Social Security systems contain tens of millions of lines of code written in COBOL, an archaic programming language. Safely rewriting that code would take years—DOGE wants it done in months.
I mean, technically SSA data might be a legitimate use of the blockchain. I am one of the biggest opponents of the whole mess, but there are use cases for a persistent immutable data record, and social security numbers would be one of them.
My heart breaks for cool ideas that got taken by scammers and are now forever associated with financial predators and will probably never see legitimate use.
I didn’t say distributed. You are absolutely correct though. I was more observing that of all the BS tech bro babble that our Oligarch in Chief could spew into the universe, blockchain would be one that could be implemented reasonably.
There are actually other comments on this thread that provide other benefits besides trust, like modification tracing. There is more to it than just trust.
You mean a transparency log? Just sign and publish. Or if it’s confidential, have a timestamp authority sign it, but what’s the point of a confidential blockchain? Sure, we han have a string of hashes chained together á la git, but that’s just an implementation detail. Where does the trust come from, who does the audit? That’s the interesting part.
Right, but you can have entries in a block chain that indicate previous entries are no longer valid, or have modifications. Calculating a final state by walking through all the blocks in the chain. ( A bit like a CQRS based system can have a particular state at a point in time by replaying all events up to that point)
Doing it in such a way also makes auditing what’s happened much easier since changes are inherently reflected in the chain. You want to know when (or by who if you keep that information) a record changes, it’s right their in the chain.
Can’t wait to hear how the blockchain will factor into this redesign.
I mean, technically SSA data might be a legitimate use of the blockchain. I am one of the biggest opponents of the whole mess, but there are use cases for a persistent immutable data record, and social security numbers would be one of them.
My heart breaks for cool ideas that got taken by scammers and are now forever associated with financial predators and will probably never see legitimate use.
Distributed blockchains are useful when all of the below are fulfilled:
Here, we have a single peer creating entries in a ledger. We can get away with a copy of the ledger and one or more trusted timestamping authorities.
I didn’t say distributed. You are absolutely correct though. I was more observing that of all the BS tech bro babble that our Oligarch in Chief could spew into the universe, blockchain would be one that could be implemented reasonably.
If your blockchain isn’t distributed, it doesn’t need to be a blockchain, because then you already have trust established.
There are actually other comments on this thread that provide other benefits besides trust, like modification tracing. There is more to it than just trust.
You mean a transparency log? Just sign and publish. Or if it’s confidential, have a timestamp authority sign it, but what’s the point of a confidential blockchain? Sure, we han have a string of hashes chained together á la git, but that’s just an implementation detail. Where does the trust come from, who does the audit? That’s the interesting part.
Except that the numbers are also prone to change, like if it’s been stolen. They’re technically not supposed to be an identification code anyhow.
Right, but you can have entries in a block chain that indicate previous entries are no longer valid, or have modifications. Calculating a final state by walking through all the blocks in the chain. ( A bit like a CQRS based system can have a particular state at a point in time by replaying all events up to that point)
Doing it in such a way also makes auditing what’s happened much easier since changes are inherently reflected in the chain. You want to know when (or by who if you keep that information) a record changes, it’s right their in the chain.