Hello!
When I was creating a CTF for a conference, I’ve finally got to learn about how blockchain and smart contracts actually works in practice, and the whole concept is simply brilliant. A quick introduction for those unfamiliar with it would be in this summary, but just to summarize how I basically understand it, blockchain is simply a VM that runs code (smart contracts) a both the code, and result of every execution of it is calculated by a bunch of users (so, mining is basically running a VM) and appended into the blockchain based on some kind of consensus and proof of work. This means that you get a single source of truth and history of every execution of a smart contract that is decentralized and you can rely on it.
But, almost every use of blockchain or smart contracts I have seen has pretty large issues either in sustainability in the long term, or in cases where you simply need some form of an authority to prevent and punish misuse. While I’m not really that much familiar with every use of blockchain so far, I will first list what I’ve already thought about or seen, and the main issues that I think are a deal-breaker for choosing blockchain for that kind of tasks. It’s possible that some of the issues are wrong or have already been solved, so please correct me if I’m wrong - my knowledge of blockchain isn’t really that in-depth.
First and the most common use is the one you are probably most aware of - cryptocurrencies. If I ignore the biggest and most unfortunate issue of cryptocurrencies turning into an investment-only product, with hugely volatile and inflated price that is not backed by any kind of real value (sure, you can pay with BTC, but it’s slow, expensive and super volatile to be useful, so the only real use is to literally sell it to others for a profit - which also basically means you are scamming someone out of their money down the line), I see the following problems with using blockchain for currencies:
- Longevity - The ledger size is already getting massive, only after a few year. It’s not sustainable, and it will eventually be really hard to keep the whole ledger at a large enough number of places to not run into problems of integrity. It’s growing exponentionally, and is at around 500Gb after around 10 years.
- Gas cost - It’s getting harder and harder to mine and confirm new transactions, which increases the cost while also making less people able to mine new transactions without being at a loss. This will only get worse, and eventually lead to the 50% problem (if someone controls 50%+ of mining nodes, he can confirm fake transactions or do whatever he wants with the blockchain) being a real issue.
- Lack of moderation - This may be one of the more controversial issues, because it goes directly against the whole idea of cryptocurrencies, but is one of the biggest problems I see that are in the way of crypto being able to be considered for wider use. We live in a world where some people are dicks that are not afraid to steal and cheat, and something like a currency simply has to be moderatable. You need to be able to punish criminals, and take back what they have stolen. If someone doesn’t pay their debts and owns me money, the government should be able to just take the money if they have them. If someone uses an account for scamming and stealing, it should be possible to freeze it.
The last issue will eventually show in most of the other uses of blockchain as well, and while I have included it, I’m still not sure how I feel bout it. In an ideal world, you would not have to deal with something like this. I would also really like to have an option to do my transactions privately, without anyone being able to profile my behavior and data, but such a system would have to allow for some safeguards against missuse to be widely adoptable. (Which is an interresting off-topic question - would it be possible to create a system that is private, but also has the possibility for trusted authorities to freeze accounts and force transactions?) And the more that I think about it, the more I’m certain that I’d rather have a centralized system where you can punish criminals and scammers, than a system where lives of people are regularly ruined by someone stealing all of their savings unpunished. But it is a thin line - I only say that because I live in a country that is all-right and I can trust my government - for now. But I definitely agree that such a private unmoderated option should exist - but can’t be considered for widespread use, which I’ve heard some people say that “crypto will replace cash in a few years”. And this is why it never will, IMO. But this discussion shouldn’t be about whether this is a good opinion or not - but more about “what blockchain is a good tool for”.
Next one are NFTs. I will just quickly gloss over them, because they are even bigger scam than crypto is. Ever heard someone say “Someone has copied and minted my NFT?”. Well, it’s a shame that there isn’t some kind of centralized authority that could, you know, not allow them to do that.
