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> He named a region in Asia and explained that the small farmers there mark their landholdings carefully, but then the annual floods sometimes wash the markers

> He named a region in Asia and explained that the small farmers there mark their landholdings carefully, but then the annual floods sometimes wash the markers away. Then unscrupulous larger landowners use the absence of markers to cut away at the smallholdings of the poorest. “But if the boundary markers were on the blockchain,” he said, “they wouldn’t be able to do that, would they?” The developed world is distinguished from the developing world often by the strength of its institutions, by the general accessibility of legal recourse, by the prevalence of trust within the society at large. Many places in the world have none of those things. Weak institutions, corrupt legal systems, and low levels of trust undermine development and prevent people from building and maintaining wealth for themselves and their families. For me, the promise of the blockchain is that it can provide a technological framework upon which to build new kinds of institutions—institutions that function as alternatives to the institutions that we all take for granted here in the first world. Is a smart contract better than a written contract? Maybe it is, if there is no well-functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes. Is a cryptocurrency better than a national currency? Perhaps, if your national currency is subject to hyperinflation. Is an NFT representing property ownership better than property title registered with a state agency? Yes it is, if the state agency can be bribed to alter or lose records that are inconvenient to large land owners. It's important to remember that what might seem redundant or useless to those of us who reside in the first world may not be redundant or useless to those who live elsewhere.

