Overstock CEO: Blockchain can make government superefficient

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It is a common joke in virtually all countries that the ruling governments are inefficient and, in many cases, wasteful with their resources. Governmental departments will go into spending overdrive toward the end of the fiscal year in order to retain, or grow, their budget allotments, spending unnecessarily and costing taxpayers huge amounts of money. The founder and CEO of online retail giant Overstock, Patrick Byrne, believes that this all could come to a stop if governments would make the decision to embrace blockchains.

In an interview with MarketWatch, Byrne asserts that blockchain technology can make governments “superefficient, inexpensive and incapable of being bribed.” His comments came in relation to a new idea he is working on that would create “government-as-a-service,” and which includes a set of applications and companies that would be able to bring blockchain to a number of government-led services.

One country that could truly benefit from the new design, according to Byrne, is Venezuela. He asserts, “We could step into Venezuela with six laptops and create not only a functioning society but arguably one with the most advanced government systems in the world.” The crypto enthusiast and visionary added, “We could bring them a central bank on the laptop. Everyone in Venezuela downloads a free app, and suddenly you have the most advanced monetary system on the planet.”

Byrne isn’t just another CEO with too much time on his hands looking to grab the spotlight. He is a firm believer in the power of crypto and blockchain technology and has gone so far as to announce that he would sell Overstock in order to work solely on blockchains. The company also recently became the first to pay taxes in cryptocurrency.

He is well on his way to being a major force in the crypto ecosystem. His crypto trading platform, tZero, began operations this past January and he has something else in the works. He reportedly hopes to lead the crusade to disrupt the financial industry by introducing blockchain technology and has said that he expects to have a contract with at least one sovereign nation “very soon” in order to launch a wide-reaching government services overhaul.