Another use I’ve heard someone praise as “the future” was lending money. I’m not sure what were they talking about, but the whole point was that you can… Escrow an amount you are borrowing, and then borrow the same amount? It didn’t make any sense, so I guess I’m missing something, but then again - we have the same issues as above, while also it being just a bizare idea - why simply not use the amount you already have? The person tried to explain it to me, but it just feels gimmicky. And if you escrow a lesser amount, you then have the same problem with moderation as above - nothing can force you to return the money (unless it is already escrowed, but then, why??)
So far, every use of blockchain I have heard about would be better done in a centralized fashion, especially as far as longevity is concerned. The growing ledger size and increasing gas cost, along with the 50% problem simply makes most of these kind of uses too impractical to work on a larger scale.
But I really like the concept and idea of smart contracts, and I’m sure there has to be some kind of use that is not as “revolutionary” or large scale. I’m just having hard time coming up with any.
I have only one - voting, and maybe transparent randomization (i.e lottery). Smart contracts are an amazing way to collect votes transparently but privately, since you can be sure that no-one can cheat, if you set it up properly. It’s also something that doesn’t suffer from the longevity problem, because it’s more of a one-shot use of blockchain, rather than something ongoing - which also justifies the price.
(tl;dr feel free to start here:) Which is what I’m interested in - does any of you have similar ideas for use of smart contracts and blockchain, that would be practical in a daily live? Be it one-shot smart contracts for a small task, such as voting or random winner selection, maybe some kind of escrow. It doesn’t have to be a “society changing system”, or something revolutionary. A common small code snippets or apps that would solve the trust issue inherent to a centralized task is what I’m after - but have hard time coming up with.
And just a disclaimer - I don’t plan on building anything and am not fishing for the next blockchain thing, I barely even understand it. I would just like to incorporate blockchain into my programming repertoire as a tool, because the concept feels so clever, but is also misused or misunderstood due to hype, but it has to have it’s uses that are overshadowed by people jumping on the blockchain bandwagon without considering whether it’s really the best tool for the job.
But is has to be a good tool for some kind of problems, right? And I would like to start a discussion about what would that be, without it being affected by the hype and reputation surrounding blockchain. I feel like that would be an interesting though exercise, and I’m sure we can come up with some interesting little uses here and there, without it being gimmicky but actually the best tool for the job.
Thank you!
EDIT: And I’d like to add that I never got into the blockchain hype, and my opinion on how it’s used so far is mostly negative. If a product mentions blockchain, I usually just avoid it as a gimmick. But that’s why I’m genuinely interested in this discussion - I don’t judge a tool about how people misuse it.
Blockchain and/or smart contracts try to solve problems that were already solved in multiple ways by adding a ton of overhead that makes them unable for large scale deployment and long term usage.
Here’s what’s stupid about the people who say that blockchain will revolutionize the financial sector: why add a blockchain and all the computing power to store transactions when you can take the obviously efficient route and simply store transactions on a SQL database? Before anyone screams the word “decentralization” do you really think banks will cease to exist? NO. The most likely scenario - if people keep pushing this bullshit - will be to have some kind of closed blockchain that banks use to transact money, so it essentially becomes the same thing we’ve now with added overhead, environmental impact and technical complexity. We have efficient system in place with safeguards, operations can be tracked, reversed etc.
Frankly it would be a better use of everyone’s time, money and effort to simply fix the REAL problems in the banking industry, such as the fact that the US still doesn’t have a decently working, standardized digital system to transfer money between account holders in different banks. Europe has this with SWIFT/IBAN and people can transfer money between accounts, banks and countries almost instantly by just providing the amount they want to transfer and an IBAN number (nothing else required). Now tell me, how many people in the US have bank account with IBAN numbers? Most likely only millionaires. The majority of people use a combination of poorly structured system of account and routing numbers that often fail and lead to delays. Oh btw Russia has a similar system to IBAN.
