Remember that three of the most important features of Ethereum include transparency, integrity, and suitability. Sounds like those three would fit very well into a well-operating government environment. In fact there are lots of places in government where Ethereum could really help. What about tax payments? You could actually pay your taxes using an Ethereum blockchain app, why not? You basically could just transfer cryptocurrency from your account to the government’s account.
It’s transparent, it’s auditable, and you can trust the fact that you’re paying it and the government knows that you paid it, easy-peasy right? What about government spending? Wouldn’t it be great if you were able to go look at your Senator’s or Representative’s payment or spending habits? You can go look on a public blockchain and actually trace through all the spending and figure out how much money went to study whether hamsters run faster or slower on a particular wheel.
Wouldn’t that be great? I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon but hey, that’s one opportunity. What about voting? Have you ever heard of an election where the outcome was in question? Well, how about blockchain voting? Blockchain voting actually gives us the ability to eradicate many of the problems with other voting systems. One way that it would work is, we talked about different tokens, what if you created your own token, a voting token, and every citizen got one token.
And you can spend it one time on whomever you wanted. That’d be a great way to count the votes. You can make it anonymous because you don’t have to identify yourself if you don’t want to and simply say I’m going to vote for this person or that person, you vote once, can’t vote again. So that’s an example of how Ethereum could help with voting. Policy development is another area that’s rich in blockchain technology or rather that blockchain technology can really help.
The reason behind that is that the more engagement that you foster with citizens the better the policies are going to be and the better those policies will be accepted. Blockchain is great crowdsourcing and community of involvement and allows for policy development based on lots of input from the citizen, the citizens that are going to be governed by that. And for a simple application, what about a notary?
Right now if you need something notarized, you have to take it in and have somebody actually stamp it and sign it saying yes I saw this but you could easily put all those decisions on the blockchain and the blockchain application could serve as a notary.
So these are just a few examples of how the properties of integrity, auditability, and transparency can help make for better governments.