Quote from: dr.offher on May 07, 2015, 12:43:44 PM

Oh, a government-run blockchain project!

Sounds wonderful, were it not completely anathema to everything the Bitcoin community stands for.

It's not as simple as that. This project doesn't aim to be a fully-fledged currency and so it doesn't directly compete with Bitcoin or claim to be better than Bitcoin. It's just a way to use the blockchain idea to secure entries in a database.

The concept isn't exactly radical either although the CoinDesk article paints it as being such. Truth is, there isn't really that much of a reason for a centralized distributed database to use a blockchain. Which this thing is:

Quote

Williamson explained the network will be manned by three "validating" nodes within the department, though anyone can download its client.

When you take Bitcoin out of the blockchain, what you get is a decentralized (or centralized but distributed in this case) relational cluster database. The purpose of a blockchain is to allow you to interact with other nodes without requiring trust. For any other purpose that doesn't have this requirement, there are actually much more efficient alternatives.

Also as an aside, the official website for CREDITS (getcredits.io) makes my computer really, really slow. Sad