Public faith at the heart of everything

I was struck by this phrase spoken by a renowned Certified Public Accountant during a training course.
I immediately associated what he said with blockchain.

The Certified Public Accountant is a professional expert in a multitude of disciplines, particularly economic and legal. Their main task is to ensure, through control, that a private or public entity declares information correctly. They must attest (as a Public Official) to the truthfulness of the facts, they must “notarize” or “certify” just as the blockchain does.

The foundations on which all applications that use the blockchain system are based are transparency (all information is public and immutable), decentralization (data is written on multiple distributed registers in the network), disintermediation (there is no control by a designated entity), automation and “certification” (when certain conditions occur, the agreement is executed without the impulse of the parties).
These principles applied to the audit process (understood precisely as a supply chain control) can be of help to the professional skepticism that the Auditor is required to maintain constantly. This distrust or lack of trust that the professional is obliged to respect serves so that significant errors attributable to facts or behaviors that imply irregularities and fraud do not occur.
The enormous advantage that Satoshi Nakamoto gave us with the spread of Bitcoin is independence. This brings us great benefits in terms of transparency and security, but also immutability of the recorded data and temporal certainty.

So, going back to the initial phrase, we can define the Blockchain technology as one of the greatest revolutions of the new millennium because it gives us what humanity needs most: public faith. Being able to certify data in history and make it inviolable brings enormous advantages in many sectors and allows the entire population to regain trust in the system and humanity.

“Too big to fail”

No one would ever have thought that one of the major banks could fail, yet it happened with Lehman Brothers, and it was a dramatic event for tens of thousands of people and, above all, one of the biggest events that allowed the world’s population to no longer trust an absolutely credible subject on which they had placed the utmost trust (the banking system).

A project in development is trying to solve this “gap” starting from the need that is precisely satisfied by the Certified Public Accountant. An Auditor has the duty to control throughout their term that every declared fact is correct. They cannot afford errors, have enormous responsibilities and are required to exactly respect the principles of the audit. Something that probably those who controlled (and still control) the banking system did not do correctly.

Who knows what could happen if there were a public and transparent system where every judgment and activity was recorded in an immutable way. Imagine what could happen if an analyst or an agency associated a certain vote/judgment to a package of bonds and then “notarized” it on the blockchain. Imagine the weight that a control of all these aspects could have in the hands of the people and not of a few agencies and finally, try to imagine what could happen to those who issue misleading or even untruthful judgments.

The collapse of the financial system that began in 2007 was caused by a liquidity crisis due to the “somewhat” unethical behavior of banks in agreement with rating agencies. They lent money to anyone and were forced to hide such loans in “packages” of toxic securities. We all know the consequence.

Web3 technology allows any supply chain process to be transparent and secure, therefore any sector that generates a product or service through a supply chain process can benefit from it. Agriculture, food, and beverage industry first and foremost, but also energy, construction, automotive, art and music, social activities, trading, real estate, tourism, supply chain, and the entire services sector.

Let’s think about the chain of data entered into systems that determine the fate of a person or a company. Imagine having certainty about the time, value, and who determined that judgment, and consider how useful it could be for the entire world to avoid fraud.

A notary makes a specific piece of data public on a particular register deposited with a single entity. The blockchain technology allows for immediate transcription onto a distributed digital register on the network, which is disintermediated and associated with a unique hash (seal) at an absolutely certain date (time stamp).

It is not unthinkable to automate every step of a chain from an accounting, economic, financial, and legal standpoint, thus avoiding a person committing a crime. Automatic oracles, whether automated or not, will be essential.

In conclusion, I believe that Satoshi Nakamoto has given us the opportunity to close a door on a harmful world and open another one in the same world, but with an extra hope. We don’t have to trust a system with centralized parties acting as trusted intermediaries, and perhaps we can learn to view trust from a different perspective. To this day, humans cannot trust their own kind, and for this simple fact, we must seize the opportunity that has been offered to us and decentralize so that humans can trust each other.