KENNEDY’S PUT THE BUDGET ON THE BLOCKCHAIN
RE: “Put the budget (federal accounting) on the blockchain for transparency” AND “The goal is to be able to scan an apple in a grocery and identify it back to its orchard.”
This is the correct framing, yes.
(a) budget + (b) transactions against it = (c) transparency.
FWIW: this was proposed back in the nineties as a means of reforming accounting systems so that we could see how money moved through corporations. Crypto evolved after we understood that there was a demand for this level of transparency. And it’s rather obvious how crypto is a two edged sword for this reason. It empowers both good uses and bad.
Why? Because all existing accounting systems effectively pool and therefore launder causality from money.
Now, I don’t care about this from the government’s perspective, but as a CEO, particularly a CEO who builds companies by buying companies and restructuring them, this is what I want to know – and better – it’s what prevents so much fraud and manipulation.
It’s bad enough we need to keep a sequence of books: cash for internal operations and survival, EBITDA for management, gross profit for bankers and investors, and net profit for everyone else. ;).
In current accounting systems, the entries required to do all that demand we write ‘macros’ for all sorts of transactions because the entries would otehrwise be too complex for human beings to repeat at volume and diversity of transactions.
Reply addressees: @gigga_watt @BobMurphyEcon
