No. Blockchain technology can reduce low-level corruption and even make some forms impossible, but blockchains cannot eliminate corruption. Why is that?

There are very few areas where society would accept the rigid interpretation of code-is-law that are the cornerstone of blockchains. Instead, communities will insist on changing the ledger to reflect their idea of fairness - for example, a judge ordering asset seizure, the division of a deceased estate or new keys for someone who lost them. The best we can hope for is that the ability to override the ledger has appropriate safeguards. Our HIVE blockchain has an account recovery feature with some built-in protections.

But, even though transactions are transparent, some people are so influential that they don't care that their corrupt actions are visible on-chain. Who are you going to call? The police that they "own"? Law is nothing without compliance and enforcement.

Where corruption will go away, which is a sufficient benefit alone, is that many low-level operations on the ledger are routine and don't need to involve low-level bureaucrats. So in those common situations, blockchains can chase away low-level corruption.

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No, this is a fallen world, corruption is natural.

*Woo!* Thinking big picture here!

This possibility fuels a lot of the innovation in the blockchain space, beyond the opportunity for personal profit, and was apparently what motivated the creation of Bitcoin in the first place. Take the control of the money supply away from central banks and diffuse it across the whole economy. But, the ideology and the technology are separate...

I don't think total eradication of corruption from society is possible, because people are always gonna people, but I do believe blockchain could be used to reduce it. Maybe in the long run to a negligible level. Consider the possibility of a democracy whereby every unit of currency paid as tax by every citizen is accounted for on a public blockchain and all government spending is accounted for in the same way. Every transaction would publicly visible, as it should be, and the body politic could ensure in realtime that all that money is spent in ways that benefit the citizens. Near-perfect transparency is theoretically possible. Why did 30,000 HIVE go to the personal account of X politician when it should have gone to pay the electricity bill for the city water treatment plant that month? Citizens could change their votes immediately and divest power and responsibility away from that politician. It mightn't even have to actually get to that point, just the possibility that it could may be enough to stop anyone trying anything shady.

The real problem is implementation. How do we go from here to there? Electoral participation and legislating change. We're a little way off but one step at a time...

And then, it could all just be done the other way around. Smart contracts, blockchain and automation could instead be used to oppress and control people. Consider CBDCs. Central Bank Digital Currencies. There's a real possibility that if enough people abandon cash in the future and too few people adopt truly decentralised cryptocurrencies in their place, that an alternate economy couldn't function. I hope we're past that point already but it also seems unlikely. 

There's plenty of corruption within blockchain spaces too! Scams, vaporware NFTs and investments, pyramid schemes, pump and dump. The whole FTX fiasco and the collapse of Terra Luna and all that before. Custodial centralised exchanges are arguably a corruption of the fundamental idea of blockchain, but they're also pretty necessary for most people to actually buy and own crypto...

So yeah, I've pretty much written a short novel and it's complicated and there's no clear answer but hey, I don't want to end on a negative because I'm optimistic: there is Hive after all. We're all here. We know it's something different and decent. It's not perfect, but it does what it does well and it doesn't pretend to do anything it can't. 

What are your thoughts on all that, valentin86?