this post makes absolutely no sense. blockchains are useful in situations where you need consensus between potentially adversarial parties. the benefits of trustless coordination have tradeoffs that make blockchains less efficient than traditional databases or computational systems. there is zero advantage and significant additional cost & complexity for a centralized body (the CCP), which has direct control over all subsidary participants, using a blockchain to collate disparate databases. this is a meaningless PR release.
> tracking social credit scores across different provinces because they've previously been silo'ed and unable to communicate with each other in a straightforward way (for whatever reason).
does this sentence mean something to you? what does a blockchain do in this situation?
China's provincial officials are potentially adversarial parties vs the central government. Officially they must do as they are told, but unofficially they have considerable independent power as long as they aren't caught.
Only a guess, but I suspect that Covid got as bad as it did partly because Wuhan officials didn't want the central government to know how bad things were (at least at first).
This is partially correct, China is not a monolithic entity that fully marches in lockstep with Beijing.
But the solution to the problem of uncooperative governors is the application of soft power (media, agitprop, appointments, rewards, threats, denunciations and disappearances, liquidation of problem people, their families, their friends, their pets, etc), not some over-engineered technological non-solution that still relies on the cooperation of all the parties in question to work.
A blockchain can't enforce that anyone actually enters data into it, or that the data that is entered isn't garbage. A snail-mail package containing data sent to Beijing has the exact same immutability property for the only party that cares about it - the national government.
Something like a blockchain is useful when peers don't trust eachother, but all care to build a shared consensus. When the peers don't care about consensus, and a central authority with the power of pit and gallows exists, none of those usecases hold.
The 21st century in the Western world has taught us that we don't need to physically erase inconvenient history, you just need to shout the new version of history loudly enough.
George Orwell was mistaken when he thought that anyone would care about facts, figures, and how much sugar was rationed every week. You just need to tell people that it's raining while you piss on them, and they'll believe you.
A block chain doesn't help with this situation though since only the central authority matters. If a adversarial party submits false data, blockchain doesn't do anything to address that.
The situation you describe can be handled via a write-only log with cryptographic signing of each change.
> tracking social credit scores across different provinces because they've previously been silo'ed and unable to communicate with each other in a straightforward way (for whatever reason).
does this sentence mean something to you? what does a blockchain do in this situation?
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