wmf 4y ago
The real promise of blockchains is that they can provide a technological framework upon which to build new institutions that are alternatives to the types of institutions that are foundational to developed economies. There's no evidence that this is true. People have been saying this for years and there's nothing to show for it.
toomuchtodo 4y ago
You cannot replace illegitimate or suboptimal institutions with systems of record or value storage and transfer they don’t have to respect or acknowledge, just as a court who cannot enforce their ruling has no authority. The systems are simply tools, it is the execution layer (ie government very broadly) that determines the outcome. If your property record is on a blockchain but those whose recognize such rights ignore it, it’s not a property record, for example. It’s an internet comment or public expression of opinion. Similarly, what makes your name typed on a Docusign a legally binding signature? Federal statute recognizing it as such.
- legutierr 4y ago
  I don't disagree with you. My point is that blockchains can reduce the cost and complexity of enforcing property rights and adjudicating contractual disputes to a meaningful extent such that many of the institutional deficiencies that exist in the developing world in this regard can be overcome. You couldn't realize such a reform, however, without buy-in from the government itself.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    > can reduce the cost and complexity of enforcing property rights and adjudicating contractual disputes to a meaningful extent No, they can't. A blockchain is, at best, a database. A database cannot do anything.
    - legutierr 4y ago
      So you would assert that the use of centralized relational databases would would not reduce the cost and complexity of enforcing property rights, in comparison to the use of paper records? A database cannot do anything?
      - dmitriid 4y ago
        > So you would assert that the use of centralized relational databases would would not reduce the cost and complexity of enforcing property rights, in comparison to the use of paper records? 1. No, I wouldn't assert that 2. It depends entirely on implementation (there are numerous examples around the world where transferring paper records to digital records mad a lot of things less efficient due to bad implementations) 3. You have to show that blockchain as a store of record is significantly better than a traditional relational database (given e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33691566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33691566 and other like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33688603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33688603 and other issues that you dismiss or ignore)
l33t233372 4y ago
I have some serious problems believing your argument. For example, this: > Is a smart contract better than a written contract? Maybe it is, if there is no functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes. If there’s no functioning judiciary, then who will enforce the contract? Who will decide if one side is not acting in good faith, or if there was coercion, or deception? I claim that smart contracts solve none of the issues actually caused by having weak institutions.
- x86x87 4y ago
  You cannot enforce the physical world through virtual means. It does not work. What you can enforce is digital goods via virtual means. Depending of what you want to enforce the presence of a central authority in the physical world may still be needed
  - acdha 4y ago
    Even digital goods are pretty limited because you need a situation where both parties honor the system. If that doesn’t fall naturally out of the model you need something like a government enforcement to prevent cheating.
- tbrownaw 4y ago
  They're public in a way that written contracts usually aren't. I can at least imagine scenarios where that might matter (even if I'm not at all certain they're realistic).
felixgallo 4y ago
If there's no functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes, then who is going to effectively and durably tell someone who won and enforce that with the threat of state-level punishment? If a state agency can be bribed, what's claiming to have an NFT going to do for the holder, besides radically increase their property ownership risk if they actually rely on that to be true? The problem with all of these cockamamie blockchain arguments is that they talk about a problem, and then they talk about a (bad, expensive, difficult to use) database that might form part of that problem, but in fact the problem is always far bigger and way more complicated than the choice of the database vendor.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  One of the interesting aspects of blockchain for many scenarios is that it makes the ledger of ownership or whatever universally available. Hopefully with some of the charlatans going bust this will transform back into a technology instead of some bizarre religion.
  - XorNot 4y ago
    What are you even talking about? Who owns what has always been available to everyone, that's how land title deeds work.
    - legutierr 4y ago
      Do they work that way in rural Africa?
      - XorNot 4y ago
        If no one knows if you own something, then you don't own it. Literally the entire concept of "ownership" it based on socialized distribution of that information. Which means anyone within range of an item for ownership rights to matter, by definition, is either aware of your claim by some means and respecting it, or unaware and you now get to see how good your legal or kinetic protections of it are. EDIT: The parent poster is possibly referring to an entirely different problem - many underdeveloped nations have antiquated automation for their land title systems, which makes proving ownership difficult due to a lack of computerization. This is a problem for the owners occupying the land, because they can't prove to third parties this claim is legal and thus use it as collateral for seeking lines of credit. One of the interesting things the Bush Jr. admin of all things spearheaded was a project which looked at funding and helping update these systems in some nations as a means of economic development. But of course, blockchain here is still useless. The problem isn't that the ledger of ownership is "secret" (which doesn't make any sense) it's that it can't be verified because the record keeping is manual. Once again, "blockchain" fixes nothing that a central database wouldn't do faster, cheaper and better.
franklampard 4y ago
> But if the boundary markers were on the blockchain,” he said, “they wouldn’t be able to do that, would they? Or they could store the makers are stored in a free-tier dynomodb instance…
rippercushions 4y ago
The technology here is the least of that small shareholder's problems. To register that land, they need to convince a corruptible human to accept their application, get another corruptible human to enter the data correctly in the database and get a third corruptible human to give them an authentic certificate proving that their land holding has been registered. You can already see three points where this can be trivially subverted, but it gets worse. The hard part, you see, is defending their property rights. Local bigwig casually stomps on their land, now they need to convince the corruptible police to investigate (good luck with that when they're on the bigwig's payroll), find a lawyer willing to take this on (in exchange for what?), get the corruptible land rights registry to verify their claim, get a corruptible judge to give a true verdict, and then convince that corruptible police to carry out the verdict. If you're a poor subsistence farmer, it's nearly impossible to navigate this morass, and blockchain solves precisely zero of these problems. Finally and most fundamentally, a land registry is by nature a centralized registry of holdings with a legal monopoly. Why on earth would you need to use a blockchain here, when an append-only database does the same job?
- legutierr 4y ago
  > Finally and most fundamentally, a land registry is by nature a centralized registry of holdings with a legal monopoly. Why on earth would you need to use a blockchain here, when an append-only database does the same job? Records within an append-only database running on a central server can be altered or deleted by whomever has the root password to that server. The only way to guard against that risk is to replicate and publicize the data, make sure all data modifications are cryptographically signed and valid according the logic of the application, and incorporate into each new version of the data a hash of prior versions of the data, in order to guard against data deletions. In other words, to implement a blockchain. > The hard part, you see, is defending their property rights. Local bigwig casually stomps on their land, now they need to convince the corruptible police to investigate (good luck with that when they're on the bigwig's payroll), find a lawyer willing to take this on (in exchange for what?), get the corruptible land rights registry to verify their claim, get a corruptible judge to give a true verdict, and then convince that corruptible police to carry out the verdict. If you're a poor subsistence farmer, it's nearly impossible to navigate this morass, and blockchain solves precisely zero of these problems. You have described a horribly corrupt and oppressive society. It's not what most of the developing world looks like. You are right that there is unlikely to be a technical solution to this level of oppression, except that it would be harder to implement in the first place in a society where property records were managed via a blockchain.
acdha 4y ago
