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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 applica

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.
- dastbe 4y ago
  > 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. nothing you’ve described here requires the decentralized parts of a blockchain. there exist centralized databases that have all of these properties, and people have mentioned them in the comments.
  - legutierr 4y ago
    You are quibbling with semantics. What you have quoted is the definition of a blockchain. Any "centralized" database with these properties is a blockchain, for all intents and purposes.
    - TheDong 4y ago
      A system with all those properties is a git repository containing all this data. Which would also scale to more operations per second than a block chain, is much more battle-hardened than any blockchain... And decidedly isn't a blockchain. It's just a merkle tree that can easily be replicated / updated via "git clone" / "git fetch". Your definition of a blockchain seems to be different than what most people use, though I admit a lot of blockchain advocates seem to make the definition tighter or looser depending on which is more convenient for the current argument.
      - legutierr 4y ago
        Your comment makes me believe that you don't think very highly of "blockchain advocates". But you don't seem to have much of a problem with using a replicated git repository in this manner. So what is the specific problem that you have? You just don't like the fact that blockchain data mutations are bundled into periodically-generated blocks that incorporate changes from multiple users, rather than being pushed by individual users on an ad hoc basis? Is it a problem for you that blockchain nodes maintain network connections with each other, and have a protocol for ensuring that they all remain in sync, rather than relying on individual users to pull and manually merge changes explicitly? A typical feature of religious disputes is that the smallest distinction takes on the most momentous significance. Is that not what's going on here?
jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
This. A friend of mine moved down to Mexico and bought land on a beach to build his dream off grid eco airbnb. After he'd been there a while and had completed some construction, a bunch of police came walking up his drive armed with assault rifles. They were with a local politician's sister that's known in the area for various land scams. They tried to kick him off his land under some pretext. My friend stood his ground despite them threatening to shoot him. After a standoff they left. Now in my friend's case he's a remote tech worker with plenty of income as well as a bunch of social/professional connections to a bunch of wealthy business owners in Mexico city. So he was able to get connected up with the right kind of lawyer to go intimidate the captain of the police office the goons came from. What was recorded on the deed in the county office mattered not one bit in this scenario.

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.

dastbe 4y ago
> 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. nothing you’ve described here requires the decentralized parts of a blockchain. there exist centralized databases that have all of these properties, and people have mentioned them in the comments.
- legutierr 4y ago
  You are quibbling with semantics. What you have quoted is the definition of a blockchain. Any "centralized" database with these properties is a blockchain, for all intents and purposes.
  - TheDong 4y ago
    A system with all those properties is a git repository containing all this data. Which would also scale to more operations per second than a block chain, is much more battle-hardened than any blockchain... And decidedly isn't a blockchain. It's just a merkle tree that can easily be replicated / updated via "git clone" / "git fetch". Your definition of a blockchain seems to be different than what most people use, though I admit a lot of blockchain advocates seem to make the definition tighter or looser depending on which is more convenient for the current argument.
    - legutierr 4y ago
      Your comment makes me believe that you don't think very highly of "blockchain advocates". But you don't seem to have much of a problem with using a replicated git repository in this manner. So what is the specific problem that you have? You just don't like the fact that blockchain data mutations are bundled into periodically-generated blocks that incorporate changes from multiple users, rather than being pushed by individual users on an ad hoc basis? Is it a problem for you that blockchain nodes maintain network connections with each other, and have a protocol for ensuring that they all remain in sync, rather than relying on individual users to pull and manually merge changes explicitly? A typical feature of religious disputes is that the smallest distinction takes on the most momentous significance. Is that not what's going on here?

jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago

This. A friend of mine moved down to Mexico and bought land on a beach to build his dream off grid eco airbnb. After he'd been there a while and had completed some construction, a bunch of police came walking up his drive armed with assault rifles. They were with a local politician's sister that's known in the area for various land scams. They tried to kick him off his land under some pretext. My friend stood his ground despite them threatening to shoot him. After a standoff they left. Now in my friend's case he's a remote tech worker with plenty of income as well as a bunch of social/professional connections to a bunch of wealthy business owners in Mexico city. So he was able to get connected up with the right kind of lawyer to go intimidate the captain of the police office the goons came from. What was recorded on the deed in the county office mattered not one bit in this scenario.