Remember back in 2017 when Bitcoin’s price soared and companies started promising to add everything to the blockchain? It was an embarrassing era, since blockchain technology has very few practical purposes that can’t be solved by a regular, old-school database. But it sounds like the White House just got the memo and wants to usher in the world of 2017 again.
President Donald Trump held a televised “cabinet meeting ” at the White House on Tuesday that clocked in at over 3 hours and 15 minutes. It was a marathon session of ass-kissing from the Trump regime’s most despicable characters. But the announcement that really stood out to us, aside from all the normalization of fascist language, was Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s promise to put government statistics on blockchain.
“The Department of Commerce 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 said.
“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.”
Lutnick then quickly moved on to another topic, but it was an odd thing to suggest. Why blockchain? Apparently, because Lutnick associates it with crypto. But it’s hard to imagine what problem putting statistics on the blockchain will solve.
The idea behind blockchain is that it’s a decentralized ledger. And it’s a neat idea, but it doesn’t actually solve very many problems beyond maintaining the existence of cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. A normal spreadsheet or database typically works just fine for distributing information of the kind Lutnick wants to put out.
Trump infamously had a dispute with some of the government’s top officials who produce government statistics, firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer, earlier this month. Trump falsely claimed that McEntarfer had produced “rigged” data that had been “manipulated for political purposes” when numbers were revised to show less job growth than had been previously reported.
Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, just happened to announce a new partnership with Crypto.com on Tuesday, according to the Wall Street Journal, so maybe Lutnick’s promise to put stats on the blockchain was inspired by that in some way. Whatever was behind the idea, Trump and his family have reaped billions of dollars through their crypto associations.
The meeting went to a lot of other weird places, especially when Trump was asked about his plans for deploying the National Guard to blue cities around the country. The president has flooded Washington, D.C., with federal agents under the pretext of cracking down on crime.
“The line is that I’m a dictator, but I stop crime. So a lot of people say, ‘You know, if that’s the case, I’d rather have a dictator,’” Trump said Tuesday.
Trump expressed the same sentiment on Monday, making it clear that this wasn’t just a verbal slip. He really wants to normalize the idea that dictators may get a bad wrap and are necessary to fight crime. And he’s threatened to send troops to places like Chicago as a show of force.
Maybe they can put the crime statistics on the blockchain, too. Why not? It’s supposed to be the fix for everything, according to crypto fans. Now, if we could only get a White House reporter to ask Trump what he thinks blockchain technology is all about. It would almost certainly be a comical answer from the 79-year-old.