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Bitcoin Blockchain
The Bitcoin Blockchain has countless and the most different use cases, from finance to real estate, from copyright management to assurance. Now, Italian Five Stars Movement leader Beppe Grillo seems to have found a new application for the distributed ledger.
You might think that the main problem for the Five Stars Movement is winning political elections or managing the issues of the administration of the Roman capital, but no. The major issue for Grillo’s political party are expulsions, that have become a real obsession for him.
All political parties expel their unwanted members, but no one has managed to invent as many systems to hunt their own party colleagues as Grillo has so far.
Apparently, Grillo failed to ensure compliance with the rules and has to launch a new system to make decree expulsions unassailable and incontrovertible through the use of an algorithm.
A few days ago, in fact, during an interview about the Federico Pizzarotti suspension from his party, Grillo commented:
“We’re working on a project, the so-called Blockchain for the encrypted information. It is very interesting- you have an algorithm and there are no intermediaries. If the Blockchain could be used in politics that would be very interesting, so if a Parliament Member you voted for does not follow the program he/she would be automatically expelled."
Obviously, it is a joke, but this attests that Grillo knows what Blockchain is, it cannot be excluded that sooner or later the Italian government will use the ledger with political use cases.
The old country has always been interested in Blockchain technology and in the last months a few projects captured their attention. We recently talked about the Italian startup Helperbit, that created a Blockchain-based platform to manage natural disaster donations.
The Blockchain Education Network Italia (BEN Italia) is also working on a law proposal that could encourage the adoption of the Blockchain within the Italian country. Last but not least, Italy proved to be very interested in the distributed ledger thanks to the BlockchainLAB in Milan, the first entrepreneurial effort that brings together the best expertise on the technology.
Italy is now demonstrating how Bitcoin could be an easy and faster method of payment in a few sectors, for instance, booking a taxi. In fact, in Rome taxis even started to accept Bitcoin through a platform called Chainside which creates an invoice to be paid in Bitcoin by the final user.
Furthermore, a few months ago Italy decided to regulate Bitcoin as a currency, as the Italian tax agency called Agenzia delle Entrate published a paper titled “Bitcoin and digital currencies buying and selling: clarification on the tax treatment” about the fiscal regulation of Bitcoin and how VAT would be applied to cryptocurrency transactions.
Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