There are tons of other weaknesses in the US banking system around the way credit and debit cards work, for instance why would anyone on their right mind assume that a system where you can provide your credit cards number and CVV/CVC code over a phone to make a transfer wouln’t be abused to scam people and steal money? Then, after decades of fraud, to “alleviate” the issue they decided to create a bunch of companies that offer virtual credit cards with limits. Now let this how with works in most European countries: banks will, most likely, refuse any attempt at charging a physical credit card unless its made on a physical payment terminal with the card actually physical inserted on the thing an a 4 digit PIN code typed in. If you want to buy shit over the internet simply open your bank’s app or website and they’ll have a function to create a single use virtual credit card for the transaction. Way more secure isn’t it? :) Either way most European countries also other systems to handle those kinds of payments eg. the online stores provides you with a specific code and you then can go into any ATM or your Bank’s App, insert the code and make the payment.
As you can see making the banking system efficient and having fast, secure and usable things isn’t about blockchain bullshit, its usually more about common sense and creating standards that companies, such as banks, have to comply with.
Great post.
One of the big things all the crypto shills constantly said was that banks are bad and crypto was the saviour because of the decentralised nature. Then they realised that it was complete shit to use without some sort of centralisation, so they made exchanges……which are just banks with less regulations………and then those exchanges went bust and everyone lost their money and started calling for more regulation 😂
There’s no real world need for blockchain tech.
Just an FYI for those that don’t know - outside of America everyone has been able to transfer money between any 2 people’s banks whenever they want without issue for decades.
Tbf, this isn’t entirely true (it’s as true as it would be for the US). This is more about the time required. Europe has had instant transfers for approximately a decade.
Edit: to be clear, I’m just refuting the plural of the word decade. The US is still behind by quite a bit though.
Yes it is, and I hope it actually fixes the issue. But I’m not sure how it works in detail and it doesn’t seem to actually replace the mess that banks made but instead just add a bandage. At least is seem to use ISO 200022 message standards but as I said would it be THAT hard to simply ditch all the crap and model a baking system around what the EU/Russia does? Actually I don’t get why the US can’t just adopt the internationally used SWIFT system and the IBAN improvements that is used by 77 countries world wide for their national and international transfers. This system won’t make the US dependent on anyone as it is mostly a bunch of technical standards and recommendations on how to transfer money between banks.
I live in Europe and have some direct experience with how the banking system works (I was pentesting the system that shares transaction data between banks over their closed intranet), and I had no idea that US doesn’t have something like that. That’s interesting, that sounds like a lot of inconveniences.
You don’t need many of the features you listed to make a blockchain. Its basic form is a Merkle tree. For which there are many practical uses, some of which predate Bitcoin, and which you’re probably familiar with.
Git is a blockchain. It’s one of the most important tools for free and open software, which in turn powers huge parts of internet and technology.
This right here is really the spirit of the post. Yes there’s many impractical applications. Much like there are many impractical applications for RDBMSs, but the tech has such a stank on it, it’s important to remember it’s just a tool that can be useful despite the hype cycle.
Blockchains don’t really have a “stank” on it. It’s just that it’s a technology in search of a problem. Not many issues have been answered with “a complicated linked list across the internet will fix this.” Blockchains are incredibly specific in implementation that you really need something that needs those things. Like someone else mentioned, audit logs actually benefit from the properties of blockchains. You can’t just delete a record without needing to then literally modify every single record before and after it. Blockchain offers security for transactions. It works for finance in the scope of cryptocurrency. But it’s missing many features of other currencies that are provided by central authorities. So it’s essentially incompatible with those other currency systems. Blockchains are great for tracking ownership of a digital thing within its own ecosystem. It sucks at tracking ownership of a thing that exists outside it’s ecosystem (digital or otherwise). This is put on full display with NFTs. Within the world of NFTs it’s easy to prove ownership. Outside that system, I can easily post copies of that digital item. Cryptocurrency is better in that it has no value/representation outside its own system.
So that’s why blockchain is a fairly old technology (relatively speaking) with very little real-world use outside crypto and NFT.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to be dismissive. I wholeheartedly agree with you. What I meant was that it’s a shame I, as an engineer in the year 2023, would have a hard time pitching a blockchain solution to a non-crypto problem to paying customers no matter how fitting the solution might be. I don’t think that’s very disputable. Now this attitude is entirely driven by the last decade of unsubstantiated crypto hype and associated bad faith actors. It has nothing to do with the technology as it is.