> Is a smart contract better than a written contract? Maybe it is, if there is no functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes. This doesn’t seem like it could possibly be true without something like an outside force requiring use of the blockchain. For example, if my neighbor uses some of my land, who cares if I say it’s not valid according to someone’s computer? If the local legal system is inept or corrupt, who’s going to do something about it? In almost all cases the local control of state power wins. This is especially relevant when you think about the long history of how lane has historically been stolen by tricking or threatening people, bribing surveyors, or by making promises which aren’t kept. Blockchains not only improve none of those situations but also add new ones like tricking people into using exploitable smart contracts or phishing their transfer approvals.
dkokelley 4y ago
Why would a corrupt state agree to use a system resistant to their influence? And if they did, why wouldn't they use violence to force the owner to transfer the property?
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > Why would a corrupt state agree to use a system resistant to their influence? Blockchain isn't resistant to their influence. Case in point: courts still exist. What's to stop me to get a court order showing I'm the rightful owner of something? How can blockchain prevent that? Moreover, what if I actually am the rightful owner, and the original record was incorrect?
amluto 4y ago
An NFT representing ownership of farmland is, frankly, absurd. If I own farmland and lose my private key (or screw up a smart contract and lock it away forever, etc), should that land never be farmed again? If a river moves and boundaries must change but the NFT isn’t aware of this, what happens? If someone with guns takes my land, who cares about my NFT? Maybe technology can help create a system where transactions really happen on a common-carrier basis and can’t be censored without censorship being documentable and illegal. But at the end of the day, ownership of real things isn’t something on chain and is enforced by centralized institutions, and a blockchain won’t change that.
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  Not to mention that the only thing that actually matters is what's in the government's land title ledger. They're the ones with the guns that enforce (or don't enforce) ownership. These crypto crazies absolutely crack me up. Can you imagine some dirt poor farmer in the arse end of nowhere confronting the local constabulary that were bribed by their rich neighbour? "You see here in my wallet how my Landz Titles NFT clearly states that this parcel of land is mine?" Cue: a bunch of uniformed thugs glance at each other and smirk before proceeding to pummel the life out of the farmer that paid in Bitcoin for a few thousand bits that won't protect him from fists, batons, or bullets. Some people are so naive and clueless that it's a parody of entitlement.
  - deanCommie 4y ago
    To augment this slightly: It doesn't even matter if the uninformed thugs completely understand, embrace, and accept the technology of the ledger. They then just simply glance, smirk, and pummel the farmer until they initiate the transfer of the digital ownership record to them.
  - arlcode 4y ago
    > Some people are so naive and clueless that it's a parody of entitlement It's nice to think that one can stand his/her ground and not have to rely on others especially in societies were rugged individualism is a concept. Reality disagrees with that and has proven throughout history that organized and coordinated groups of people are much more powerful than the sum of their parts. It's the same with prepers (the crazy political kind), who think that in an apocalyptical world of madness and warlords their 1 family home will not just be sieged down immediately with them either bending the knee or getting killed.
Finbarr 4y ago
Arguments like this one strike me as extremely condescending. Have you directly spoken to developing world farmers who have experienced these problems? Do you think people with these problems are just clamoring for the first world to come in and solve this for them with blockchain technology? Do you think all of the participants in the situation you described would even adopt blockchain (the small farmer, the larger farmer who wants to steal land, the corrupt central government officials open to bribes)? If so, why? It seems the only person with an incentive for change is the one least likely to have strong influence for that change.
- acdha 4y ago
  > Do you think people with these problems are just clamoring for the first world to come in and solve this for them with blockchain technology? Especially in this case where the pitch is “commit now to paying me and friends first world transaction fees on everything you do, and maybe we’ll figure out how to help with the actual hard problems in the future”. If the real goal is helping small farmers I’d expect the answer to involve things like paying for accurate surveying and working with big agricultural buyers so the calculation changes from “bribe local official to ignore this small farmer’s deed; profit!” to include things like major buyers not buying from any of your farms.
philliphaydon 4y ago
This a solved problem that isn’t solved using blockchain. In Thailand when you get out into the rural areas, there’s no central database you can go and argue to in regards to land ownership. You have chiefs. He mediates sales between people and ensures who owns what land. If a land dispute happens it gets resolved by the chief. In cities it’s all controlled by local governments and paper records. It works in the city with government and paper. It works less in rural areas where people can be bought. Blockchain is not solving any problems here. The problem is no one managing any records. Paper records and up to date gps records are enough.
inkyoto 4y ago
> The developed world is distinguished from the developing world often by the strength of its institutions, by the general accessibility of legal recourse, by the prevalence of trust within the society at large. The developed world is not immune to some of the problems, namely: genuine human errors, negligence and a great uneasiness to accept the personal responsibility for making mistakes, inadvertent or out of sheer incompetence (rampant in the British culture). The latter two somewhat step into a gray area, but I digress. Ledger databases/blockchains provide a technological solution to the problem in multiple areas where a full immutable temporal history of changes is necessary even in the developed world where the governance is strong and corruption is less frequent.
dmitriid 4y ago
> Weak institutions, corrupt legal systems, and low levels of trust undermine development and prevent people from building and maintaining wealth for themselves and their families. > For me, the promise of the blockchain is that it can provide a technological framework upon which to build new kinds of institutions You're trying to solve social and political problems with tech. And you cannot. You could spend 30 seconds thinking abuout the problem and realised why it can't. Question: who is the rightful owner of the marked land? See my comments in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564 > Is a smart contract better than a written contract? Maybe it is, if there is no well-functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes. And who is going to enforce this smart contract? > It's important to remember that what might seem redundant or useless to those of us who reside in the first world may not be redundant or useless to those who live elsewhere. It's also important to remember that people who claim this (and claim blockchains are solutions to problems) also reside in the first world and have literally no clue about the problems outside their cushy bubbles.
BackBlast 4y ago
Currency is the only one of those that actually works within the corrupt legal system because it doesn't require any action on the part of the corrupt system. You can use it directly with other parties. (smart) Contracts? Without institutional enforcement, doesn't matter. Maybe being all on-chain, but that hasn't really functioned. Ownership (NFT)? Doesn't work at all without some level of institutional enforcement. Blockchain does only one thing well.
LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
They simply need to record the location of the property markers. They could even use paper. The problem is that they don't have surveying equipment and the training to use it so all they have is the sticks. As others have said, you can't (usefully) represent ownership in the blockchain because ownership can change or be made irrelevant outside of the blockchain. While blockchain wouldn't be useful for this, a host of cryptographic tools would be. If a country used signed survey data they could prevent a host of crimes and bugs changing boundaries, and if they issued signed land titled you could check their validity offline - helpful for remote areas. They could be tied together entry to entry, like a blockchain, to assure that no records "go missing". There could be a single-core proof of work stored regularly, checkpointing the data, to prevent the country's IT team from rewriting the whole database. It just doesn't need to be "a blockchain" because there is a centralized authority who we all follow, if not trust, so the decentralized thing isn't that important. And we don't need to limit publishing so we don't need a currency.
jasonhansel 4y ago
> it can provide a technological framework upon which to build new kinds of institutions But will those institutions be democratic or respect human rights? Proof-of-work blockchains are effectively plutocracies, controlled by those with the most computing power.

