I've looked at that first article before. Nearly every single example listed could be done with a standard DB and/or required centralised trust. The author of the article doesn't appear to have put two and two together that if the land registry in Ghana wants a centralised public DB then obviously only the land registry itself should ever be allowed to write to that DB and why on earth do you need a massive, slow public network that the registry would need to pay to use just to confirm that it was in fact the land registry when it could just use a private key?

I do however think blockchains are an excellent, useful concept. Verifiable, non-repudiable, write-only audit logs are a fine idea and I can think of many uses for them. I've never heard a reason why they need to be run on inefficient, unscalable, power-hungry, untrusted, adversial public networks, however.

So, for transparency... I'm the author of both articles.

It's true that they could be done with a standard DB which would be managed like most of the other public / government IT throughout the developing world. The key to understanding the use cases is to look at the blockchain capabilities one by one and see where Ghana benefits from having a hard to modify public database.

If there is any subject that you would like to see developed or answered feel free to let me know. I usually write my articles as a way of responding to FAQ I receive in my consulting business.

> Ghana benefits from having a hard to modify public database

I am very much on board with that idea. I work in finance and write-only is practically a law. I just don't see why you need ethereum to implement it; in fact it seems a terrible, overly complicated way to do it.

It is good though that the blockchain hysteria is inspiring governments to think about these concepts though.

On your disclosure - despite my criticism they are good articles and do get one thinking.

So, I've worked in finTech for 20 years before changing careers to focus on Blockchain in general and Ethereum in particular, so I'm biased when I see the possibilities of an internet-of-agreements as well as mechanism design and cryptoeconomics in general as complements for real-world policy making and governance.

This to say, we could debate the relative merits of any solution so I'll simply say that transparency is a powerful tool in most government use cases. Ethereum was just a tool.

Thank you for the compliment!