
New York City Launches First Blockchain Initiatives - edwinksl
https://www.nycedc.com/press-release/new-york-city-launches-first-blockchain-initiatives
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Someone1234
That's a complete waste of tax payer money. Per the article this money will be
used to actually find a use of blockchain, rather than funding existing ideas
for how blockchain could improve "security, efficiency, and turn-around-times
for government services."

In other words, NYC is blowing $200M to chase a fad that they nor many in the
press even seem to grasp. This is one of those schemes they look back on with
shame and embarrassment.

I'm still waiting on the edge of my seat for the other uses for blockchain
than pseudo currency. But I've been on the edge of my seat for three years
now, and other than perhaps DNS I've not heard much.

Most of the proposals ignore the fact that the ledger gets larger and more
costly [by design] which limits the growth potential. That's why nothing has
ever come on tap (except currency/investments where increased cost is a
benefit, not a drawback).

~~~
lawn
Like usual with these hyped technologies people use them and search for a
problem.

That said I take issue with "pseudo currency". In many ways it's a better
currency.

An ever increasing ledger isn't that big of a deal either as technology
improves and not everyone needs to store the whole ledger.

~~~
nbeleski
It is not a better currency in any reasonable way besides illicit uses. To be
honest, it would even be hard to classify it as a currency.

It is not a currency, neither a store of value. The blockchain technology is
also not really technologically relevant.

~~~
lawn
> It is not a better currency in any reasonable way besides illicit uses.

Oh yeah?

* Donations to wikileaks. Paypal froze their account and there are tons of examples where they have done this without good cause.

* Legal businesses like marijuana sellers, porn, escort services and gambling platforms have had trouble using and keeping payment services. Some have been forced to only accept cash payments as they couldn't accept credit cards.

* A way to accept irreversible payments digitally. Credit card charge back fraud is a big problem.

* Credit card companies take a 5-10% fee. Cryptocurrencies are much cheaper (see Bitcoin Cash as Bitcoin is not a good example).

* Send money to remote countries, for example to countries in war, Argentina or North Korea. Western Union is slow, expensive and cannot be used to send everywhere. With cryptocurrencies all you need is internet (sometimes a VPN as well).

~~~
ThalesX
I'm not a connoisseur but your last bullet point seems strange. In order for a
currency to be functional, it needs to have someone accepting it. Would a war
torn country really find value in digital currency?

~~~
etherael
The more corrupt and broken a given economy is, the higher the markup for
reliable crypto and (relatively reliable) foreign currencies. Rule of thumb I
have almost always found to be true.

Case in point, Zimbabwe just tried to ban bitcoin and now the market price
there jumped by almost 5000 USD.

It's hard for people who don't see the government as what it actually is, to
see the value in cryptocurrencies. Some governments hide their nature better
than others.

For those which are very straight forward about their parasitic nature and do
not make any real attempt to justify it though, people subject to them are
extremely aware of the actual value of state and central bank proof currency.

Inhabitants of OECD nations will at this point say "but nobody here needs
that" with a straight face, unaware the US government just "lost" 21 trillion
dollars. Which actually probably means worse than lost. It probably means it
was illegally spent for nefarious ends. And given the foreign policy
objectives of the US coupled with the "questionable partnerships" they've
recently been discovered to be directly financing, that money probably has a
lot of blood on it.

Such is the actual naked nature of the state. It's depressing, but there's no
getting around it. And that's why the world needs cryptocurrencies; to destroy
them all. They are the only possible tool for that essential job.

------
Ironchefpython
I couldn't be happier that my tax dollars are going to harness the power of
the blockchain to solve the problems of "food deserts" and gentrification.

\--edit--

In case you are wondering if this is sarcastic, let me clarify. I fully expect
the blockchain to revolutionize the delivery of government services the same
way Bitcoin will revolutionize grocery shopping, and the same way Etherium
will revolutionize legal contracts.

\--edit 2--

Since people still don't get it, let me elaborate:

Imagine a world where you could use Bitcoin to transfer money anywhere in the
world with the same ease as making a Bitcoin micropayment, simply, safely,
instantly, with no fees.

Imagine a world where people use Etherium smart contracts to control
everything from marriages to college diplomas to corporate governance.

Now imagine the same revolutionary ideas applied across NYC to everything from
garbage collection to city ordinances!

The power of the blockchain is bounded only by your imagination.

~~~
SlowRobotAhead
_" As part of Blockchain Week NYC, NYCEDC and GrowNYC co-sponsored a hackathon
on May 12-13, challenging technologists to use blockchain technologies to
create solutions that improve trackability and transparency of the City’s
GrowNYC food supply chain, tracking food from farm, to warehouse, to retail
outlet, to consumers, especially those in our underserved neighborhoods. "_

That's definitely not what a decentralized database is needed for. Any
centralized SQL database could this much better and efficiently.

If you need to look for a use, it's not useful for you.

