History-retaining Merkle trees (like Git with force-push turned off) are a significant advance towards a better society, government, and industry. No, not blockchains with distributed consensus, history-retaining Merkle trees with no distributed consensus (Byzantine or not).
Example: UK Number Plates
The Driver Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) is decades old and runs operations for the UK from Swansea in Wales, and allows high-street stores to apply for and then operate license plate printing services (for profit). They are supposed to check that you have the right to that “plate”, but the BBC found that checking is skipped by some firms. People are using those firms to make plates for other people’s cars, in order to evade parking/speeding fines (and worse). Of course, criminals could print their own, but if dodgy firms are mixing illegal plate printing among legal plate printing then whole the system needs an upgrade. Now, it could be (I don’t know) that the license firms mail in paper forms to DVLA who then put them in a pile ahead of scanning them. If true, that is a bit Victorian. Maybe there a website for those firms making changes, and DVLA runs a 10 person dev team just to maintain the site. If it exists, it’s still a bit Victorian as people who own plates that have been cloned “by mistake” are not informed when that cloning happens. I say mistake because the firms caught by the BBC mentioned in their article all have good excuses and pledge to not let it happen again.
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