wmf 4y ago

The real promise of blockchains is that they can provide a technological framework upon which to build new institutions that are alternatives to the types of institutions that are foundational to developed economies. There's no evidence that this is true. People have been saying this for years and there's nothing to show for it.

toomuchtodo 4y ago

You cannot replace illegitimate or suboptimal institutions with systems of record or value storage and transfer they don’t have to respect or acknowledge, just as a court who cannot enforce their ruling has no authority. The systems are simply tools, it is the execution layer (ie government very broadly) that determines the outcome. If your property record is on a blockchain but those whose recognize such rights ignore it, it’s not a property record, for example. It’s an internet comment or public expression of opinion. Similarly, what makes your name typed on a Docusign a legally binding signature? Federal statute recognizing it as such.

legutierr 4y ago
I don't disagree with you. My point is that blockchains can reduce the cost and complexity of enforcing property rights and adjudicating contractual disputes to a meaningful extent such that many of the institutional deficiencies that exist in the developing world in this regard can be overcome. You couldn't realize such a reform, however, without buy-in from the government itself.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > can reduce the cost and complexity of enforcing property rights and adjudicating contractual disputes to a meaningful extent No, they can't. A blockchain is, at best, a database. A database cannot do anything.
  - legutierr 4y ago
    So you would assert that the use of centralized relational databases would would not reduce the cost and complexity of enforcing property rights, in comparison to the use of paper records? A database cannot do anything?
    - dmitriid 4y ago
      > So you would assert that the use of centralized relational databases would would not reduce the cost and complexity of enforcing property rights, in comparison to the use of paper records? 1. No, I wouldn't assert that 2. It depends entirely on implementation (there are numerous examples around the world where transferring paper records to digital records mad a lot of things less efficient due to bad implementations) 3. You have to show that blockchain as a store of record is significantly better than a traditional relational database (given e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33691566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33691566 and other like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33688603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33688603 and other issues that you dismiss or ignore)

