I saw this tiktok where this guy was talking about how he’d get his hands on real social security numbers… this was a clip from a whole story he told about some criminal shit, I was too distracted by my thoughts on how to fix the exploits he used.
Block chains and cryptographic signatures would solve basically every one of his exploits. But regardless of the myriad of reasons as to why we won’t adopt cryptography into American laws and bureaucracy, imagine if we did do everything involving government and policy in a cryptographically secure environment.
Imagine if everyone who is born gets assigned a gpg secret key signed by the government and that is your government ID for everything from opening a bank account to paying your taxes to claiming benefits. IMPO I think this is a perfect solution (iif you ignore the human element).
So my question is why wouldn’t it be perfect, and what kind of exploits could bad actors use in a cryptographic bureaucracy?
Any and all public record keeping would be done on a block chain. For example it’s not a secret who owns a given house, you can look up property and tax records. Smart contracts on a block chain work just as well as paper contracts if they’re given the same respect by the courts.
The smart contracts that are full of bugs and are exploited all the time?
git gud?
Flawless security measure there bud
What advantages does the blockchain give compared to just having a government website that allows you to download a zip archive of these documents?
(Also, having public records of house ownership and tax is a terrible idea in general…)