You can use blockchain with fake data. The problem isn't chain of custody. It's that the source of truth in American financial data has been compeltely undermined and lacks legitimacy.
Blockchain is a buzzword technology, mostly, for grifters. This administration is corrupt and grifting. Don't look for coherent positive policy. Does this produce chaos, unnecessary churn, and slow down the economy/government? Then it's doing what the administration wants: nothing good.
Only possible thing I can think of is they won't be able to just pull down data that is "not aligned with the current administration". I'm not sure that would be an intended side effect, though.
The people who do that will be fired/ridiculed/charged and the people in power will pretend none of that happened and flood the 24h news cycle with something unrelated. We've already seen this happen, multiple times. It's not like a published stat from 2024 would have disappeared without bitcoin mining.
You can put anything "on a blockchain" but the cases in which that does anything useful versus any of several simpler and cheaper solutions are fairly narrow.
“American Bitcoin, the bitcoin miner backed by two of U.S. President Donald Trump's sons, has locked in crypto and traditional investors to back an all-stock merger that will allow the firm to soon start trading on the Nasdaq, the company's largest investor said.”
It aims “to start trading in early September” [1].
I guess the data can't be altered if it's on a blockchain unless a 51% attack on the network occurs, right? Along with the data would be signatures or something similar of who entered the data, so if foul play is suspected, blame can be assigned.
Putting it on a blockchain doesn't do anything. Suppose one piece of data is how many businesses filed for bankruptcy with the IRS last quarter. How are you going to read a bunch of private tax documents to confirm they are correct? How will you verify that there is no ommitted data?
The only way would be some kind of giant panopticon of the entire relevant federal government and the daily activities of every employee. No amount of signing will increase the trustworthiness of the source.
Secretly altering the data is not a thing either. It's like trying to secretly alter last week's print NYT headline. You can push out all the new copies you want, but lots and lots of people remember the old one, there are a million old copies sitting in archives, and once somebody notices the jig is up forever. You can issue errata if you want, but that is orthogonal to storage mechanism.
This is just some combination of a flood-the-zone BS answer to criticism of interference with the BLS and a gift to the crypto industry donors of the admin.
Crypto apps running in eg smart contracts will be able to interact directly with it and trust it, rather than needing to trust a third party oracle that retrieves the data externally.
You haven't articulated how. You've explained that it is different but not what end goal that enables that actually improves anything.
Like, I can store this data on a server in a yaml file and that would be different. But it wouldn't improve anything. Taking an action and using a technology are not improvements in and of themselves.
Actually that does sound like an improvement, I hadn't considered the need for trusted publishers interacting directly with the blockchain making smart contracts more meaningful.
All third-party oracles are simply contracts on other blockchains. The new blockchain is yet another third-party oracle for the contract to interact with.
Putting a hash of the PDF report is useless but this is probably just the first step.
One has to understand it is very hard to bring data on the blockchain. The system being in a way fully isolated to the external world (no http GET query possible on xxx.gov, a trusted source has to bring it in).
If they will next publish actual data through an oracle as the official source it is actually a revolution (I do not have access to the Bloomberg article, not sure they talk about this).
They are probably about to plug those blockhains as legitimate financial systems and it is gonna be hard to revert.
Whether we like or dislike blockchains, the US and others decided to dump their currencies on it to save them.
Probably not Trump idea, nor it was pitched to him by a crypto bro. He is just executing a move that is as big as Bretton Woods or the end the convertibility of the US dollar to gold.
The reason why this is useful is for DeFi applications that are blockchain native. If an applications needs to rely on the economic data, it will be able to use it natively without using an oracle. This doesn't improve the integrity of the data or replace the old ways of getting the data, just makes it more accessible to the blockchain ecosystem.
You're missing the point. A database or a normal http API is great if you're accessing the data from outside a blockchain. If you want smart contracts to access the data, it's better if the data is available natively inside the blockchain. You're probably not interested in smart contract, but there are other people that are trying to build smart contracts which use that data. One simple example would be a prediction market.
So... how is it useful? You're trading one oracle for another. Either of these oracles can be manipulated or compromised.
I think one could argue that it's more elegant from the point of view of blockchain maximalism. But I don't quite understand the utility in any other sense.
No details on the implementation, but something like this would be great, because currently the fastest way to find out if an economic data print is good or bad is to watch the stock market, and then the numbers turn up in the news and tweets ~2 minutes later.