l33t233372 4y ago

I have some serious problems believing your argument. For example, this: > Is a smart contract better than a written contract? Maybe it is, if there is no functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes. If there’s no functioning judiciary, then who will enforce the contract? Who will decide if one side is not acting in good faith, or if there was coercion, or deception? I claim that smart contracts solve none of the issues actually caused by having weak institutions.

x86x87 4y ago
You cannot enforce the physical world through virtual means. It does not work. What you can enforce is digital goods via virtual means. Depending of what you want to enforce the presence of a central authority in the physical world may still be needed
- acdha 4y ago
  Even digital goods are pretty limited because you need a situation where both parties honor the system. If that doesn’t fall naturally out of the model you need something like a government enforcement to prevent cheating.
tbrownaw 4y ago
They're public in a way that written contracts usually aren't. I can at least imagine scenarios where that might matter (even if I'm not at all certain they're realistic).

felixgallo 4y ago

If there's no functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes, then who is going to effectively and durably tell someone who won and enforce that with the threat of state-level punishment? If a state agency can be bribed, what's claiming to have an NFT going to do for the holder, besides radically increase their property ownership risk if they actually rely on that to be true? The problem with all of these cockamamie blockchain arguments is that they talk about a problem, and then they talk about a (bad, expensive, difficult to use) database that might form part of that problem, but in fact the problem is always far bigger and way more complicated than the choice of the database vendor.

Spooky23 4y ago
One of the interesting aspects of blockchain for many scenarios is that it makes the ledger of ownership or whatever universally available. Hopefully with some of the charlatans going bust this will transform back into a technology instead of some bizarre religion.
- XorNot 4y ago
  What are you even talking about? Who owns what has always been available to everyone, that's how land title deeds work.
  - legutierr 4y ago
    Do they work that way in rural Africa?
    - XorNot 4y ago
      If no one knows if you own something, then you don't own it. Literally the entire concept of "ownership" it based on socialized distribution of that information. Which means anyone within range of an item for ownership rights to matter, by definition, is either aware of your claim by some means and respecting it, or unaware and you now get to see how good your legal or kinetic protections of it are. EDIT: The parent poster is possibly referring to an entirely different problem - many underdeveloped nations have antiquated automation for their land title systems, which makes proving ownership difficult due to a lack of computerization. This is a problem for the owners occupying the land, because they can't prove to third parties this claim is legal and thus use it as collateral for seeking lines of credit. One of the interesting things the Bush Jr. admin of all things spearheaded was a project which looked at funding and helping update these systems in some nations as a means of economic development. But of course, blockchain here is still useless. The problem isn't that the ledger of ownership is "secret" (which doesn't make any sense) it's that it can't be verified because the record keeping is manual. Once again, "blockchain" fixes nothing that a central database wouldn't do faster, cheaper and better.

franklampard 4y ago

> But if the boundary markers were on the blockchain,” he said, “they wouldn’t be able to do that, would they? Or they could store the makers are stored in a free-tier dynomodb instance…

rippercushions 4y ago

The technology here is the least of that small shareholder's problems. To register that land, they need to convince a corruptible human to accept their application, get another corruptible human to enter the data correctly in the database and get a third corruptible human to give them an authentic certificate proving that their land holding has been registered. You can already see three points where this can be trivially subverted, but it gets worse. The hard part, you see, is defending their property rights. Local bigwig casually stomps on their land, now they need to convince the corruptible police to investigate (good luck with that when they're on the bigwig's payroll), find a lawyer willing to take this on (in exchange for what?), get the corruptible land rights registry to verify their claim, get a corruptible judge to give a true verdict, and then convince that corruptible police to carry out the verdict. If you're a poor subsistence farmer, it's nearly impossible to navigate this morass, and blockchain solves precisely zero of these problems. Finally and most fundamentally, a land registry is by nature a centralized registry of holdings with a legal monopoly. Why on earth would you need to use a blockchain here, when an append-only database does the same job?

