I think this (charity donations) is one of the perfect use cases for the blockchain. To be clear, I am not suggesting Bitcoin, but the underlying blockchain technology.
Having publicly visible transactions will be a huge boost to transparency and shady practices like those described in the article just won't fly. Every other month a news article about banks exploring blockchain tech keep popping up in the media and I hope banks find a way to incorporate blockchain technology into the existing system.
Blockchain technology is (nearly) useless without the blockchain being public. Banks need stronger distibuted consensus primitives than theyre using now, but blockchain is overkill.
It would be interesting to figure out how much of the process you could make public without compromising the privacy of the donors too much.
How much additional risk would be added by just publishing a log of all donations, with just the sender anonymized (with the sender knowing or even choosing the id, so they can verify their donation went through?), and how could that be mitigated?
With Bitcoin it is almost impossible to figure out who an account belongs to. It's however easy to follow the money as every transaction is public.
So while you can see what the charity does with the money, and also confirm that they received it, it's almost impossible for the charity to figure out who sent the donation.
An account in Bitcoin is just a long random number. And you can create as many accounts as you like. In order to find out who the account belongs to you have to trace back the money to an exchange, and not only hope they will cooperate, but also that they have not deleted the records of the transfer.
Having publicly visible transactions will be a huge boost to transparency and shady practices like those described in the article just won't fly. Every other month a news article about banks exploring blockchain tech keep popping up in the media and I hope banks find a way to incorporate blockchain technology into the existing system.