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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.

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.

What are you even talking about? Who owns what has always been available to everyone, that's how land title deeds work.

Do they work that way in rural Africa?

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.

> Once again, "blockchain" fixes nothing that a central database wouldn't do faster, cheaper and better.

Some things that blockchains would do better than centralized databases in your example:

* Blockchains are natively replicated on a massive basis, so you wouldn't have to worry about data loss due to disruption, inaccessibility or incompetent management of the centralized system.

* Blockchains cannot be corrupted by bad actors managing the central system. As I've noted in another comment, a Postgres DBA can be bribed to modify a property record and wipe the backups. That can't happen to a blockchain record.

* Blockchains can streamline the availability of credit, making it easier for a property owner to leverage their property to grow their business.

* Blockchains can increase the liquidity of the property market by providing via smart contract services that might not otherwise be available. For instance: escrow, auction, and mortgage lending.

Many of these seem like downsides.

> Blockchains cannot be corrupted by bad actors managing the central system. As I've noted in another comment, a Postgres DBA can be bribed to modify a property record and wipe the backups. That can't happen to a blockchain record.

What is to happen if a land-owner drops their cell-phone with their private keys, and now needs to re-gain ownership of their land? Well, either the government/admins can update the blockchain to have a new private key as an owner (in which case they could be bribed to do the same), OR the blockchain will be inaccurate, it will have an old address owning some land even though no one can use that address. See also, a farmer dies and has no beneficiary.

Also, how is new land added to the blockchain and old land removed? If the government needs to exercise eminent domain to build a railway, the farm's boundaries are changed. Perhaps the farmer does not want to make the update... so how does the land get updated to align with reality?

Natural disasters can also make land change drastically.

> Blockchains can streamline the availability of credit, making it easier for a property owner to leverage their property to grow their business

This just seems bad. Easier access to credit has not been great.

> Blockchains are natively replicated on a massive basis

They are if you have a lot of nodes. Which you do if you use bitcoin/eth/whatever (but then the cost of doing anything is incredibly expensive for those in the global south, so it's unusable). If each town builds their own to manage their land, it would be just as replicated as a .json file in s3 people can mirror if they want, which is to say archive.org might save a copy, a few farmers and companies in the area might, but most people would not care. Heck, people mirroring a json dump of a database would be more likely to happen than people figuring out how to spin up weird blockchain software I bet.

When you say "blockchain", are you referring to something like bitcoin? In other words, a proof of work blockchain? If we put all the world's data on a POW blockchain, we will cook the planet very quickly, and we won't have any energy for anything else.

If you read upthread, the example given was that of Asian farmers who struggle with markers being damaged by floods.

A cheap device that was able to locate reference points with GPS to some sort of online land registry would potentially avoid these disputes. Blockchain could be a tool to mitigate the limited connectivity available.

It’s potentially a way to make information more available and maybe facilitate certain transactions.

Again, it’s just a technology. It may make sense as a solution or not.

So what happens when a rich baron approaches a farmer who's exact GPS ownership record is registered on the blockchain and says "transfer digital ownership of your land to me, or i kill your sister"?

Exactly the same thing as what happens without a blockchain.

Weak institutions are absolutely a problem in human society, but they are not solved by decentralization technology.

Even better for the land owner, they (or more likely a "subcontractor") can force the transfer once and even if courts get involved and decide in favor of the farmer, the records can't be corrected if they are based on blockchain technology.

A less violent example would be a fraud based on social engineering.

It sounds like you’re throwing hands up and stating that no change is possible.

Land records are by definition ledgers. A distributed ledger is also a ledger. Does it protect you from a physical harm? Of course not.

Weak institutions are a problem, but technolgy can be used to strengthen them. If you can make facts more available and easier to access, perhaps you can push disputes to local magistrates and improve access to justice.

> It sounds like you’re throwing hands up and stating that no change is possible.

No, they're saying there must be a point to the change. If adding blockchain doesn't help in any way, why add it to the mix?

> A cheap device that was able to locate reference points with GPS to some sort of online land registry would potentially avoid these disputes.

