Hive Needs to Be Enterprise Ready: Signatures

An enterprise is known for one major feature: bureaucracy (not the political bureaucracy, but the bureaucracy that implies an excessively complicated procedure).

We have all come to appreciate how time-consuming bureaucracy can be, how you have to wait for a seemingly simple decision to fly across offices and tables before it is made, and how it could hamper growth and innovation.

But could bureaucracy be a good thing sometimes?

In this article by Louise Gaille, some advantages of bureaucracy are pointed out. While I do not agree with all of his thoughts, some of his points make sense. Examples include: better job security; less favoritism; more specialization; best practices; and better defined roles.

Because of the nature of bureaucracy, the finances of a firm could be better managed and secured, as a person cannot simply come up one day, and steal all business funds for themselves. This is possible as multiple signatures could be required to sign transactions before a traditional fiat banking platform could approve a fund request.

Does Hive need a multi-signature account feature?

Before I go into this, let me start by reminding everyone that the signature here is simply the active or owner key, that could be used to validate or approve financial transactions for a specific account (posting keys may also need this).

The lack of multi-signature support could be one limiting factor that is hampering enterprise adoption of the Hive blockchain. The fact remains that no matter how liberal a partnership enterprise is, when it comes to funds (money), some levels of bureaucracy must be introduced.

Thus, if we all agree that Hive and HBD are both real money, something needs to be done. You cannot be in a business and have the keys to the funds in a person's possession or in a shared possession. With a multi-signature feature, enterprises can effectively go through a formal and proper agreement/consensus process before funds are released for any reason. With that, better trust can be built among partners and workers.

Implementing enterprise-grade multi-signature support here on Hive will simply require presenting the option of generating multi-keys for an account with each key released to a specific user designated as a proprietor/partner, and the respective keys coming with some level of authority and restrictions, e.g. some keys can simply be validators, but cannot provide total validation without the primary validator. Also, monetary restrictions could be imposed.

Most Hive blockchain projects would benefit from such an implementation even before external enterprises, as it would help them decentralize financial management.

If the above makes any sense at all, it could be refined and implemented, and with this, Hive could be marketed as an enterprise-ready blockchain solution. Or is this already an option? I'd like to know.

Posted Using LeoFinance ^Beta