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Comment by bo1024 | Hacker News Reader

Very nice article. As others have alluded to, I think Tim does miss an important point about trust. He writes:

> we just couldn’t convince ourselves that the real world wanted zero-trust; so there was a transaction manager you had to trust.

And then later:

> It seems a good idea to have a land-registry database but, blockchain or no, I wonder if the large landowners might be able to find another way to fiddle the records and still steal the land? Perhaps this is more about power than boundary markers?

Yes. Blockchain is about decentralization of power. It's exactly the most interesting in situations with no trusted third party (i.e. weak rule of law) and an imbalance of power. I think Tim missed that aspect of this discussion (which is no knock on him in 2016, but should be reevaluated now). The rest I found insightful and very interesting.

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No. Tim did not miss an important point about trust.

You missed an important point about power.

Those large land owners do not give a fuck about your blockchain. They'll take the land and farm it anyways. You can "own" the virtual stake; they're happy to cede you cyber nonsense as long as they get to control who touches the actual grass.

The large land owners, who have local authorities in their pocket, would simply quote President Andrew Jackson's apocryphal opinion on blockchain: "The blockchain has made its decision; now let the blockchain's army and police enforce it!" [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcester_v._Georgia

A central part of the quote I was responding to is "fiddle the records". I agree with what you said otherwise.

How does being able to point at a database prevent land being stolen in the absence of a trusted third party? It's not like the land itself can authenticate the farmer. For the database to have any weight, there'd need to be an authority that can enforce what it says (and won't take bribes to ignore it, or collude in extorting "voluntary" transfers). If you do have such an agency, well, there's your trusted third party.

Here's the issue.

In a country with a stable, effective government, you don't need a blockchain for this: you can just have a centralized database.

In a country without such a government, a blockchain wouldn't help: the government will care more about the large landholders than about the blockchain records, and will have little incentive to enforce the latter.

(Also: I won't look forward to the day when some hacker figures out how to get into a bunch of farmers' crypto wallets and takes all their land. If the government doesn't respect the hackers' claims, then the blockchain isn't really the source of truth; if it does, then a bunch of people's lives are destroyed.)

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