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Kathleen Martin
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Blockchain technology has been hailed as a world-changing innovation, but does it have any use beyond creating speculative financial instruments?
The bitcoin boom spawned new billionaires and videos of beach parties and Lamborghinis. The crypto crash brought devastation for small investors and bankruptcy for many companies.
Blockchain technology underpins crypto and has been hailed as a world-changing innovation, but does it have any use beyond creating speculative financial instruments?
AFP asked crypto critic Stephen Diehl, author of recently published "Popping the Crypto Bubble", to run the rule over some of the most popular claims made for blockchain technology.
More secure voting?
As tension and confusion engulfed the United States after the 2020 election, Changpeng Zhao, billionaire founder of crypto firm Binance, had a suggestion.
A "blockchain-based mobile voting app", he tweeted, would mean "we won't have to wait for results, or have any questions on its validity".
Fellow crypto billionaire Vitalik Buterin replied that there were "significant challenges" but he thought it was "directionally 100 percent correct".
So far, experiments have been very small scale.
For Diehl, blockchain was more likely to introduce problems than solve them.
"From the American perspective, every single district runs its own voting programme," said.
"This is seen as a feature because to corrupt any one election you would have to corrupt many, many civil servants.
"Centralising the voting system in one digital place would be pretty risky -– then all you have to do is corrupt the blockchain and you could corrupt democracy."
Continue reading: https://techxplore.com/news/2022-08-blockchain-crypto.html
The bitcoin boom spawned new billionaires and videos of beach parties and Lamborghinis. The crypto crash brought devastation for small investors and bankruptcy for many companies.
Blockchain technology underpins crypto and has been hailed as a world-changing innovation, but does it have any use beyond creating speculative financial instruments?
AFP asked crypto critic Stephen Diehl, author of recently published "Popping the Crypto Bubble", to run the rule over some of the most popular claims made for blockchain technology.
More secure voting?
As tension and confusion engulfed the United States after the 2020 election, Changpeng Zhao, billionaire founder of crypto firm Binance, had a suggestion.
A "blockchain-based mobile voting app", he tweeted, would mean "we won't have to wait for results, or have any questions on its validity".
Fellow crypto billionaire Vitalik Buterin replied that there were "significant challenges" but he thought it was "directionally 100 percent correct".
So far, experiments have been very small scale.
For Diehl, blockchain was more likely to introduce problems than solve them.
"From the American perspective, every single district runs its own voting programme," said.
"This is seen as a feature because to corrupt any one election you would have to corrupt many, many civil servants.
"Centralising the voting system in one digital place would be pretty risky -– then all you have to do is corrupt the blockchain and you could corrupt democracy."
Continue reading: https://techxplore.com/news/2022-08-blockchain-crypto.html