------
mfarris
That is an awful lot of words to say "Hey anybody got any ideas how to make
'blockchain' useful to people not interested in bilking cryptocurrency
speculators? Sure, we've got homeless on the streets but ALSO $200 million
burning a hole in our city's pockets, and saying 'blockchain' is much cooler
than 'hunger' or 'poverty' or 'infrastructure.' Ooh look, blockchain!"

Please somebody suggest an even remotely plausible way that "blockchain" could
possibly improve "turn-around times for government services."

~~~
etherael
Instead of waiting for a bureaucratic notary to update a centralised
government database 9am to midday Monday to Friday except public holidays,
strikes, or other unforeseen circumstances, you interact with a distributed
app hosted on a blockchain 24/7/365 which does exactly the same thing, except
immediately and with no other human in the loop to slow it down or add errors.

In fact, all of the above plus all the benefits of just destroying the state
completely and interacting with all the functions it used to compulsorily
provide terribly only by voluntary smart contracts, much more efficiently.

~~~
mfarris
Ah, so "blockchain" is a Libertarian Trojan horse that will obviate
government. Man, "blockchain" can do ANYTHING.

"voluntary smart contracts"... more buzzwords that sound great but mean
nothing. What's so smart about contracts that lose hundreds of millions of
dollars because someone put a semicolon in the wrong place? I'm not
volunteering for that.

Can't wait for the first time the soon-to-be-obsolete government has to "fork"
the Social Security "blockchain" because a few $$$BILLION "went missing" when
some 25-year-old, third-tier programmer/consultant screwed up the "smart"
contract. Oops.

~~~
etherael
Blockchains can't do everything.

All hype aside, what they really are is simply a useful platform for
permissionless cooperation at scale. That happens to be a pretty useful thing
to do, things like economies, religions, and nation states are typically
employed to do much the same things, and as such when a blockchain can be used
instead of those things and there are gains to be had, it makes sense to do
it.

Voluntary is not a buzz word, it has a very specific and important meaning,
especially when it comes to questions of the state, where the core force is
coercive rather than voluntary. Smart contracts may be a buzzword, but they do
in fact mean something very specific that actually once again is useful, which
is effectively just an implementation of an application using a platform for
permissionless cooperation at scale as the underlying technology. I get that
it's cool to be cynical and complete paradigm shifts to the way things have
been done for hundreds of years, especially when those things are both
extremely morally questionable as well as so vast in scale as to be almost
society defining, and typically justified in terms of "necessary evils" are
scary, but none of that invalidates the very real gains to be made from these
advancements.

That applications can have bugs should be as about as controversial as the
statement that water can be a liquid on a forum like this, that doesn't mean
they absolutely have to, anymore than it means water absolutely has to be a
liquid, either. The truth is this is potentially the first widely visible
platform where bugs _really, really_ matter, as in they can't just be rolled
back and we pretend everything is OK and a human comes along and fixes it,
because that invalidates the entire purpose of disintermediated permissionless
peer to peer cooperation. I actually think it's good that bugs matter so much,
it is about time that security and software development were taken as
seriously as they deserve, rather than treated as a cost centre and just going
back and papering over inevitable failures. There's plenty of other areas
where that's really not an acceptable modus operandi, either, but because
they're not so visible as the failures in this area they've historically been
allowed to slide under the radar. That doesn't mean the people that died
because of bugs in x-ray software deserved it, though, or that it was alright
in any way.

And finally, they're not at all a trojan horse. In the very first block of the
very first blockchain a very loud declaration was made as to precisely why the
creation was being bought into existence. The real irony in this charge is
that the very forces they were designed to disintermediate ended up trying to
trojan horse that exact same blockchain barely nine years later to subvert it
away from the original vision and back to enslaving the very people it was
designed to free.

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jnbiche
I know there's a lot of pooh-poohing of the blockchain here, and for good
reason. However, I can think of an excellent use case for blockchain in
government that couldn't (verifiably) be done with a normal database: tracking
grants, contracts, misc spending, etc.

With a public blockchain, grants and other government spending (which are
sometimes otherwise misspent or stolen) could be verifiably tracked and
published. This could be a great asset to state and local governments that are
prone to corruption.

~~~
frockington
Living in a that city prides itself on being "slightly less corrupt than
Cleveland", I can guarantee you that no corrupt local politician would ever
support this. They can't even regulate dogs on restauraunt patios without the
state having to come in due to excessive bribery

~~~
etherael
Taxi companies would never support ride sharing services, either. But the end
result is inevitable regardless.

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dnomad
NYC is a high-tax, high-growth region. It should use a blockchain to
distribute tax credits to those people who need it most. Those people can then
take the tax credits and spend them at city businesses. The great thing is
that it could defer these tax credits... that is disallow them to be resolved
for N years. Experience growth now and pay for it in the future. It would be
an interest-free loan (though in reality, the credits would be discounted) ...
in other words it would be currency. It could easily transform welfare within
the city.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17041697](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17041697)

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SlowRobotAhead
Replace blockchain with "mathy database" is the use case still cool? No? Ok
then.

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rajacombinator
Without reading sounds like free money for whatever “friend of NYC” sold them
this load of crap! Even better than ICO free money.

