this sort of thinking were the product of scientific analysis, then fair enough, so be it. But to begin with the assumption, and then proceed to backfill reality to fit the assumption, that’s just wrong.
Utopians. They never learn.