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> a well organized and reasonably trustworthy third party who can handle this stuff You hit the nail on the head. In the US we can trust our third parties. Eur

> a well organized and reasonably trustworthy third party who can handle this stuff You hit the nail on the head. In the US we can trust our third parties. Europe too. But that's not always the case elsewhere. I am reminded of a friend who told me he wanted to sell some stock held in a bank in his country in Latin America, but the bank refused to process his transaction for a few weeks. By the time he was finally able to sell, the price had fallen greatly. It later turned out that the owner of the bank was selling his own shares during that time. Blockchain is good for systems where there are few transactions and energy is cheap, but there is no one single trustworthy actor. That's often the case in the third world. Third world equities exchanges (not places like Brazil and Chile but other countries with very undeveloped financial markets) would benefit from blockchain. There's not much liquidity there and the individual investor ends up getting pushed to the side when the large players want to trade. Even if you have a central clearinghouse and a liquid exchange, corruption is a factor. I don't pretend to know how best to implement blockchain for electronic exchanges, but I suppose the starting point would be to build a settlement system that has the imprimatur of a coalition of different governments (like Mercosur or Comunidad Andina), hold the shares in trust somewhere, and use the settlement system to process exchange-traded transactions from the constituent countries. Eventually, exchanges don't have to be the origination points of transactions, and you could presumably just get bids and offers directly from other participants over the internet. No guarantees that you are getting the best ones, but that doesn't matter as much for third world markets because the prices are wide and slow-moving anyway.

redisman 6y ago
If you can't trust the government then what are the chances they'll buy into using a blockchain that takes away their corruption powers? The only way you could adopt it is if it's developed in a trusted country, but then you'd be pitching your corrupt government to use a (possibly) hostile countries system to manage property. Or that they will actually use the blockchain to resolve disputes rather than just telling you to piss off?
- totalZero 6y ago
  > If you can't trust the government then what are the chances they'll buy into using a blockchain that takes away their corruption powers? OK well I can't speak for Asia or Africa but I am familiar with the Americas... Aside from the fact that governments always look for PR campaigns that make them look fair, they also know they aren't going to be in power forever, and they suffer (get fired, thrown in jail, you name it) when power changes hands. If you can insulate the financial system from those shocks then it's beneficial for both parties because they each protect their financial downside. Also, the country as a whole grows when markets get healthier and can attract more investment. That's good for everyone. It's not that you can't get the government to set up and use a particular system. It's that individual corporations within the country affiliate with a particular faction/party and try to bend the system to take advantage of other participants. The corruption happens under the skin. You can establish a competent central actor but you can't trust him not to bend the rules, like a horny professor when an attractive student with a B asks for a low A. The third world is one big hackathon for the misuse of institutions. Look at Morales' successful efforts to wriggle out from the grasp of term limits; he went to the Supreme Court and asked his buddies there to declare him eligible due to "human rights." He didn't say "I don't care about the Constitution," even though he wanted to violate its rules. They don't want the institution to look like it's crumbling, even when they're the ones chipping away at it. If you elevate the exchange to a multinational blockchain then you have competing factions, lots of ebb and flow, and the potential for outside participants. And you get the "i don't have to trust the others" aspect of blockchain. The whole point of developing robust systems is to make them failure tolerant in the face of perturbations, so we should apply them to the perturbed applications instead of building blockchain for rideshare/dildoes/whatever that helps nobody with an actual problem.

redisman 6y ago

If you can't trust the government then what are the chances they'll buy into using a blockchain that takes away their corruption powers? The only way you could adopt it is if it's developed in a trusted country, but then you'd be pitching your corrupt government to use a (possibly) hostile countries system to manage property. Or that they will actually use the blockchain to resolve disputes rather than just telling you to piss off?

totalZero 6y ago
> If you can't trust the government then what are the chances they'll buy into using a blockchain that takes away their corruption powers? OK well I can't speak for Asia or Africa but I am familiar with the Americas... Aside from the fact that governments always look for PR campaigns that make them look fair, they also know they aren't going to be in power forever, and they suffer (get fired, thrown in jail, you name it) when power changes hands. If you can insulate the financial system from those shocks then it's beneficial for both parties because they each protect their financial downside. Also, the country as a whole grows when markets get healthier and can attract more investment. That's good for everyone. It's not that you can't get the government to set up and use a particular system. It's that individual corporations within the country affiliate with a particular faction/party and try to bend the system to take advantage of other participants. The corruption happens under the skin. You can establish a competent central actor but you can't trust him not to bend the rules, like a horny professor when an attractive student with a B asks for a low A. The third world is one big hackathon for the misuse of institutions. Look at Morales' successful efforts to wriggle out from the grasp of term limits; he went to the Supreme Court and asked his buddies there to declare him eligible due to "human rights." He didn't say "I don't care about the Constitution," even though he wanted to violate its rules. They don't want the institution to look like it's crumbling, even when they're the ones chipping away at it. If you elevate the exchange to a multinational blockchain then you have competing factions, lots of ebb and flow, and the potential for outside participants. And you get the "i don't have to trust the others" aspect of blockchain. The whole point of developing robust systems is to make them failure tolerant in the face of perturbations, so we should apply them to the perturbed applications instead of building blockchain for rideshare/dildoes/whatever that helps nobody with an actual problem.