Many people don’t consider Git to be a blockchain because it lacks more than just proof of work. No argument against merkle tree, but a blockchain is more than a merkle tree, otherwise it would just be called a merkle tree. Part of the issue is I don’t think there’s any real accepted definition for just a simple blockchain.
For example, you can absolutely undo a commit (it’s messy, yes). This is counter to how blockchain operates. Each commit does not rewrite every previous commit.
So git is sort of a precursor to blockchain. Distributed ledger, sure. Blockchain, no.
A blockchain is extremely difficult (virtually impossible) to intentionally tamper with. Git is not. Well, relatively speaking.
You can tamper all you want with a blockchain if you hold the only copy. You just replace it with an earlier state and evolve it into a different direction. Which also applies to git.
Blockchains and git repos are only tamper resistant when they’re distributed.
Blockchain is the generic idea of a distributed, tamper-resistant, independently verified ledger. Git is a practical implementation with specific goals. Merkle trees are the theoretical model. They all refer to the same concept.
You can tamper all you want with git even if you aren’t the only holder. You can make it to any other repos cant merge back in. If you waste a lot of time, you can make commits that will erase known work on other repos. You don’t need to replace it. You can just rewind. Blockchain requires each block to contain a hash of the previous. Git doesn’t really do this. It’d be extremely inefficient. Imagine every commit changes every previous commit.
Blockchains are more than merkle trees. Blockchains is a technology from 2008. Git is much older and again, this is obvious as Torvalds isn’t credited with the invention of blockchain.
Git is not tamper resistant.
I haven’t heard anyone ever refer to git as a blockchain. The main point of “blockchains” is to have a trustless security mechanism, which git doesn’t have. I don’t think blockchain and merkle trees are the same thing at all, even if blockchain uses merkle trees under the hood.
A closed blockchain doesn’t need or use expensive hashing nor is expensive hashing required for a public blockchain.
Every rant about how blockchains are bad SQL databases is ignorant of the actual, novel uses of a decentralized blockchain and whatever system it uses as proof to find the current block’s validator.
Blockchains allow for the synchronization of many actors up to the agreement of the majority of actors. They eliminate a class of corruption. Which is at least those where the authority over a log of data uses that authority to alter the log outside the will of the majority of those who use said log.
You can make all the arguments you want about the usefulness of that ability, you can make arguments that the cost of adding that ability being too high vs the reward.
You vague argued that its complicated and it wont end banks so its pointless. Neither of which is much of an argument. Also, the blockchain replaces central banks, not member banks.
Is that worth doing? Likely not at the current state of the technology.
buying drugs and scamming people
oh, and throwing gasoline at an already burning planet
Stop using FIAT then.
lol. lmao
Audit logs and Access control paper trails.
Security event logging has to be:
- Broadly accessible
- Write-protected
- offering some proof of completeness.
These three requirements are tricky and often conflicting. Block-chain might be an inefficient way to achieve these, but the glove does fit quite neatly.
Logistical paperwork
- Purchase Orders/Invoices and packing slips
- Waybills/Bills of lading and CMR’s
These kinds of documents require multiple stages of matching and approval by untrusted 3rd parties. There are dozens of ecosystems of interacting systems that support processing these documents, but most people still use paper. Paper is more reliable when you need to deliver a container full of diapers from Poland to North Sudan. It’s more reliable but incredibly prone to fraud and forgery. Having all of these approvals and transactions tracked on a blockchain and letting different systems interact with the same chain, would make it possible without each ERP having a rest API to each other ERP.
I fail to see what blockchain can provide in the realm of audit logging?
Fundamentally, you need to trust the systems which are logging events to log the correct events at the correct time. How does blockchain change this?
