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Exactly, and while the government database "land registry" could, of course, be replaced with a government "HouseChain" it wouldn't actually solve any Problem b

Exactly, and while the government database "land registry" could, of course, be replaced with a government "HouseChain" it wouldn't actually solve any Problem but would introduce a ton of new ones.

aflag 5y ago
However, if you have no government, the housechain could be a way for a decentralized society to implement the concept of a land registry. Once everyone agrees that the housechain is proof of ownership, then measures can be taken to enforce that without necessarily evoking a central government. I'm not sold on the idea of a society without a central government, but I think the blockchain would help — or even enable — such an experiment.
- giaour 5y ago
  In the absence of a governing authority, property disputes would revert to being settled by violence or the threat thereof. Why should my band of armed thugs defer to what it says on the blockchain when they could instead hit you with a $5 wrench until you vacate the premises? https://xkcd.com/538 https://xkcd.com/538
  - aflag 5y ago
    Because everyone else around them would help defend the validity of the deeds, as they all own property in the same way. Like I said before, I'm far far away from having all the answers about how to set up a decentralized society and I'm not even sure I would like to live in such a society. However, issuing deeds and currency is an important job that currently you need a central government you trust to do. With a blockchain that problem is solved. There are plenty of other problems besides that. But it is one less item in the checklist.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - giaour 5y ago
      > Because everyone else around them would help defend the validity of the deeds, as they all own property in the same way. That feels a bit like saying that everyone will pitch in to stop mugging since we all carry physical cash in the same way. Maybe some civilians would intervene some of the time, but most will not risk their own bodily autonomy to defend another's property. Issuing deeds and currency feels like the easy part of creating an agreed upon land registry or economy. I have a printer and know how to use SQLite, so nothing is stopping me from issuing my own physical currency or deeds today. I could even save paper and put them on my own personal blockchain. Convincing others to honor my currency or deeds sounds like the hard part.
      - aflag 5y ago
        It is not the easy part if you want a decentralized government because no one person can be tasked with issuing and governing over those, otherwise that person will have power over everyone and kind of defeat the purpose. That doesn't mean that there aren't other equally or even harder challenges. I was not claiming that blockchains was the last problem stopping us from becoming decentralized. Anyway, like you said, nothing prevents you from issuing your currency and deeds today. And, before blockchains, the only way to have a decentralized government would be for many people to do that. However, that system is more fragile than a system built on a single blockchain everyone agrees on. The big thing about blockchains is that it allows people to all agree on a certain asset, without giving control of that asset to a single party. That is big news for anyone group wanting to live in a decentralized society, because it was one of the big problems.
    - dale_glass 5y ago
      Reality (eg, Jews in Nazi germany) shows that this is bullshit. If the local government and population is on your side, then you're fine. If however you're a minority that's now deemed to be the enemy, then what supposedly belongs to you doesn't matter one bit. You can prove it as mathematically as you want, and you can have your neighbors on your side, but if a bigger army of goons shows up to take your stuff, they'll take it. Ultimately this is an entirely political problem, and the blockchain will simply be completely ignored if things go to shit.
      - aflag 5y ago
        I think you're missing the point. I agree with everything you said. The validity of everything comes from the people (the majority at least) agreeing on the legitimacy of something. Everyone agrees on the legitimacy of the dollar, so that's why it has value. However, by agreeing on that, we give USA's central bank a lot of control over it and, therefore, power. If everyone agrees that dollars are worthless, but bitcoins have value instead, then the central bank has a lot less control. Moreover, a society without a central government would never be able to agree on any fiat money without the blockchain. Now, such society could do so. Also, that society would have a hard time evaluating the legitimacy of deeds without the blockchain. So that is yet another feature that can help building such society if one so inclines.
        dale_glass 5y ago
        Things like BTC are even worse. BTC has two main sources of control: 1. The developers. Somebody has to develop the software, and no matter what, this ends up being a very select group. If you have multiple groups, that's still not a lot of people and they'll have to cooperate somehow, which will result in some sort of system you're not involved with. 2. The miners. They group up into pools, and there's not that many of them that are big enough to matter. Those two groups are the ones truly in control, and they're unelected, unaccountable, and have their own interests and agendas. If you think the banks are bad, then using a system made of a cabal distributed among the globe is hardly better.
        5y ago
  - arlcode 5y ago
    My band of thugs however would offer people the ability to buy protection from your band of thugs. I may even be inclined to write down some rules and introduce a process to resolve conflicts without unnecessary damage to people and property. (In this hypothetical scenario any form of land registry is only as valid as I say it is.)
    - giaour 5y ago
      Then in the end, we all live by the rules established by whoever has the largest band of thugs. Good thing we got rid of government and created this libertarian utopia.
