A verified Blockchain would essentially turn everything into torrens instead of abstract title. I think that’s a good thing and I’d rather pay the government to verify the transaction than done for profit company that’s going to review title as quickly and cheaply as possible.
You can pay for the govt for that service without introducing blockchain-based BS in the process. After all that’s what most countries do, land rights and transactions are recorded, stored and verified by some governmental branch.
planish@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
One of the good things about using a blockchain system is that it forces you to set out and follow a set of programmatic, and thus at least minimally fair, rules for how the system is going to work. It means you are running on some kind of rule of law, and for it to work everyone involved has to be able to replicate the history of the system and agree that it is correct.
It seems a fairly natural fit for something like land, especially in the US, where we know for a fact that huge swathes of it were seized in the past from Native Americans, or revoked after being given to Black folks at the end of the civil war, or otherwise moved around by the government in suspiciously ad-hoc ways that we have later come to regret.
If you can design the entire system to grind to a halt if rights are not respected or someone tries to rewrite the rules on the basis of they have the guns, it could be a powerful force for the rule of law and the maintenance of a consensus reality.
Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
Bro that’s complete fantasy nonsense… Somebody has to also enforce the ownership. You ideologic internet stuff means jack shit if someone else has the gun.
planish@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
If you don’t have a system of law that even its designated enforcers are obliged to follow, you don’t have a legitimate government, you have a mafia.
The easier it is to make cases where a law is broken common knowledge, the easier it is to gather the political will to enforce the law. That mechanism is what obliges the enforcers to actually follow the law, and it can work more or less well depending on the structure of the society, the relative power of different groups of people, and the communication technologies in use. If the President guns someone down in broad daylight, they get thrown out more often if you have a reputable newspaper than if you don’t. An election is a convenient substitute for everyone trying to kill each other until we find out who is left.
Blockchains are one technology for establishing common knowledge among a group of participants. They’re not magic, they don’t even usually work particularly well. But they do offer techniques for binding the administrators of systems of rules to actually follow those rules, which have the potential to be applied more broadly.