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Colorado Candidate For Governor Wants To Put His State On the Blockchain (gizmodo.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: The Democratic nominee for governor of Colorado, U.S. Representative Jared Polis, wants to add blockchain to the list of items voters consider this year. Polis currently represents Colorado's 2nd district in the House, and he won the Democratic gubernatorial nomination last month. He's held his seat in the House for about a decade and has been a fairly solid progressive. On Wednesday, Polis added a set of limited proposals regarding blockchain to his gubernatorial platform that at least give us an idea of what it means for a politician to campaign on blockchain. Polis told us he would like to resolve some of the "ambiguity" in federal rules, encourage fintech company investment, remove some licensing requirements for token securities, and exempt cryptocurrencies from state money transition laws. He says these companies are "trying to fit what they're doing into an obsolete, outdated, and often obsolete federal law."

Polis also wants to explore how blockchain could be used for voting security. Polis isn't ready to necessarily endorse moving all voting to the blockchain system. He likes paper ballots and told us, "this would be more how the information is generated and stored from those paper ballots rather than doing so in a centralized database it would be done across a distributed ledger." The congressman also thinks that blockchain could be used to streamline the process for storing public records and making them available to the public. "We're talking more about everything from Colorado contracts, expenditures, titles, a lot of the data-intensive aspects of state government can be more secure and more accessible through distributed ledgers," he said.

2 of 61 comments (clear)

  1. Seemed appropriate by grasshoppa · · Score: 4, Insightful
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    Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
  2. Re:Hmm ... titles by Spazmania · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Blockchain for real-estate titles isn't stupid.

    As a matter of fact, it is.Blockchain would be a terrible idea for real estate. Understand the two key things about it and you'll understand why:

    First, Blockchain is used when there is no suitable central authority to rely on. Each change to a protected asset is cryptographically authenticated by equipment run by multiple organizations. The consensus of those authentications accepts the change. When a central authority like a government agency is readily available, there is no need for this technique. Indeed it's more expensive than using a single trusted central authority.

    Second, Blockchain is intentionally irreversible. Once a change is published and accepted, it can never be removed or undone. In financial transactions, that's actually a bad thing. Combating fraud in financial transactions (such as real estate transactions) critically depends on reversing false changes.

    An asset protected by Blockchain can only be changed by someone who has the key for the most recent change. When your key is stolen and used to publish a false change, that's no longer you... it's the thief. When your key is lost on a crashed hard drive, nobody can publish further changes to the asset. Ever again.

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    Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.