    - FledNanders 5y ago
      > My band of thugs however would offer people the ability to buy protection from your band of thugs. Thereby reinventing the police > I may even be inclined to write down some rules and introduce a process to resolve conflicts without unnecessary damage to people and property. and the courts. But maybe that was your point?
      - arlcode 5y ago
        Indeed it was :) With a big enough population at least one government and a basic bureaucracy will be formed by someone. A few people in the Blockchain space seem to think that technology can fundamentally change that.
        FledNanders 5y ago
        Ah, I thought so! And I agree! I'm hopeful that when the Ponzi schemes fade away, we'll end up with a slightly more informed populace that has inadvertently received an introduction to political science, state-building, the origins of power, etc. Civics teachers take note! :)
        CRConrad 5y ago
        Almost the entire populace will be more informed -- except for the Ponzi-"coin" proponents, because they're busy innoculating themselves against reason by... Well, being Ponzi-"coin" proponents; strengthening their own biases by debating in favour of these ludicrous schemes. Like, right here on this page.
- zepto 5y ago
  > then measures can be taken to enforce that without necessarily evoking a central government. What measures?
  - aflag 5y ago
    I don't have the answers, but I'm easily drawn to such thought experiments: all the neighbors would agree with you that you're the owner and not the person who sold you the deed but wants to remain inside of it or some intruder or whatever. So, when you knock on their door and try to remove them, you'll get support from the local people who will try to respect what's in the "housechain". It is in their interest that the deeds are respected, because they also own their houses that way. That's beside the point, though. I'm just noting that the possibility of have distributed deeds does make it possible to have some of the benefits of a centralized government: deeds and currency, without having one. That obviously only works if everyone in the society has come to the agreement that those things are valuable (just like in case of central governments too). But the point is just that you don't need a central person with all the power of issuing them.
    - zepto 5y ago
      > That's beside the point, though. No - it is the point. > I'm just noting that the possibility of have distributed deeds does make it possible to have some of the benefits of a centralized government: No, it doesn’t make anything possible unless there is an enforcement mechanism.
      - aflag 5y ago
        It's besides the point that I was making that blockchains solves some of the problems with decentralized governments. Albeit, not all. > No, it doesn’t make anything possible unless there is an enforcement mechanism. I was trying to say it solves some of the problems, though I may have worded it awkwardly.
        zepto 5y ago
        You didn’t actually mention any problems it solves. It’s not about awkward wording, it that the examples aren’t real.
- betterunix2 5y ago
  The people in charge of enforcement would become a de facto government. What distinguishes a government from any other organization is the monopoly on violence (more precisely, the monopoly on deciding when and how violent measures can be employed), and enforcing property rights sometimes requires violence (e.g. if someone refuses to leave your home, eventually the police will have to physically remove them against their will). Blockchains do nothing at all to help anything about this situation. You could use a blockchain to manage ownership, but it would be far more efficient to use a central database of some kind that is held by whatever organization is responsible for enforcing property rights. In the end you are not going to care how your ownership is managed, you are only going to care that, if someone tries to violate your rights, the police will come and protect you. You need to trust that the enforcement will actually be applied, but what difference does it make if you use a blockchain?
  - kikimora 5y ago
    You cannot get your hacked bitcoins back even if you are the government with police and army. Lots of things that government does can be replaced with a smart contract. Hey, you can even have direct democracy - vote with your citizen token for a change in a smart contract and voala the law changed and immediately enforced.
    - aflag 5y ago
      You could, because the government could coerce the person who stole it to give you back.
      - kikimora 5y ago
        I would consider this to be a corner case, that does not disprove the point I made.
        aflag 5y ago
        It could be the norm. It all depends on how the society is organized. If there is a system of law and a court and you prove someone stole something from you, the government will coerce that person to give you back or pay some sort of fine. For instance, even if the system says you own those bitcoins, a court can rule that you give it back to the person you hacked and also pay for the costs of the case. The same goes for smart contracts. A court may rule that the contract is invalid and require one of the parties to pay the other, regardless of the smart contract. So, that technology doesn't, in and on itself, revolutionize any of that. However, it could be made into law that a court cannot revert a smart contract or that the contents of a digital wallet belongs to whoever has it, regardless of how it was obtained.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  This is only true if people with guns will show up to kick somebody else out of the house that you own the token for or if we figure out a way to completely eliminate antisocial behavior voluntarily.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > if you have no government, the housechain could be a way for a decentralized society to implement the concept of a land registry. Once everyone agrees that the housechain is proof of ownership, then measures can be taken Once everyone agrees on anything, they can agree to have a centralised real estate ownership registry. Or a whole centralised government. Your idea seems to be a thought experiment with weird priors. (Feels like that makes it rather meaningless.)

