As usual, this is a solution in search of a problem. It adds a lot of complexity to re-implement solved problems in expensive ways, while not addressing the very real unsolved problems of corporate governance, none of which involve a lack of technology to record/tally votes.
Look at Enron, for example, setting up fake trading floors, or lying to investors. What happens inside organizations is opaque. This is a fundamental characteristic of public corporations because if shareholders got full transparency, then a rival business could purchase 1 share of stock, or have an agent purchase 1 share of stock, and then they would know everything happening inside of their competitor. A vendor could purchase 1 share of stock, and gain access to competitive pricing information, etc. So corporations are necessarily secretive. They embargo information, and they don't provide a lot of specifics. They give only roll up summaries to public investors and don't release enough information for investors to verify that the summaries are correct.
None of that will change at all with blockchain. This isn't a technological problem, where we don't have a way of correctly tallying votes, or we lack mechanisms of sharing information with investors, so thank God blockchain came along so we'd know how to hold elections.
As long as anyone can dispose or acquire a share in the open market, corporations are going to withhold most of the details from shareholders.
It doesn't matter what protocols the shareholders are going to use to reach agreement or count votes. They will never have enough visibility into the workings of the corporation in order to be able to enforce this type of micromanagement.
Going back to actually addressing the problem -- the current state of the art is to have third party auditor verify the roll up summary statements. This auditor is necessarily bound to secrecy -- e.g. they cannot disclose to shareholders the proprietary information that went into verifying the summaries. The state of the art is to trust these auditors and to have penalties for making misleading statements. However these audits are necessarily a manual and expensive process, as they require judgement to classify millions of transactions into known categories which then roll up to income and balance sheet statements. How would blockchain help here? The transaction is secret, and without the appropriate contextual information, we don't know how to classify it. Is this working capital, should that be booked as revenue for this quarter, should we do a Goodwill write off, etc? But if shareholders can't be trusted with enough contextual information to adjudicate even these types of classification problems, how are they going to adjudicate the hundreds of thousands of smaller decisions that happen every day in a firm? On the other hand, if we are relying on third party auditors, then what do we need the blockchain for?
Look at Enron, for example, setting up fake trading floors, or lying to investors. What happens inside organizations is opaque. This is a fundamental characteristic of public corporations because if shareholders got full transparency, then a rival business could purchase 1 share of stock, or have an agent purchase 1 share of stock, and then they would know everything happening inside of their competitor. A vendor could purchase 1 share of stock, and gain access to competitive pricing information, etc. So corporations are necessarily secretive. They embargo information, and they don't provide a lot of specifics. They give only roll up summaries to public investors and don't release enough information for investors to verify that the summaries are correct.
None of that will change at all with blockchain. This isn't a technological problem, where we don't have a way of correctly tallying votes, or we lack mechanisms of sharing information with investors, so thank God blockchain came along so we'd know how to hold elections.
As long as anyone can dispose or acquire a share in the open market, corporations are going to withhold most of the details from shareholders.
It doesn't matter what protocols the shareholders are going to use to reach agreement or count votes. They will never have enough visibility into the workings of the corporation in order to be able to enforce this type of micromanagement.
Going back to actually addressing the problem -- the current state of the art is to have third party auditor verify the roll up summary statements. This auditor is necessarily bound to secrecy -- e.g. they cannot disclose to shareholders the proprietary information that went into verifying the summaries. The state of the art is to trust these auditors and to have penalties for making misleading statements. However these audits are necessarily a manual and expensive process, as they require judgement to classify millions of transactions into known categories which then roll up to income and balance sheet statements. How would blockchain help here? The transaction is secret, and without the appropriate contextual information, we don't know how to classify it. Is this working capital, should that be booked as revenue for this quarter, should we do a Goodwill write off, etc? But if shareholders can't be trusted with enough contextual information to adjudicate even these types of classification problems, how are they going to adjudicate the hundreds of thousands of smaller decisions that happen every day in a firm? On the other hand, if we are relying on third party auditors, then what do we need the blockchain for?