Talking tonight with pals about how the Hedera #Hashgraph could solve a huge amount of problems with the logistics of planned economies. Socialist planning rises and falls on well-functioning bureaucracies and logistical masterpieces.

A technology like Hedera Hashgraph could have incredibly interesting implications for the potential it could have. Its gossip protocol means that any information inputted into the network is instantly shared with every other node in that network.

For a practical example, if a state ran supermarket reported into the network that there was a 5% increase in X product, immediately every single node in that supply chain would already be aware and could enact the protocols necessary to adjust production relative to demand

Market economies never ever ever achieve supply and demand equilibrium (mainly because of profit, there are incentives at different times to underproduce or over produce) but a technology like Hedera Hashgraph could automate enormous swathes of the logistical legwork in economies

This is all very People's Republic of Walmart (v good book BTW you should read it) but if socialists want to have real, concrete alternatives to capitalism they need to logistical solutions

Mismanagement of supply and demand can cause enormous pain, such as mass shortages

But a technology like Hashgraph would be able to spread information around a network lightning fast (and at a very low energy cost too).

To compare the speed of the Hashgraph ledger technology, Visa handles around 1,700 transactions a second. Hashgraph can handle 10,000 a second

Also, because there is the trait of Hashgraph having asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance, the network is highly highly secure. Hackers would need to approximately gain control over about 1/3 of the nodes in the network to corrupt it.

Scale this up to something like an NHS datasystem with hundreds of thousands of computers in the system, and it becomes unfeasible for hackers to compromise that system as they would need to control at least 1/3 of all nodes in the network.

This would mean that economic planning would be highly secure and we could trust that the information being input into the system is accurate and honest.

The network would also be able to run elections intensely quickly.

Let's say Hashgraph was running an election system. There is something in there called the gossip protocol; basically, every time a node takes an action on the network, it randomly tells another node what it did, when it did it and where that information came from.

The node that received that gossip then randomly tells another node in the network, and so on and so forth until everyone in the network knows about that action. And you know its legitimate and honest, because you'd need to take over 1/3 of the nodes in the network to corrupt it

So let's say you run an election on Hashgraph and you can handle up to 10,000 transactions a second, and we have online voting that you can do at home or electronic voting machines.

The network could, theoretically, count 10K votes every second with 100% accuracy and certainty, because every node in the network would know the transaction of every single vote and the timestamp on it (so if you usually postal vote you could make sure your vote arrives on time)

If we take the EU Referendum for example. 33,551,983 total votes/10,000 per second = 3,355 seconds.

3,355/60 = 56 minutes (to nearest integer).

We'd have known the results of the referendum before 23:00, instead of the 04:45 it was actually announced.

And like I say we'd know this was foolproof because unless 1/3 of voters have their device they're voting from taken over, or 1/3 of all voting machines are corrupted then the asynchronous byzantine fault tolerance makes it completely legit. It would eliminate rigged elections.

The implications this technology could have for many different fields of life is absolutely crazy. It seems to be an enormous leap in logistical management and I think it's something socialists should genuinely look into.

Here's a video on it if you want to learn more about it.