Exactly, and while the government database "land registry" could, of course, be replaced with a government "HouseChain" it wouldn't actually solve any Problem but would introduce a ton of new ones.

aflag 5y ago

However, if you have no government, the housechain could be a way for a decentralized society to implement the concept of a land registry. Once everyone agrees that the housechain is proof of ownership, then measures can be taken to enforce that without necessarily evoking a central government. I'm not sold on the idea of a society without a central government, but I think the blockchain would help — or even enable — such an experiment.

giaour 5y ago
In the absence of a governing authority, property disputes would revert to being settled by violence or the threat thereof. Why should my band of armed thugs defer to what it says on the blockchain when they could instead hit you with a $5 wrench until you vacate the premises? https://xkcd.com/538 https://xkcd.com/538
- aflag 5y ago
  Because everyone else around them would help defend the validity of the deeds, as they all own property in the same way. Like I said before, I'm far far away from having all the answers about how to set up a decentralized society and I'm not even sure I would like to live in such a society. However, issuing deeds and currency is an important job that currently you need a central government you trust to do. With a blockchain that problem is solved. There are plenty of other problems besides that. But it is one less item in the checklist.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - giaour 5y ago
    > Because everyone else around them would help defend the validity of the deeds, as they all own property in the same way. That feels a bit like saying that everyone will pitch in to stop mugging since we all carry physical cash in the same way. Maybe some civilians would intervene some of the time, but most will not risk their own bodily autonomy to defend another's property. Issuing deeds and currency feels like the easy part of creating an agreed upon land registry or economy. I have a printer and know how to use SQLite, so nothing is stopping me from issuing my own physical currency or deeds today. I could even save paper and put them on my own personal blockchain. Convincing others to honor my currency or deeds sounds like the hard part.
    - aflag 5y ago
      It is not the easy part if you want a decentralized government because no one person can be tasked with issuing and governing over those, otherwise that person will have power over everyone and kind of defeat the purpose. That doesn't mean that there aren't other equally or even harder challenges. I was not claiming that blockchains was the last problem stopping us from becoming decentralized. Anyway, like you said, nothing prevents you from issuing your currency and deeds today. And, before blockchains, the only way to have a decentralized government would be for many people to do that. However, that system is more fragile than a system built on a single blockchain everyone agrees on. The big thing about blockchains is that it allows people to all agree on a certain asset, without giving control of that asset to a single party. That is big news for anyone group wanting to live in a decentralized society, because it was one of the big problems.
  - dale_glass 5y ago
    Reality (eg, Jews in Nazi germany) shows that this is bullshit. If the local government and population is on your side, then you're fine. If however you're a minority that's now deemed to be the enemy, then what supposedly belongs to you doesn't matter one bit. You can prove it as mathematically as you want, and you can have your neighbors on your side, but if a bigger army of goons shows up to take your stuff, they'll take it. Ultimately this is an entirely political problem, and the blockchain will simply be completely ignored if things go to shit.
    - aflag 5y ago
      I think you're missing the point. I agree with everything you said. The validity of everything comes from the people (the majority at least) agreeing on the legitimacy of something. Everyone agrees on the legitimacy of the dollar, so that's why it has value. However, by agreeing on that, we give USA's central bank a lot of control over it and, therefore, power. If everyone agrees that dollars are worthless, but bitcoins have value instead, then the central bank has a lot less control. Moreover, a society without a central government would never be able to agree on any fiat money without the blockchain. Now, such society could do so. Also, that society would have a hard time evaluating the legitimacy of deeds without the blockchain. So that is yet another feature that can help building such society if one so inclines.
      - dale_glass 5y ago
        Things like BTC are even worse. BTC has two main sources of control: 1. The developers. Somebody has to develop the software, and no matter what, this ends up being a very select group. If you have multiple groups, that's still not a lot of people and they'll have to cooperate somehow, which will result in some sort of system you're not involved with. 2. The miners. They group up into pools, and there's not that many of them that are big enough to matter. Those two groups are the ones truly in control, and they're unelected, unaccountable, and have their own interests and agendas. If you think the banks are bad, then using a system made of a cabal distributed among the globe is hardly better.
        5y ago
- arlcode 5y ago
  My band of thugs however would offer people the ability to buy protection from your band of thugs. I may even be inclined to write down some rules and introduce a process to resolve conflicts without unnecessary damage to people and property. (In this hypothetical scenario any form of land registry is only as valid as I say it is.)
  - giaour 5y ago
    Then in the end, we all live by the rules established by whoever has the largest band of thugs. Good thing we got rid of government and created this libertarian utopia.