It's not clear where (and maybe not easily accessible) to get these numbers at -exactly- the moment they release.
Because the website doesn't immediately update. The blockchain approaches something dynamic, where the update is broadcast to everyone at the same time, not just broadcast to those who know where to ask for it at the right time.
It seems similar to people who harvest the URL of a product before launch, so they don't have to wait for the slow website.
It should just be served up to anyone who is actively listening at ~8:30:000. Exactly like what a blockchain would do. Broadcast a new block to everyone at the same time.
A bit oldskool but go retro and try a tv "broadcast" ... anyone who is actively listening at 8:30:000 gets it served to them.
I am getting strong "tech bros invent the bus in 2025" vibes. Putting Founder, CEO,
Cereal Entrepreneur on your linkedin bio doesnt make you instantly a genius.
Its a vehicle that holds idk like 20 people or maybe even a bigger one that holds 100 or so. It will go from one point to another, along a pre-determined route, stopping at designated places along the way. People can get on and off at any one of the places it stops at.
Its reimagining the way we travel, its going to change the world. A similar thing is in the works that goes on fixed metal rails, the details havent all been figured out yet nor what to call it, but expect exciting news soon.
WTF are you talking about? All this data is freely available on government websites such as https://www.bls.gov/ and in easily downloaded formats. Putting it on the blockchain is pointless.
In my experience it takes a few minutes for the website to update. It comes off like there is a hidden API to request the documents, and then everyone else gets it once the front-end website finishing propagating the update or something.
Do you think the government would be able to get away with altering data after the fact? If they released it, someone downloaded it, and would be able to easily spot changes. It could even be (and probably is) automated.
And either way, what does the blockchain offer if the government comes out and says that some previously published numbers were incorrect, and they publish new ones? You'll have two competing versions of the same data, with one considered obsolete because the government says so.
And none of this matters if they're altering the data before publishing.
Why alter it when you can call it fake news and fire the person who published it and hire a new person who is commited to "Fair and Balanced" data*
*data is for 'entertainment' purposes only - Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual data is entirely coincidental.
Revisions to initial economic data is common, though, once other slower statistics are compiled into a final GDP/CPI number. The initial month-over-month or QoQ are estimates.
If it’s not open source, it’s fraud in disguise
Even if it's open source but a single entity/foundation has full control of the blockchain, it's a fraud in disguise.
Also an idiotic way to implement a database.
See previous https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45031689
The 9 blockchains: “Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, TRON, Stellar, Avalanche, Arbitrum One, Polygon PoS, and Optimism.”
You can use blockchain with fake data. The problem isn't chain of custody. It's that the source of truth in American financial data has been compeltely undermined and lacks legitimacy.
Yup, the president just fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner when unfavorable jobs numbers were released.
Blockchain does absolutely nothing to address this trust issue.
It’ll be good enough probably for his base.
His base doesn't read BLS reports.
Exactly. It’s all a mirage. They read the headline and think something positive has happened. They’ll get a little dopamine and forget about it.
> They read the headline
I doubt even this.
It's all smoke and mirrors: leave enough small truths within the lie, and double down on them.
How is this an improvement over just publishing the data on the web so we can wget it? Which is how it works now.
“The plan is to put a so-called cryptographic hash of the data — essentially, a tool to verify its integrity — on those blockchains.”
Seems like you could get away with a centralized signing mechanism - am I missing something?
> am I missing something?
Probably just money-laundering through crypto tokens.
No. Whenever someone starts to pitch blockchain as a solution I check this flowchart to see if they're full of shit. Never fails!
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mohammad-Chowdhury-14/p...
Blockchain is a buzzword technology, mostly, for grifters. This administration is corrupt and grifting. Don't look for coherent positive policy. Does this produce chaos, unnecessary churn, and slow down the economy/government? Then it's doing what the administration wants: nothing good.
Only possible thing I can think of is they won't be able to just pull down data that is "not aligned with the current administration". I'm not sure that would be an intended side effect, though.
The people who do that will be fired/ridiculed/charged and the people in power will pretend none of that happened and flood the 24h news cycle with something unrelated. We've already seen this happen, multiple times. It's not like a published stat from 2024 would have disappeared without bitcoin mining.
Yeah this is entirely pointless.
