Why the Trump Administration should implement Blockchain

I suspect President Elect Trump is pretty smart. As such I encourage the support of Blockchain and cryptocurrency to become the law of the land. Below are some of the questions and issues that need to be addressed to make that a reality. There are four big questions and a few sub-questions for you … the reader to consider and chime in.

This is not a political post. However, if Trump truly wants to Make America Great Again he should encourage, embrace and adopt Blockchain.

Why?

Blockchain protects his legacy, Blockchain protects companies, Blockchain protects the consumer. Blockchain will set the USA on the path to leadership in the financial controls that Blockchain enables across all aspects of business.

For a primer read - Cryptocurrency - Blockchain, Bitcoin, and Beyond

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Added Benefits from Trump can be summed up in two words:

  • Non-Retroactive
  • Day-Forward

This brings up a big question that needs to be addressed:

Can Blockchain be implemented retroactively?

Retroactive Blockchain?

The general thinking is no … Blockchain can only be implemented in a day-forward scenario. Otherwise the controls that define the Blockchain cannot be insured to be compliant and consistent with the tenets of the Blockchain. Which puts every transaction after them in a questionable state.

Consider, for example, blood testing for Olympic Athletes:
Where blood samples are kept and stored for potential future scrutiny (with new methodologies or questions). Retroactive testing like this is not built into Blockchain (nor should it be).

Retroactive testing for financial transactions will likely never be a thing.

With pre-Blockchain transactions they cannot be trusted and they cannot be assured to follow the tenets of the Blockchain process. This adds up to a win for a lot of businesses. While we may not like it … the fact is that a Retroactive Blockchain will likely never be implemented.

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What happens when Blockchain becomes common?

It enables the USA to take the lead on secure global transactions.

Is this the carrot?

Will this be the carrot that will allow people, companies and governments to join in and support Blockchain and cryptocurrency?

  • If they know they will not be held accountable for past transactions?
  • If they know that everything they do from today forward will be tracked?
  • If they know their competition will be tracked?

Some of the questions that need to be asked:

  • Will there be a grace period to allow companies to get their affairs in order?
  • What oversight should be applied to this grace period?
  • Are there any industries that are excused form participating?

Blockchain is the ultimate in Transparency

A Few of The Benefits

What would you pay to have transparency?

This is not a political post. However, if Trump truly wants to Make America Great Again he should embrace and adopt Blockchain.

Doing so cements his legacy as someone truly willing to break from tradition, drain the swamp, and make the USA a leader in a race that is as big as The Space Race.

Controversial Businesses Can Be Managed 

There are a lot of controversial businesses that can be run effectively using black chain. The marijuana trade is one that comes to mind almost immediately.

Marijuana, while legal in many states is still not allowed to use the Federal Reserve System's money transfer system

What other industries can you think of that could use more oversight and more visibility into every single transaction?

The obvious one is … Government.

Imagine: How would governments improve when they know everything is going to be tracked and managed in a Mutually Distributed Ledger (MDL).

Blockchain enables the full end-to-end fidelity of a complete transaction.

Others include:

  • Taxi’s and Autonomous Vehicles – Catch a ride, swipe your card or chip and move along. Your next Uber --- whether there is a driver or not can be managed with a Blockchain transaction from end-to-end.
  • Retail – both for the consumer and the retailer. Products arrive via courier and are purchased … with full fidelity of the complete transaction.
  • Trucking – The current systems in place today for trucking are quite good. But, with Blockchain the level or transparency will increase.
  • It’s not just financial - Manufacturing, Healthcare, Retail, Utilities, and every business today would be impacted.

What do you think?

  • Can Blockchain ever be implemented widely?
  • Can the USA take the lead in the development of Blockchain?
  • What are the impediments to mass adoption and acceptance of Blockchain?

Add your thoughts here. And, while this may seem to be a political post … it’s not.

President Elect Trump claims to want to Make America Great Again. I’ll take him at his word. Blockchain is a surefire way to insure the USA is at the front edge of the next wave in transactional control systems. If he is as smart as he claims to be he’ll see this and get on it right away.

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Image Credits: Blockchain

clip_image001Jeff is business advisor, mentor and community engagement expert. He has spent most of his career in the Enterprise Content Management industry. He brings over 20 years of Channel Sales, Partner Marketing and Alliance expertise to audiences around the world in speaking engagements and via his writing. He has worked for Microsoft, Kodak, and K2.

Connect with me on Twitter @jshuey

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I am a a contributing author to Entrepreneur, Elite Daily, Yahoo, US News and to the Personal Branding Blog

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Comments

Terrible idea, though very very Rand Paul libertarianish.
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The part most don't get about black-haired is that it effectively is the digital equivalent of a commodity backed currency:
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Because there is a fixed amount of crypto keys at any moment in time, the "crypto coin" is like a "gold standard" based currency. It's growth is controlled by how much "new" "coin" can be produced, not by the monetary needs of the economy.
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Thus economic productivity becomes disconnected from monetary supply.
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When monetary supply and economic productivity diverge, you get inflation or deflation. But unlike with fiat currency where you can tweak it to always be slightly inflationary, with "commodity currency" you necessarily oscillate between inflation and deflation.
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And that means you periodically have deflationary crashes.
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Economic history (and research) tells us deflationary crashes are the hardest to recover from since they're self reinforcing (Japan's Lost Decade).
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So crypto currency is a bad idea.
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Cyber Libertarians who wanted destroy central banks out of an ideological reason love the "commodity currency" aspect of crypto currency, but pretty much no one else who understands how money really works
Karl Schulmeisters said…
So the question arises - what benefit does BlockChain provide that current settlement systems do not?

There is end-to-end tracability of a particular currency identifier, but precisely because that is no more associated with a "real world" entity today than say Russian Doll offshore corporations are today - it really does NOT provide any additional "transparency" to the transaction beyond what we have today.

The same applies to the Olympic Doping scandal. The issue there was not that there was a misidentification of sample vials - rather that Russia had come up with a system by which a sealed vial could be opened, the contents replaced and resealed without damaging the anti-tamper mechanisms. So again the issue comes in the digital-to-realworld mapping, not in the existing Chain of Custody


Looking at your other examples

Taxis and AEVs work just fine with today's credit transaction settlement process

Retail - again the courier arrival and delivery issue is the digital to real world transaction issue - which Block Chain does nothing to address

Trucking - same thig.

The only places where BlockChain - aka Distributed Shared Ledger systems - because that's really what they are - make a difference is where you have issues of repudiation and falsification of LEDGER entries.

This clearly has applicability in the financial world where the vast majority of contracts and transactions today are non-physical ledger entries and modifications. But that does not really extend to circumstances where this repudiation/validation issue exists between a "real world Act" and a "digital realm entry". In this latter case, until a secure, unspoofable "machine sensing" environment can be created, the intactness of the ledger does nothing directly to validate the real world action any more than the systems we have today.


So from a purely "applicable beyond the digital realm" - BlockChain is questionable in its usefulness

and within the digital realm - its usefulness is really limited to situations where the validity of ledger entries is questionable.

So where I can see Blockchain making inroads in the financial sector, is in interbank settlement systems. Essentially replacing SWIFT, NIBSS, SEPA etc.

but for even management of currency, I think you will see both banks and nations stay away from it because it hamstrings one of the important tools in the market management quiver (to jambalaya a bunch of metaphors)
Jeff Shuey said…
As always ... great points Karl. Thanks for your insights and thinking here. It's early days and perhaps it will die and unceremonious death, but I think there should be continued discussion.