  - FledNanders 5y ago
    > My band of thugs however would offer people the ability to buy protection from your band of thugs. Thereby reinventing the police > I may even be inclined to write down some rules and introduce a process to resolve conflicts without unnecessary damage to people and property. and the courts. But maybe that was your point?
    - arlcode 5y ago
      Indeed it was :) With a big enough population at least one government and a basic bureaucracy will be formed by someone. A few people in the Blockchain space seem to think that technology can fundamentally change that.
      - FledNanders 5y ago
        Ah, I thought so! And I agree! I'm hopeful that when the Ponzi schemes fade away, we'll end up with a slightly more informed populace that has inadvertently received an introduction to political science, state-building, the origins of power, etc. Civics teachers take note! :)
        CRConrad 5y ago
        Almost the entire populace will be more informed -- except for the Ponzi-"coin" proponents, because they're busy innoculating themselves against reason by... Well, being Ponzi-"coin" proponents; strengthening their own biases by debating in favour of these ludicrous schemes. Like, right here on this page.
zepto 5y ago
> then measures can be taken to enforce that without necessarily evoking a central government. What measures?
- aflag 5y ago
  I don't have the answers, but I'm easily drawn to such thought experiments: all the neighbors would agree with you that you're the owner and not the person who sold you the deed but wants to remain inside of it or some intruder or whatever. So, when you knock on their door and try to remove them, you'll get support from the local people who will try to respect what's in the "housechain". It is in their interest that the deeds are respected, because they also own their houses that way. That's beside the point, though. I'm just noting that the possibility of have distributed deeds does make it possible to have some of the benefits of a centralized government: deeds and currency, without having one. That obviously only works if everyone in the society has come to the agreement that those things are valuable (just like in case of central governments too). But the point is just that you don't need a central person with all the power of issuing them.
  - zepto 5y ago
    > That's beside the point, though. No - it is the point. > I'm just noting that the possibility of have distributed deeds does make it possible to have some of the benefits of a centralized government: No, it doesn’t make anything possible unless there is an enforcement mechanism.
    - aflag 5y ago
      It's besides the point that I was making that blockchains solves some of the problems with decentralized governments. Albeit, not all. > No, it doesn’t make anything possible unless there is an enforcement mechanism. I was trying to say it solves some of the problems, though I may have worded it awkwardly.
      - zepto 5y ago
        You didn’t actually mention any problems it solves. It’s not about awkward wording, it that the examples aren’t real.
betterunix2 5y ago
The people in charge of enforcement would become a de facto government. What distinguishes a government from any other organization is the monopoly on violence (more precisely, the monopoly on deciding when and how violent measures can be employed), and enforcing property rights sometimes requires violence (e.g. if someone refuses to leave your home, eventually the police will have to physically remove them against their will). Blockchains do nothing at all to help anything about this situation. You could use a blockchain to manage ownership, but it would be far more efficient to use a central database of some kind that is held by whatever organization is responsible for enforcing property rights. In the end you are not going to care how your ownership is managed, you are only going to care that, if someone tries to violate your rights, the police will come and protect you. You need to trust that the enforcement will actually be applied, but what difference does it make if you use a blockchain?
- kikimora 5y ago
  You cannot get your hacked bitcoins back even if you are the government with police and army. Lots of things that government does can be replaced with a smart contract. Hey, you can even have direct democracy - vote with your citizen token for a change in a smart contract and voala the law changed and immediately enforced.
  - aflag 5y ago
    You could, because the government could coerce the person who stole it to give you back.
    - kikimora 5y ago
      I would consider this to be a corner case, that does not disprove the point I made.
      - aflag 5y ago
        It could be the norm. It all depends on how the society is organized. If there is a system of law and a court and you prove someone stole something from you, the government will coerce that person to give you back or pay some sort of fine. For instance, even if the system says you own those bitcoins, a court can rule that you give it back to the person you hacked and also pay for the costs of the case. The same goes for smart contracts. A court may rule that the contract is invalid and require one of the parties to pay the other, regardless of the smart contract. So, that technology doesn't, in and on itself, revolutionize any of that. However, it could be made into law that a court cannot revert a smart contract or that the contents of a digital wallet belongs to whoever has it, regardless of how it was obtained.
UncleMeat 5y ago
This is only true if people with guns will show up to kick somebody else out of the house that you own the token for or if we figure out a way to completely eliminate antisocial behavior voluntarily.
CRConrad 5y ago
> if you have no government, the housechain could be a way for a decentralized society to implement the concept of a land registry. Once everyone agrees that the housechain is proof of ownership, then measures can be taken Once everyone agrees on anything, they can agree to have a centralised real estate ownership registry. Or a whole centralised government. Your idea seems to be a thought experiment with weird priors. (Feels like that makes it rather meaningless.)