Just another example of how judicial systems are run by ignorant dinosaurs who don’t understand how anything works (e.g. series of tubes). You’d expect a judge presiding over this type of case to make a ruling after seeking advice from domain experts; on what was in the realm of possibility.
If Google were motivated to do this voluntarily, I’d expect it to be a 6-12 month project, at the very least.
It is exceptionally useful for the auditing of damn near everything in digital space, as long as shared resources and 3rd parties have access to the blockchain … which is probably the major reason corporations and politicians don’t want anything to do with it.
It’d be a lot harder to hide crimes, fraud, grey business dealings, bribery and illegal donations, sanction violations, secret police slush funds, etc, etc if every event in the entire financial system and supply chain was logged and cryptographically verifiable.
EDIT: NOTE I’m not talking about everyones transactions being in a public ledger (bad). Only enhancing the current system between businesses and orgs so it’s exceptionally difficult for any of them to falsify data without the others knowing, as well as having near instant visibility and analytics of the entire market (great for regulators, academics, etc).
A supply-chain wide blockchain could enable individuals to view every raw material that went into every product they consume, down to the location, date — even the exact time in many cases — each was mined, refined, harvested, transported, picked, traded, etc. in a way that no individual corp could hide or falsify dramatically. Each corp and individuals true (embodied energy consumption would be visible to every buyer; developed world politicians and corporations couldn’t simply blame China and other developing countries for their own consumption.