Yeah the problem isn’t the veracity of the logs, it’s providing a mechanism for third parties of proving that the sequence of events in your log hasn’t been tampered with after the fact
It’s more about tampering with the audit log. “Company A provided their audit logs to prove their innocence.” Did they? Well. Maybe. How do we know it’s the full log. How do we know it wasn’t altered? Sure, the company can digitally sign it, but what does that prove?
Then sign and send the audit log in realtime to the authority which A provided their logs to. Same effect no blockchain.
You could also encrypt and publish it. But realistically there is always going to be some entity actually responsible for enacting the consequences for non-compliance and they are the only entity that really ever needs to check these logs.
I am not sure I understand what the incentives to “mine” this blockchain would be. Without a certain block difficulty, which requires many miners, it will be trivial to rewrite the entire chain.
The audit logging sounds interesting. If you combine it with some kind of encryption, then I can imagine it working pretty well. Aside from the logistical problems/gas cost, that is.
Blockchains are “just” distributed databases with a guarantee about transaction ordering (doesn’t have to be totally ordered like regular literal chain-of-blocks but eg. some sort of DAG). Then on top of that you have your consensus-forming mechanism like PoW, PoS or PoA (Proof-of-Authority), most of which are designed to work in a network where you don’t trust the participants, except for PoA where nodes that eg. have a cert signed by a specific authority can do validation.
I could see PoA networks being useful for eg. banks, real estate related stuff, DNS (like @[email protected] mentioned) etc. Anything where you’d be interested in having all parties agree on some order of transactions, and where validation is only done by trusted actors. DNS-like systems could maybe even be done with public validation, but PoW is out of the question because of the W part, and most PoS-like systems (well, PoW and PoS but still) have lots of problems with validators being incentivized to order transactions in a certain way (“Maximal Extractable Value” et al) that can actually be detrimental to the network (or even consensus) and to the users.
I’m not really super sold on the idea of public blockchain networks where anyone (well, anyone with the means, which is not a small barrier) can be a validator, they mostly seem a bit like a solution looking for a problem. I can easily envision blockchains becoming something like Linux in the sense that they could be used “in the background” in many contexts, but so that us plebs rarely actually have to deal with them (the majority of the Internet runs on some flavor of Linux, but most people don’t “consciously” use it apart from Android which does its damndes to pretend not to be Linux).
Your comment pivoted from smart contracts to the foundations of why blockchains are useful. If we’re going down to strictly what a blockchain can be used for, replacing the web of trust for certificate validation.
Monero is a good example of what digital money should look like. Fungible, not an open ledger, usable like cash is.
If we ever put an authority in a position where they can surgically change things on a distributed ledger. It’s much more efficient to simply have a central ledger controlled by that same authority.
It does get interesting when we look at partitionable blockchains with Central oversight but those are pretty rare. But if you do have a partition will blockchain your the government functions could keep operating if there’s some network partition government event natural disaster communication interruption or say colonies on different planets. That could be interesting.
Yeah my comment was all over the place, but I hope not too much to be totally worthless.
PoA doesn’t mean the validators can change history, at least unless the network is specifically designed for that – which most aren’t, although I’d argue there’s potential use cases for allowing to eg. “undo” transactions, like what your bank does if your credit card number gets stolen.
Re. partitionable chains, it’d be fun to think about how to manage transactions when some nodes are potentially light years away. We already have the “interplanetary file system” after all 😄
Well we kind of already have historical examples of partitionable ledgers. It’s all about the merge. So historical documents written in far off offices merge or central offices. And they just kind of ignored conflict effects.
So if you have a very partitionable environment and we are using a distributed blockchain we might have to do something like record authority moving between partitions. That could be really interesting
Eventual consistency would be really eventual, heh.
And if the network is generally partitioned (or DAG-like I guess?), how do you handle eg. someone hopping on a (slower-than-light! I don’t believe in that FTL nonsense) ship and going from eg. Earth to live on Alpha Centauri? Do they have to bring a part of the DAG with them (or some sort of zk proof of it anyhow) in some form, so that it can be “transplanted” into the consensus on the other end when they arrive?
