White House reveals nebulous plans to put government data on the blockchain — 'The Department of Commerce is going to start issuing its statistics on the blockchain because you are the crypto president'

News
By published

And here I thought I'd never have to type 'distributed ledger' again.

Blockchain illustration
(Image credit: Getty / Eugene Mymrin)

New reports from the White House indicate that the Trump administration, specifically Howard Lutnick's Department of Commerce, has seemingly inexplicable designs to start putting statistics "on the blockchain." As to what data exactly might find its way to the blockchain, or what purpose that might serve, Lutnick failed to elaborate.

Gizmodo reports that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told President Trump on Aug. 26 that his department "is going to start issuing its statistics on the blockchain because you are the crypto president, and we are going to put out GDP on the blockchain so people can use the blockchain for data distribution."

Lutnick added, "and then we’re going to make that available to the entire government so all of you can do it ... we’re just ironing out all the details so we can do it.”

Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button.

Nathaniel Mott
Nathaniel Mott
Freelance News & Features Writer

Nathaniel Mott is a freelance news and features writer for Tom's Hardware US, covering breaking news, security, and the silliest aspects of the tech industry.

6 Comments Comment from the forums
  • usertests
    Instead of that, send some funding to Internet Archive, Archive.today, etc.
    Reply
  • ggeeoorrggee
    usertests said:
    Instead of that, send some funding to Internet Archive, Archive.today, etc.
    But … but … history can’t be (re)written by the victors if they don’t control its sources!
    Reply
  • waltc3
    I'm not sure what they are talking about, and I know that Lutnick doesn't know, either...;) (I like Lutnick's enthusiasm, though.) Ah, well, it's the century for technobabble by the government, I guess, instead of from the marketing departments of various tech companies as we are so used to.
    Reply
  • jlake3
    I'm left with more questions than answers.

    On what blockchain? The public blockchain? Or are you going to make your own chain?
    If you run your own blockchain where the government controls all the minting and validation systems, isn't that centralized?
    Would we need a special client to see what's on this government chain?If you put it on the public blockchain, how? Storing data there is expensive.
    Putting a single strong of text that ways "25Q3 US GDP=xxxxx" entry onto a major chain probably isn't too computationally expensive and does technically fulfill the promise, but there's no way you're storing all the underlying raw data there.
    If you're just storing a pointer to a government server on the chain, isn't that just a bad NFT? You can still have tampering and link rot.As pointed out by the article, the data is issued by a central authority. The ledger may be distributed, but there will be a singular authoritative source that controls what goes into the ledger... so doesn't that defeat the principles crypto is supposedly based on?
    As a lot of people have covered, when crypto is used to track things that happen off the chain, there's no inherent mechanism that keeps the chain synchronized to reality. If jobs are down and someone authorized to input data into the chain says they're up, the chain won't know it's getting bad data. Doesn't this data need to be revised sometimes as new information comes in? And while you should retain the original figures, you may want to mark them as obsolete and add a pointer to the revised data, which could get messy.
    Doesn't extensive media coverage make this data fairly tamper-proof already, because there's always contemporary reporting that will expose any revisions?
    What does ANY of this do that couldn't be accomplished with a PDF press release and an Excel file hosted on the Department of Commerce website? (Other than generate empty crypto hype)
    Reply
  • ravewulf
    He sounds like a CEO trying to jump on a hype train, but severely late
    Reply
  • edzieba
    ggeeoorrggee said:
    But … but … history can’t be (re)written by the victors if they don’t control its sources!
    Shush! Don't tell them that past record immutability with mass public distribution of signed data is one of the defining features of a blockchain!
    Reply