You can put anything "on a blockchain" but the cases in which that does anything useful versus any of several simpler and cheaper solutions are fairly narrow.
“American Bitcoin, the bitcoin miner backed by two of U.S. President Donald Trump's sons, has locked in crypto and traditional investors to back an all-stock merger that will allow the firm to soon start trading on the Nasdaq, the company's largest investor said.”
It aims “to start trading in early September” [1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/american-bitcoin-...
I guess the data can't be altered if it's on a blockchain unless a 51% attack on the network occurs, right? Along with the data would be signatures or something similar of who entered the data, so if foul play is suspected, blame can be assigned.
Putting it on a blockchain doesn't do anything. Suppose one piece of data is how many businesses filed for bankruptcy with the IRS last quarter. How are you going to read a bunch of private tax documents to confirm they are correct? How will you verify that there is no ommitted data?
The only way would be some kind of giant panopticon of the entire relevant federal government and the daily activities of every employee. No amount of signing will increase the trustworthiness of the source.
Secretly altering the data is not a thing either. It's like trying to secretly alter last week's print NYT headline. You can push out all the new copies you want, but lots and lots of people remember the old one, there are a million old copies sitting in archives, and once somebody notices the jig is up forever. You can issue errata if you want, but that is orthogonal to storage mechanism.
This is just some combination of a flood-the-zone BS answer to criticism of interference with the BLS and a gift to the crypto industry donors of the admin.
It's misdirection. They are planning to intentionally publish false data. They are going to say LOOK ITS CRYPTO IT CANT BE CHANGED.
And they are going to poker face it.
It's not an improvement.
The conspiracy theorists like to posit that the data is changed over time.
Maybe because Trump can’t fire the blockchain if number goes down?
My guess is that he’s not quite dumb enough to take that capability away from himself.
I predict an article detailing all the technical/security flaws about a week after the implementation details are public.
Crypto apps running in eg smart contracts will be able to interact directly with it and trust it, rather than needing to trust a third party oracle that retrieves the data externally.
They asked how it would be an improvement. You've described how it would be different...
It improves one flow without affecting another. You might not like what it improves but it does improve something.
You haven't articulated how. You've explained that it is different but not what end goal that enables that actually improves anything.
Like, I can store this data on a server in a yaml file and that would be different. But it wouldn't improve anything. Taking an action and using a technology are not improvements in and of themselves.
Actually that does sound like an improvement, I hadn't considered the need for trusted publishers interacting directly with the blockchain making smart contracts more meaningful.
All third-party oracles are simply contracts on other blockchains. The new blockchain is yet another third-party oracle for the contract to interact with.
verifying data hasn't been tampered with is useless if you don't trust the original source, and no one in their right mind would trust this data.
A blockchain at least implies the possibility running a data node and this having a local copy of all the data.
If that’s the case, this is a great step forward for transparency and accountability.
We’ll see how it goes!
Putting a hash of the PDF report is useless but this is probably just the first step.
One has to understand it is very hard to bring data on the blockchain. The system being in a way fully isolated to the external world (no http GET query possible on xxx.gov, a trusted source has to bring it in).
If they will next publish actual data through an oracle as the official source it is actually a revolution (I do not have access to the Bloomberg article, not sure they talk about this). They are probably about to plug those blockhains as legitimate financial systems and it is gonna be hard to revert.
Whether we like or dislike blockchains, the US and others decided to dump their currencies on it to save them.
Probably not Trump idea, nor it was pitched to him by a crypto bro. He is just executing a move that is as big as Bretton Woods or the end the convertibility of the US dollar to gold.
https://archive.ph/c8HRk
The reason why this is useful is for DeFi applications that are blockchain native. If an applications needs to rely on the economic data, it will be able to use it natively without using an oracle. This doesn't improve the integrity of the data or replace the old ways of getting the data, just makes it more accessible to the blockchain ecosystem.
Sounds like a database with an API would have done the trick. Slap a MCP server on top and you can use it with AI and people would have been ecstatic.
If you are raising funds I am in for 10mil at a valuation of 1B.
You're missing the point. A database or a normal http API is great if you're accessing the data from outside a blockchain. If you want smart contracts to access the data, it's better if the data is available natively inside the blockchain. You're probably not interested in smart contract, but there are other people that are trying to build smart contracts which use that data. One simple example would be a prediction market.
