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Yeah, my original thought was that you could see a record to show that a public works contract put forth by Politician Joe and awarded to ABC Roadwork Inc, and then later you'd see that most of the contract money ended up in Joe's cousin's investment account.
And again, I don't think it's foolproof because ABC would just immediately convert everything into cash to pay their vendors. But it's still nice to think about alternatives even if we know they might be impractical because hey, that's how we come up with better alternatives.
If we're imaging a world where corporations and governments would agree to this level of accountability, wouldn't it be eaiser to just make certain financial transactions into public records?
Currently we consider some things public records (registering a company y, the voting roll) and other things private (income and taxes, bank transactions). If there was the will to chnage things we could just make the financial records of all elected government officials and corporations with government contracts automatically publically accessible. This doesn't need block chain, a law could be passed deeming these "in the public interest" such that banks would have no grounds to refuse a request from journalists or any citizens to access them.
This would be a lot simpler and cheaper than block chain. But its unlikely to happen for the same reason that block chain won't be used for this either.
The only counterpoint I can think of is that the distributed ledger is much harder to fuck with than a physical or digital archive with a couple backups.
Sure, I suppose any public record is a public record. And you're right, as much as I'd love to see it and it'd be good for the world, I don't imagine it happening in my lifetime.
I suppose either way an unscrupulous person might find a way to launder their money.