> Of course, we probably don't want the dystopic parts of society to get more reliable, but the fact is the tech would probably make them so. I strongly agree,

> Of course, we probably don't want the dystopic parts of society to get more reliable, but the fact is the tech would probably make them so. I strongly agree, and thank you for spelling it out. It's a point often lost in discussions of both tech and economics, that we need some slack in the system. That's where happiness, love, friendship, compassion, charity, forgiveness, imagination, and all other things good, nice and human, live. Too much efficiency just grinds people to dust. (That, and creates brittle systems that breaks the first moment reality asserts itself.) > Apparently it's not uncommon that when a debt collector buys a spreadsheet of unpaid debt, they can't actually prove in court that the debtor actually owes them the debt. You'd think some form of cryptocurrency technology would improve this At a glance, I think your idea would work. I'm just curious about corner cases alone, and how often they'd happen. For example, in some cases, I imagine it would actually reveal there is no proof because the debt is bogus. My impression is, no one in the chain is really incentivized to verify whether the debt is legitimate. Creditors outsource that in bulk to collection agencies, agencies might find it easier to try and collect anyway than proactively validate every entry in the spreadsheet, and plenty of debtors will contest real debts anyway. For the first two, the name of the game is minimizing costs; not sure if adding crypto to the mix would help, or just make the process more complicated and expensive. I also wonder what would happen if, for some reason, a smart contract/NFT was established around a bogus entry. How much harder would it be for the debtor to prove that they don't actually owe the money in question?