So... how is it useful? You're trading one oracle for another. Either of these oracles can be manipulated or compromised.
I think one could argue that it's more elegant from the point of view of blockchain maximalism. But I don't quite understand the utility in any other sense.
It's useful because it's coming from the original source, instead of having an oracle network made up of 3rd parties which vote on it.
No details on the implementation, but something like this would be great, because currently the fastest way to find out if an economic data print is good or bad is to watch the stock market, and then the numbers turn up in the news and tweets ~2 minutes later.
It's not clear where (and maybe not easily accessible) to get these numbers at -exactly- the moment they release.
> It's not clear where (and maybe not easily accessible) to get these numbers at -exactly- the moment they release.
This is all publicly available to everyone at the exact same time. How do you think the market is moving in response, if this info is not available?
Because the website doesn't immediately update. The blockchain approaches something dynamic, where the update is broadcast to everyone at the same time, not just broadcast to those who know where to ask for it at the right time.
It seems similar to people who harvest the URL of a product before launch, so they don't have to wait for the slow website.
I guess. It doesn't seem like people who want/need this data in instant real-time are having trouble getting it.
On what planet does putting these data on a blockchain hinder insider trading?
> if an economic data print is good or bad is to watch the stock market, and then the numbers turn up in the news and tweets ~2 minutes later
I can get the number on the internet within a fraction of a second. Back when bots were allowed on twitter I could get it faster than bloomberg.
It should just be served up to anyone who is actively listening at ~8:30:000. Exactly like what a blockchain would do. Broadcast a new block to everyone at the same time.
A blockchain doesn't, unless all peers are directly connected to all other peers.
Otherwise, a transaction has to propagate through the network.
For Bitcoin, for the last couple years, looks like it's typically 15ish seconds to reach 90% of the network and 5ish to reach 50% of the network.
A centralized server could send updates to directly connected clients much faster than that.
https://www.dsn.kastel.kit.edu/bitcoin/#propdelaytx
A bit oldskool but go retro and try a tv "broadcast" ... anyone who is actively listening at 8:30:000 gets it served to them.
I am getting strong "tech bros invent the bus in 2025" vibes. Putting Founder, CEO, Cereal Entrepreneur on your linkedin bio doesnt make you instantly a genius.
I'm not pushing for a blockchain, I'm pushing for any other way than it is currently done.
You are right it is not a bus.
Its a vehicle that holds idk like 20 people or maybe even a bigger one that holds 100 or so. It will go from one point to another, along a pre-determined route, stopping at designated places along the way. People can get on and off at any one of the places it stops at.
Its reimagining the way we travel, its going to change the world. A similar thing is in the works that goes on fixed metal rails, the details havent all been figured out yet nor what to call it, but expect exciting news soon.
WTF are you talking about? All this data is freely available on government websites such as https://www.bls.gov/ and in easily downloaded formats. Putting it on the blockchain is pointless.
In my experience it takes a few minutes for the website to update. It comes off like there is a hidden API to request the documents, and then everyone else gets it once the front-end website finishing propagating the update or something.
Reporting agencies will get the headline figures a few minutes early under embargo. They have very strict rules on handling that information.
If there’s any issues with releases, they’re not going to be resolved by putting them on a blockchain
Putting it into a public blockchain prevents it from being altered after the fact.
Do you think the government would be able to get away with altering data after the fact? If they released it, someone downloaded it, and would be able to easily spot changes. It could even be (and probably is) automated.
And either way, what does the blockchain offer if the government comes out and says that some previously published numbers were incorrect, and they publish new ones? You'll have two competing versions of the same data, with one considered obsolete because the government says so.
And none of this matters if they're altering the data before publishing.
Is that an actual problem we've had?
Nb announced revisions aren't a problem at all, and not one that "blockchain" prevents anyway (you can publish new stuff on a blockchain, no problem)
Why alter it when you can call it fake news and fire the person who published it and hire a new person who is commited to "Fair and Balanced" data*
*data is for 'entertainment' purposes only - Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual data is entirely coincidental.
So does archive.org
Revisions to initial economic data is common, though, once other slower statistics are compiled into a final GDP/CPI number. The initial month-over-month or QoQ are estimates.
It doesn't prevents the government from firing BLS administrators for reporting correct figures though.
It doesn't prevent altering the data before it gets published, though. Garbage in, garbage out.
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5432523-trump-fi...