Senator Bam Aquino's Philippine National Budget Blockchain Bill captured public attention, especially given the timing around flood-control controversies. The current outrage has ignited an important conversation on how public funds are spent-- and potentially hidden. In the uproar over stalled projects and missing allocations, the bill promised a clean fix: put every peso on the blockchain. Each transaction, it claimed, would live forever on an immutable ledger—visible to all, tamper-proof, and honest by design. It’s a seductive vision: that technology could finally do what politics hasn’t.
But that’s the problem. We keep mistaking technology for reform. Blockchain is treated as the cure, not the tool. As if corruption were a software bug, not a symptom of power, discretion, and inequality. The assumption is that when code is incorruptible, people will become so too.
Yet history reminds us that tools inherit their makers’ hands—and their habits.
Blockchain’s appeal rests on its promise of “trustless” systems—no need to rely on people, because the code will enforce the rules. Yet democracy has never been trustless. It depends on public reasoning, ethical judgment, and accountability that can’t be automated. Code can record transactions, but it cannot record intentions. It can track where money goes, but not why it was spent that way—or who was silenced to make it possible.
Every design embeds a perspective or idea. Coders build systems in their own image: what counts as efficiency, which institutions deserve verification, which activities need surveillance. Those biases get baked into the structure and passed off as neutrality. A blockchain system may look like pure math, but its rules already define what coders think honesty means. The politics isn’t erased; it’s compiled.
This is how governance by code quietly replaces governance by consent. What used to be questions of ethics and accountability become questions of protocol and interoperability. The public sees a dashboard of transparency, but not the politics beneath its design. The same blindness that made people believe social media democratized communication now fuels the belief that blockchain can democratize the budget.
Transparency without legibility is still opacity. It’s one thing to publish every transaction; it’s another for citizens to actually understand it. Without data designed for human understanding, those ledgers are just digital fog—open to the public, yet inaccessible to the very citizens they claim to empower. The budget becomes a blockchain spectacle: visible, dazzling, but hollow.
We’ve seen this cycle before. Each generation of bureaucrats promises modernization through its favorite tool—typewriters, spreadsheets, portals, dashboards, now blockchains. The pattern stays: we mechanize accountability instead of institutionalizing it. The infrastructure changes, but the incentives do not.
To be fair, blockchain can improve documentation and traceability. It can deter tampering and improve record-keeping. But it won’t fix corruption any more than a mirror fixes your reflection. Without honest data entry, oversight, and enforcement, all we get is an incorruptible record of corrupt acts—proof preserved in perfect code.
If the goal is genuine accountability, then transparency must remain human-centered. Citizens need to read and interpret what’s on the ledger, not just admire its so called “immutability”. Reform begins when people can ask why, not merely see where.
Technology can assist that process, but it can’t absolve it. A blockchain can record truth, but it can also fossilize lies. The future of accountability won’t depend on how tamper-proof our ledgers are, but on whether our politics can still tell right from wrong.