I can only imagine in such an environment you would have packetized network updates. You wouldn’t try to run a globally consistent ledger. You would bake in the partition network. And if you know somebody’s going to transit from network aid to network b you might sign something you might do a key you might give some sort of authority for this record to now get updated in a different partition. And if that traveled with a human all the better.
I imagine the partitions would also keep best effort consistent copies of other partitions, but they wouldn’t consider them you know up to date for any logistical purpose. So if you had a record that dealt with partition a but you were in partition b you would leverage as much data in partition be as possible and send an update record to a who would be the authority to do the thing and then send you the result.
But that’s a very very very naive approach. I’m sure we could come up with something more interesting. A distributed eventually consistent ledger with very sparse updates. Could get interesting
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The only use that I’ve thought of over the years is event logging where you need a very high confidence that no one has tampered with the logs.
gitIts backing store is an (immutable) merkle tree, which is a chain of crypographically signed object (commits, trees and blob), aka a chain of block, aka a blockchain.
Maybe when we have AGIs making contracts with each other and current legal system just does not work for them?
Name lookups. Like DNS.
If you have a trusted Oracle on whatever chain you’re using, then your smart contracts can start working with real world data. And that opens up lots of possibilities. Of course it puts a lot of faith in oracles. But for instance you could have an inheritance scheme that triggers on the death of a relative. You could do life insurance. You could affect any sort of contract was transaction money or currency.
To your points about central control, I think it’s anthema to the idea of a distributed system. If your resistant to malicious actors you have to be resistant to censorship. Because it’s only a matter of time until the central authority becomes a malicious actor. At least for some of the population.
Trust is a fundamental thing in human life an society. It get around the abuses by having checks designed into the system and smart ways to stop corruption. If you can’t trust a company to deliver a service after payment why would you even work with them? This is the “issue” that smart contracts allegedly fix.
You can make the same argument against escrow services. But they’re absolutely fundamental to housing transactions. Where the risk of a downside is unacceptable.
I can, and I do and that’s exactly the point. An escrow service from the environmental standpoint is way more efficient than any smart contract based solution.
The only useful use case I’ve seen is for when you absolutely MUST be able to track historic data and ensure edits don’t destroy the original. Blockchain “solves” this by never allowing saved data to be edited.
The only place I’ve seen it actually being used properly for that was within Brazil’s medical vaccine tracking (ptbr article), which is what allowed them to confirm that Bolsonaro falsified his vaccination card. It doesn’t offer details on what kind of protocol it uses, but it could just be a “decentralized, distributed” database, for all intents and purposes.
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Maybe when we have AGIs making contracts with each other and current legal system just does not work for them?
Blockchain isn’t about subverting legal systems though. It doesn’t exist outside of law.
Land deeds and property titles.
Maintaining a provable chain of ownership and legal transfer of land and property is required for mortgages, for title insurance, inheretance, etc.
A public, decentralized ledger of land/property transfers could revolutionize home ownership, lending, insurance, etc
Land ownership (in the US) already is public. What problem would this solve? What problems would it create? How would the solutions outweigh the problems?
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Blockchain suffers from the same problem. What happens when someone compromises the network by taking over 50% of the computing power then transfers all deeds to themselves? Or hacks or exploits a bug in the smart contract and does the same? Hopefully if that happens then you can appeal to some higher authority to get it fixed, but then what is the point of using the blockchain or smart contracts in the first place since you could get the same result under our current system without the computing overhead of blockchain.
Those take over attacks are even more likely when we’re talking about govt blockchains when, effectively, the only user would be the govt itself.
You know that decent governments have ways to account for that issue that don’t require wasting resources on blockchain don’t you?
But if you simply want to a tech solution for that I’ve two: make it law that the gov/state has to issue the land rights in a PDF file and sign it with a govt certificate/pk. People can store the PDF and later, if the information on their databases don’t match what is on the PDF point the finger at the govt. They should also do the same for the entire database, publish a copy of the land database, every month, signed with a key they hold. If the records are changed afterwards people can simply show the signed database and say “no it was tampered”.