Okay, and why would you use a blockchain over a state-held database?

Because it doesn't matter what your blockchain says about ownership, the state that issued the title deeds are the ones who decide where the boundaries are.

If the state is not recording it, recording it in a blockchain doesn't help.

There is also a problem of what happens when the farmers computer gets hacked and their land NFT stolen. Are the police meant to roll in and kick out the farmer who clearly still owns the land? Or do they just ignore the blockchain record as it's obviously wrong but not fixable.

The effectiveness of institutions cannot be measured in black and white. There is a continuum of effectiveness. It is very rare in the developing world that the courts are completely ineffective—it's often just that they are slow, expensive, subject to corrupt influence, etc. They function, to an extent—but they function poorly. How poorly depends on where you are.

In addition, bribery and corruption themselves also operate on a continuum. In the example cited in the article, the rich landowners don't just remove the property markers—they wait for flooding to wash them away before illegally expanding their claims. In other words, even in a society where official corruption is rampant, there are still societal limits within which corruption is possible.

The impact that blockchains can have is to simplify the tasks that systems of adjudication must undertake in order to enforce property rights and contracts. They also remove individual judgement from most decisions, and make it impossible to alter or destroy records.

I'm not saying that blockchains can entirely replace all human governance systems. Rather, blockchains can make it cheaper and easier to maintain functioning and accessible systems for adjudication. They reduce the surface area for the use of individual judgement, and thereby reduce costs and opportunities for the injection of corrupt influence.

Yes, many of the things that blockchains can do can also be done by centralized database applications—maintaining property records, for example. Those centralized databases still need to be maintained by trusted parties, however—trusted parties who themselves may be subject to corrupt influence.

By moving title records from paper to a centralized database all you are doing is changing who becomes the bribery target—the Postgres DBA instead of the clerk at the records office. With a public blockchain, there is no one you can bribe.

Yeah, but these kind of ideas don't really work in the complexity of the real world. If somebody hacks a computer and steals my land title token, we need off-chain ways of adjudicating that and fixing the database. So we have exactly the same kind of problems, can't rely on the blockchain for actually saying somebody definitely owns something, and may as well just not have bothered with the blockchain...

Unless you want to change it so 'code is law' and if you can hack someone and transfer ownership to yourself, then you legally own it. But I think few want to live in that kind of society...

Why not just make the records public? In the US, you can usually just look up who owns the parcels of land in your area. If the records are public, it will be pretty obvious if they've been tampered with; you can just compare the current data against a copy archived earlier.

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?

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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?

You're right that this level of pedantry isn't actually that useful. However, we're both on hacker news and thus presumably steeped in technology, which seems to turn people into pedants quite easily. I'm making the pedantic point because you're already talking specifically about tiny semantic points in this thread, and if you're going to quibble semantics, pedantry seems open.

This distinction is not the one that actually matters and does not have huge significance in my frustration with blockchain advocates.

To me, the large issue seems to be that people advocating for blockchain _stuff_ usually seem to be ignoring reality and trying to paint a libertarian dream that is simply entirely divorced from how real governments and societies currently function.

The exact definition of blockchain doesn't matter. The use of a blockchain technology also doesn't matter (like, I don't care if my doctor is saving my records in Oracle SQL, some private blockchain, or whatever, never have cared, as long as the data is still there next time my doctor needs it, and it's compliant with legal privacy requirements).

What matters is that "blockchain" always seems to be coupled with "and by using it, it will fix this social problem somehow" when that problem is inevitably social or political, not technical.

I'm all for fixing these problems, but switching databases ain't it when the problem is several layers off, so it seems like at best a distraction from useful action, and at worst a grift to extract money from various entities by promising an easy solution to a difficult problem, which cannot realistically be delivered on.

surveying definitions of blockchain, decentralized consensus is consistently a part of the definition. a blockchain without distributed consensus is something less specific.

i also don’t know why you put “centralized in quotes”. amazon qldb has all of the qualities you describe and is 100% centralized.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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?

> 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 and other like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33688603 and other issues that you dismiss or ignore)

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

> 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.

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?

> 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?

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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…