The utilization of Blockchain across politics and music, ensures that transparency and accountability is maintained.
Ever since the advent of cryptocurrency, Blockchain has become the hot cake for many sectors. With the rampant use of Bitcoin, blockchains are being widely accepted across industries. Its unique feature of storing the information across a series of computer networks has made it more accountable and transparent for application. Since there is no central authority to regulate or to monitor the customers and users’ data, all the information is undisclosed and readily available to the users, thus gaining momentum of acceptance across many sectors. Politics, government organizations and music industry are the three areas, where the issue of corruption and plagiarism is prominent. The application of cryptocurrency in these three sectors, will ensure that the challenge embedded due to traditional functioning in all the three areas is rectified.
Blockchain in Politics
One of the major talked about challenge, concerning politics is fraud, misuse of funds and corruption. Be it the 2016 US Presidential elections or 2019 Indian Loksabha elections, the issue of party funds and money utilized by the party or the amount of donations they received, has never been disclosed. Infact, it’s really hard to locate the transactions happening amongst political organizations most of the time, which creates a lack of accountability amongst the citizen of any country.
An OECD report has estimated that a total of 20-25% of the funds are lost globally due to corruption. Even though sometimes this lost is unintentional or occur due to an alternation of economic situations, the reason behind the fund loss cannot be traced, leading to lack of transparency amongst the people or the government.
That’s why the utilization of cryptocurrency in politics would help in tracking down the funds utilized by each political party during their election campaign or utilizing that amount in other areas.
Since the information of users is maintained across a network of computers, the possibility of modifying the information about the transactions is rare. Also, blockchain is tamper-proof, the information about the user is verified across the multiple network of computers involved in blockchain. The entries of all the transactions is available publicly which helps the political organizations to maintain transparency with the voters.
Since, all the information regarding the use, donation and transactions are surveiled,verified and is not governed by a central entity, the possibility of fraud and misuse gets reduced.
Blockchain Philanthropy
The non- profit organizations, businesses and institutes of any sector, receive donations for social cause. However, the trust and confidence for such charities has declined with time. A report suggests that, beginning since the year 2005 until now, a decline of 67% has been observed regarding charity. That’s why to rectify this situation, Blockchain philanthropy is being observed as the new option for charity, thus to retain trust and confidence amongst the donors.
In order to promote blockchain philanthropy, Alibaba has developed a blockchain donation system called Charities on the chain, to enhance trust in the philanthropy sector. It is Co-developed by Alibaba Philanthropy and Ant Financier’s team and deploys blockchain technology to connect donors, charitable organizations and beneficiaries, thus allowing users to track their donations. Alibaba has said, that this platform will assist charitable organizations without the proper technology, for improving efficiency, and are planning to extend this chain in societal organizations in the future.
Such blockchain philanthropy in any level, would help donors in building trust with the organizations, thus preventing the under-utilization, over-utilization and misuse of funds.
Blockchain in Music
One of the major challenge faced by music industry globally is the copyright infringement and piracy. The world has witnessed countless incidents, where singers, musicians and lyricists have displayed their apprehensiveness towards copy-right issue. But this challenge can be countered with the help of deploying blockchain.
As blockchain maintains a ledger of information across various network, the information regarding the publication of the music, can be maintained with the help of a unique code, which can be viewed as a ledger ID, which is unalterable. This will solve the problem of piracy and copy-right infringement. As blockchain also maintains the information regarding transactions or payments by user accounts, this will also rectify the issue of ownership and digital payment, thus ensuriung that transparency is amongst the public, Music Company and the singer.
Many start-up music companies are accepting this new way of payment with blockchains. The music platform Benji Roger has published a comprehensive guide for a fair trade music format for adopting blockchain that can counter the challenge of ownership.
Thus application of blockchain is a new reform across sectors that have the possibility of changing the traditional systems.