How does a central government database not also solve those problems?
There’s only a few recorders who actually check title, called Torrens, when you record something in the US. 99% of them work under abstract where literally anyone can record anything as long as they pay the county recorder and meet the basic requirements like have a notary stamp.
There’s a good chance if you’re in the US that I could just record a deed giving me ownership of your house or apartment complex. I’d have to fraudulently sign your name as grantor, but the county isn’t going to stop me. You’ll have to stop me.
There’s a whole huge industry around recording and verifying deeds for sales to deal with that type of nonsense. First, they won’t want to get dismantled. Fidelity is huge for example. Sort of like how TurboTax inserts themselves between you and paying taxes. Fidelity inserts themselves between you buying and selling a house.
A verified Blockchain would essentially turn everything into torrens instead of abstract title. I think that’s a good thing and I’d rather pay the government to verify the transaction than done for profit company that’s going to review title as quickly and cheaply as possible.
Nevermind having to deal with a title insurance industry – like all insurance – that’s inherently be incentivised to reduce costs by not paying claims.
A verified Blockchain would essentially turn everything into torrens instead of abstract title. I think that’s a good thing and I’d rather pay the government to verify the transaction than done for profit company that’s going to review title as quickly and cheaply as possible.
You can pay for the govt for that service without introducing blockchain-based BS in the process. After all that’s what most countries do, land rights and transactions are recorded, stored and verified by some governmental branch.
One of the good things about using a blockchain system is that it forces you to set out and follow a set of programmatic, and thus at least minimally fair, rules for how the system is going to work. It means you are running on some kind of rule of law, and for it to work everyone involved has to be able to replicate the history of the system and agree that it is correct.
It seems a fairly natural fit for something like land, especially in the US, where we know for a fact that huge swathes of it were seized in the past from Native Americans, or revoked after being given to Black folks at the end of the civil war, or otherwise moved around by the government in suspiciously ad-hoc ways that we have later come to regret.
If you can design the entire system to grind to a halt if rights are not respected or someone tries to rewrite the rules on the basis of they have the guns, it could be a powerful force for the rule of law and the maintenance of a consensus reality.
Bro that’s complete fantasy nonsense… Somebody has to also enforce the ownership. You ideologic internet stuff means jack shit if someone else has the gun.
Either you trust your city / county to keep track of land ownership (in whatever technical way they would like) and to enforce it or you don’t. You can’t magically get it both ways with “blockchain”.
If you don’t have a system of law that even its designated enforcers are obliged to follow, you don’t have a legitimate government, you have a mafia.
The easier it is to make cases where a law is broken common knowledge, the easier it is to gather the political will to enforce the law. That mechanism is what obliges the enforcers to actually follow the law, and it can work more or less well depending on the structure of the society, the relative power of different groups of people, and the communication technologies in use. If the President guns someone down in broad daylight, they get thrown out more often if you have a reputable newspaper than if you don’t. An election is a convenient substitute for everyone trying to kill each other until we find out who is left.
Blockchains are one technology for establishing common knowledge among a group of participants. They’re not magic, they don’t even usually work particularly well. But they do offer techniques for binding the administrators of systems of rules to actually follow those rules, which have the potential to be applied more broadly.
A central database would be just a list of all the land and who owns it.
Right now, the deed system is a bunch of deeds that say “remember when I got this land, on page 302 of book 75 in the county recorder’s office? Well now Jimantha owns it actually, since they bought it from me for ten dollars and a peppercorn.”. This is great for accountability: it lets you trace ownership history and provides a piece of evidence to substantiate every transfer, and so helps you answer inconvenient questions like “why should you own that house when it was my grandmother’s house and I want to own it?”. It also lets you roll transfers back if they are found to be fraudulent, and neatly captures how all current ownership is contingent on the theft of the whole place from any disposessed original inhabitants.