legutierr 4y ago
> Finally and most fundamentally, a land registry is by nature a centralized registry of holdings with a legal monopoly. Why on earth would you need to use a blockchain here, when an append-only database does the same job? Records within an append-only database running on a central server can be altered or deleted by whomever has the root password to that server. The only way to guard against that risk is to replicate and publicize the data, make sure all data modifications are cryptographically signed and valid according the logic of the application, and incorporate into each new version of the data a hash of prior versions of the data, in order to guard against data deletions. In other words, to implement a blockchain. > The hard part, you see, is defending their property rights. Local bigwig casually stomps on their land, now they need to convince the corruptible police to investigate (good luck with that when they're on the bigwig's payroll), find a lawyer willing to take this on (in exchange for what?), get the corruptible land rights registry to verify their claim, get a corruptible judge to give a true verdict, and then convince that corruptible police to carry out the verdict. If you're a poor subsistence farmer, it's nearly impossible to navigate this morass, and blockchain solves precisely zero of these problems. You have described a horribly corrupt and oppressive society. It's not what most of the developing world looks like. You are right that there is unlikely to be a technical solution to this level of oppression, except that it would be harder to implement in the first place in a society where property records were managed via a blockchain.

acdha 4y ago

> Is a smart contract better than a written contract? Maybe it is, if there is no functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes. This doesn’t seem like it could possibly be true without something like an outside force requiring use of the blockchain. For example, if my neighbor uses some of my land, who cares if I say it’s not valid according to someone’s computer? If the local legal system is inept or corrupt, who’s going to do something about it? In almost all cases the local control of state power wins. This is especially relevant when you think about the long history of how lane has historically been stolen by tricking or threatening people, bribing surveyors, or by making promises which aren’t kept. Blockchains not only improve none of those situations but also add new ones like tricking people into using exploitable smart contracts or phishing their transfer approvals.

dkokelley 4y ago

Why would a corrupt state agree to use a system resistant to their influence? And if they did, why wouldn't they use violence to force the owner to transfer the property?

dmitriid 4y ago
> Why would a corrupt state agree to use a system resistant to their influence? Blockchain isn't resistant to their influence. Case in point: courts still exist. What's to stop me to get a court order showing I'm the rightful owner of something? How can blockchain prevent that? Moreover, what if I actually am the rightful owner, and the original record was incorrect?

amluto 4y ago

An NFT representing ownership of farmland is, frankly, absurd. If I own farmland and lose my private key (or screw up a smart contract and lock it away forever, etc), should that land never be farmed again? If a river moves and boundaries must change but the NFT isn’t aware of this, what happens? If someone with guns takes my land, who cares about my NFT? Maybe technology can help create a system where transactions really happen on a common-carrier basis and can’t be censored without censorship being documentable and illegal. But at the end of the day, ownership of real things isn’t something on chain and is enforced by centralized institutions, and a blockchain won’t change that.

jiggawatts 4y ago
Not to mention that the only thing that actually matters is what's in the government's land title ledger. They're the ones with the guns that enforce (or don't enforce) ownership. These crypto crazies absolutely crack me up. Can you imagine some dirt poor farmer in the arse end of nowhere confronting the local constabulary that were bribed by their rich neighbour? "You see here in my wallet how my Landz Titles NFT clearly states that this parcel of land is mine?" Cue: a bunch of uniformed thugs glance at each other and smirk before proceeding to pummel the life out of the farmer that paid in Bitcoin for a few thousand bits that won't protect him from fists, batons, or bullets. Some people are so naive and clueless that it's a parody of entitlement.
- deanCommie 4y ago
  To augment this slightly: It doesn't even matter if the uninformed thugs completely understand, embrace, and accept the technology of the ledger. They then just simply glance, smirk, and pummel the farmer until they initiate the transfer of the digital ownership record to them.
- arlcode 4y ago
  > Some people are so naive and clueless that it's a parody of entitlement It's nice to think that one can stand his/her ground and not have to rely on others especially in societies were rugged individualism is a concept. Reality disagrees with that and has proven throughout history that organized and coordinated groups of people are much more powerful than the sum of their parts. It's the same with prepers (the crazy political kind), who think that in an apocalyptical world of madness and warlords their 1 family home will not just be sieged down immediately with them either bending the knee or getting killed.