This is also basically how ownership works in many current blockchain systems: you select something you own based on the transaction that gave you ownership, and then you say who should own it now in a signed message.
But the blockchain systems verify signatures cryptographically, whereas the county recorder verifies the authority to transfer stuff on the “you think someone would just tell lies? On the Internet?” principle. And the centralized database doesn’t even keep the transfers around for review, it just has the database operator in charge of who owns any given thing at the moment.
Would you rather walk up to a grumpy person with a shotgun and demand that they move out while brandishing a printout of an SQLite database recently recovered after the ransomware attack at the county administrative building? Or with a deed with their spouse’s signature on it?
Then the problem is to make the deeds more machine-readable, and to get better at not putting in deeds from people who have no business writing to that part of the ledger, for which pieces of blockchain technology might be useful.
A central database would be just a list of all the land and who owns it.
Says who? Why would it not be a list of who owned/owns that land and when they owned it?
Would you rather walk up to a grumpy person with a shotgun and demand that they move out while brandishing a printout of an SQLite database recently recovered after the ransomware attack at the county administrative building? Or with a deed with their spouse’s signature on it?
Yes, the document from the county administration would be much better, than some “magic” contract from the internet that may or may not be enforced by the county.
If the county isn’t actually using the system you try to present evidence from, of course it will not work.
If you have a list of who owned the land and when, and you have evidence to support each transfer, then you have a log-structured or relatively blockchain-like database.
Why would the county not use their own system? What are you even talking about? You seem to simultaneously make arguments for and against blockchains in the same sentence.
Yes, the document from the county administration would be much better, than some “magic” contract from the internet that may or may not be enforced by the county.
If the magic contract from the Internet is not actually likely to be enforced by the county, then the county is not actually using the magic Internet contract system. If the system were adopted by the county, then the official records from the system would be known to be enforceable.
I sound like I am for and against blockchain because I am. I don’t think you can stand up any existing blockchain system and start slapping government functions onto it and get a good result. People won’t understand it well enough or have sufficient resources to be true peers in the system, and if they did it wouldn’t scale very well.
But I do think that governmental systems can be improved by taking inspiration form blockchain technology and drawing on its underlying philosophical principles of accountability and consensus.
How does forced repossession of property work? You didn’t pay your bills. The only asset you have is the land. Court authorized giving it up in a lawsuit. I don’t know. Either way, there must be some way to enforced transfers without voluntarily relying on the person.
And who’s managing the keys? The land owner? What happens if they lose them? What happens if they die prior to transferring property?
Tying keys to natural people is indeed an unsolved problem.
The system can be designed to recognize more people than just the current owner as authorized to do a transfer. You could do the whole tax record tracking in the same system, to ensure that property can be seized for back taxes exactly when back taxes are owed.
How do you prove someone in the central government didn’t take a bribe and tamper with the records? What if you’re from a country where the central government is less than stable? How would you prove ownership if something were to happen to that database? How do you prove that someone is who they say they are? How do citizens and businesses access that database? Is there a standardized format for it? Does it use some proprietary software built by the lowest bidder?
Not saying that blockchain has all the answers or that it is the right tool in all cases, but these are some of the problems it is trying to solve.
If you live in such a shitty country, the records would probably not be respected anyway. Also a blockchain still has to allow new inputs from a trusted source. And that source could still make up a fake sale and give your land to someone else.
(And no, priavate wallets wouldn’t work to protect that transaction… because what if you lose your wallet?)
If the government is unstable what authority do you have to claim the land is yours. Land ownership is literally backed only by the government. Forced change of ownership must also be possible, therefore the same weaknesses would exist in Blockchain as elsewhere. Tracking property who’s ownership isn’t inherently authorized by the system itself is pointless. The rules will change. The government will never back a system that controls physical property unless they have the authority to change it. You can try to argue individual sovereignty, but that simply doesn’t exist. You only own the land as long as the government backs you up on that. If the government collapses, no Blockchain will convince a new government that they can’t take the land from you.