Finbarr 4y ago

Arguments like this one strike me as extremely condescending. Have you directly spoken to developing world farmers who have experienced these problems? Do you think people with these problems are just clamoring for the first world to come in and solve this for them with blockchain technology? Do you think all of the participants in the situation you described would even adopt blockchain (the small farmer, the larger farmer who wants to steal land, the corrupt central government officials open to bribes)? If so, why? It seems the only person with an incentive for change is the one least likely to have strong influence for that change.

acdha 4y ago
> Do you think people with these problems are just clamoring for the first world to come in and solve this for them with blockchain technology? Especially in this case where the pitch is “commit now to paying me and friends first world transaction fees on everything you do, and maybe we’ll figure out how to help with the actual hard problems in the future”. If the real goal is helping small farmers I’d expect the answer to involve things like paying for accurate surveying and working with big agricultural buyers so the calculation changes from “bribe local official to ignore this small farmer’s deed; profit!” to include things like major buyers not buying from any of your farms.

philliphaydon 4y ago

This a solved problem that isn’t solved using blockchain. In Thailand when you get out into the rural areas, there’s no central database you can go and argue to in regards to land ownership. You have chiefs. He mediates sales between people and ensures who owns what land. If a land dispute happens it gets resolved by the chief. In cities it’s all controlled by local governments and paper records. It works in the city with government and paper. It works less in rural areas where people can be bought. Blockchain is not solving any problems here. The problem is no one managing any records. Paper records and up to date gps records are enough.

inkyoto 4y ago

> The developed world is distinguished from the developing world often by the strength of its institutions, by the general accessibility of legal recourse, by the prevalence of trust within the society at large. The developed world is not immune to some of the problems, namely: genuine human errors, negligence and a great uneasiness to accept the personal responsibility for making mistakes, inadvertent or out of sheer incompetence (rampant in the British culture). The latter two somewhat step into a gray area, but I digress. Ledger databases/blockchains provide a technological solution to the problem in multiple areas where a full immutable temporal history of changes is necessary even in the developed world where the governance is strong and corruption is less frequent.

dmitriid 4y ago

> Weak institutions, corrupt legal systems, and low levels of trust undermine development and prevent people from building and maintaining wealth for themselves and their families. > For me, the promise of the blockchain is that it can provide a technological framework upon which to build new kinds of institutions You're trying to solve social and political problems with tech. And you cannot. You could spend 30 seconds thinking abuout the problem and realised why it can't. Question: who is the rightful owner of the marked land? See my comments in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564 > Is a smart contract better than a written contract? Maybe it is, if there is no well-functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes. And who is going to enforce this smart contract? > It's important to remember that what might seem redundant or useless to those of us who reside in the first world may not be redundant or useless to those who live elsewhere. It's also important to remember that people who claim this (and claim blockchains are solutions to problems) also reside in the first world and have literally no clue about the problems outside their cushy bubbles.

BackBlast 4y ago

Currency is the only one of those that actually works within the corrupt legal system because it doesn't require any action on the part of the corrupt system. You can use it directly with other parties. (smart) Contracts? Without institutional enforcement, doesn't matter. Maybe being all on-chain, but that hasn't really functioned. Ownership (NFT)? Doesn't work at all without some level of institutional enforcement. Blockchain does only one thing well.

LawTalkingGuy 4y ago

They simply need to record the location of the property markers. They could even use paper. The problem is that they don't have surveying equipment and the training to use it so all they have is the sticks. As others have said, you can't (usefully) represent ownership in the blockchain because ownership can change or be made irrelevant outside of the blockchain. While blockchain wouldn't be useful for this, a host of cryptographic tools would be. If a country used signed survey data they could prevent a host of crimes and bugs changing boundaries, and if they issued signed land titled you could check their validity offline - helpful for remote areas. They could be tied together entry to entry, like a blockchain, to assure that no records "go missing". There could be a single-core proof of work stored regularly, checkpointing the data, to prevent the country's IT team from rewriting the whole database. It just doesn't need to be "a blockchain" because there is a centralized authority who we all follow, if not trust, so the decentralized thing isn't that important. And we don't need to limit publishing so we don't need a currency.

jasonhansel 4y ago

> it can provide a technological framework upon which to build new kinds of institutions But will those institutions be democratic or respect human rights? Proof-of-work blockchains are effectively plutocracies, controlled by those with the most computing power.