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Comment by vertex-four | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, most people don't understand what a blockchain is, including many people working on altcoins. This causes them to make buzzwordy statements which are, to everyone else, nonsensical. "Code is law" being one of them. "Property on the blockchain" being another.

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The lack of technical knowledge in the cryptocurrency community is staggering. It's obvious that a huge number of people are attracted by the "get rich quick" aspect of it all and they lack the basics to really understand the trade-offs and the subtleties of the various blockchain "flavors" and tweaks.

So it turns into dumb cargo culting like "Proof of Stake is 100% proven not to work", "Proof of Stake is 100% proven to work", "Lightning Network is going to fix everything and bring world peace", "Lightning Network is going to ruin everything and bring WW3" etc...

And you can't have any constructive discussion because if you try to argue for or against a certain technical proposal you'll immediately be called a "paid shill" or a "troll" regardless of your arguments. I've been lurking in the bitcoin subreddits lately and it's really one of the least helpful and constructive communities around. And it's a bit sad because on the technical side the blockchain is pretty damn interesting.

In all seriousness, you should lurk in the Ethereum subreddit instead.

We have our share of cheerleaders who take the black and white "this good, that bad" position without evidence, but they're not dominant, and we have a far larger proportion of developers who are interested in building cool technology and are able to look objectively at the problems involved.

Ehh... I have quite similar issues with the Ethereum crowd. Nobody understands in which situations they need distributed consensus on some state, and what the other available solutions to various similar problems are. Blockchains solve a very niche (but previously difficult-to-solve!) problem, and given that they literally cost money to use, it's good to use other tools to solve problems when you can.

This is the dot com age of the blockchain. It is hard, close to impossible, to conduct business in this space because at all times are you surrounded by questionable upstarts and outright scams who compete by screaming incoherent buzzwords the loudest. All these have valuations far above what a serious upstart could ever achieve.

People make outlandish promises that no person of average intelligence could ever take seriously taking up all the air, keynoting conferences and generally diverting discourse from what really needs to be done in order for this technology to be useful.

I think we have to wait for all the ICOs and rich statefullness flim-flam to subside before we see any real benefits from this space.

Very likely true, but the question is... what benefits are there to be found? I think we found most of the useful spaces for a blockchain quite early on - aside from currency, there's squaring Zooko's Triangle (identity/nameservices), trustless gambling, and simple mechanisms for agreeing where to send money.

I think the next set of services (once we've solved scalability+transaction fee problems) will revolve around figuring out what to do now that we have a currency that is very easy to send to anyone over the Internet, rather than trying to develop blockchain technology itself further. Even just getting it into people's hands and developing the user experience further is going to result in the currency gaining far more utility. (I'll note that we still have no reasonable protocol for implementing subscription payments etc.)

There was a short period of time, between bitcoin entering the public consciousness and its technology becoming a platform for investment in thin air, an ability for me to buy a whole lot of things with it. With just a little effort, I could've survived with no traditional currency at all. And then that vanished, quickly, as it became obvious that its teething problems were not being solved.

Why is property on the blockchain nonsensical?

Property only exists insofar as someone enforces it. Whether that's yourself, your Government, or your local militia that you pay. If you can't prevent someone from taking it, it's not your property.

So... why put notice that you own a piece of property on the blockchain, if you're already putting trust in someone to enforce your property? Why not just ask them to publish notice that you own the property?

Yes but if you've ever purchased property the titling process can be really expensive. A block chain provides a way "to publish notice" that's indelible so could lower costs. In countries with poor property rights it could also help bootstrap the system.

Yes but never forget the $5 wrench solution to crypto problems.

You can "publish notice" by putting a sign outside your front door. The reason the titling process is expensive is because your Government requires it, not because publishing notice in some reasonable manner is inherently expensive. (We publish notice of a lot of things just by sticking an ad in the paper as it is, property is a weird one.)

What issues is the titling process solving that cannot be solved in any way without a blockchain?

You called property "weird" so I wonder whether you are aware that property is weird exactly because of the double spending problem. A land title registry gives you double spend protection, not just irrevocable publication. Your point of course stands, since you're trusting someone with enforcement, you might as well trust them with double spend protection. I'd say decentralized irrevocable publication (e.g. certificate transparency) is much cheaper than decentralized double spend protection.

It's a trustless, reliable system for transferring and tracking ownership of property. Yes, you still need government to enforce it. Think of it like unforgeable, hard to steal, uncorruptible, easy to transfer land deeds.

Why don't you trust the Government to track it if you trust the Government to enforce it? That is, why do you need "trustless" if you need to trust someone further down the line anyway?

You don't need the government, you need the society at all. These things can be done in a lot of ways, all them compatible with a trusted ledger that keeps track unambiguously of who owns what.

Notary services were for a long time independent of the State, they may still be in some countries and places. This is indeed something in which a global decentralized trusted ledger can help.

See my "property ownership == enforcement" comment above. If you yourself are enforcing your monopoly over your property - you can stick a sign outside your front door saying "trespassers will be shot" and be done with it. If it's a militia, have them do whatever they think is reasonable notice. If you're depending on your local community, stick it on a community noticeboard.

The question is, exactly why do you need a trustless ledger in order to post notice that you're willing to enforce your monopoly? What problem, precisely, does a blockchain solve?

You don't need to solve every problem to solve some problems. Blockchains don't address enforcement for real property. They do address everything else. And everything else is a big deal.

I don't think they do address everything else - or rather, I believe that if you have to trust an entity for enforcement, you have a perfect avenue for everything else along with that. A blockchain is specifically designed for situations you have no trust in anything (except that 51% of mining power is not colluding in a specific way) - the rest of the time, there are much cheaper and simpler solutions.

The blockchain solves the problem of assignment and transference of property rights. Right now that process in many places is slow, expensive, error prone, and corruption prone. Blockchains completely eliminate that, full stop. Yes, you still need the authorities for enforcement, so obviously blockchains do not create some utopia where everything works perfectly, but they do solve big, real problems.

Shallow thinking.

In my nice first-world country I do trust the government to track it. But in many third-world countries, deed registers are prone to forgery and bribery, and it's not uncommon for people to discover they suddenly don't own their land. I've seen economists argue that this is a major factor limiting economic growth in those countries.

Probably some of those countries would like to fix this, and for them, a blockchain might make sense...say with multiple government entities cross-signing property transfers, rather than requiring all property owners to hold their own keys.

> it's not uncommon for people to discover they suddenly don't own their land

The thing is, the same Government could generally just storm in with guns and say "this is ours now". A known-good register doesn't solve the issue unless you have a separate mechanism of enforcing the register... in which case the solution is filing your deed with the people you trust to enforce it, not using a blockchain.

Also: if you had multiple Government entities cross-signing property transfers, they could just make the lot of it public the normal way, no blockchain necessary. Irrevocability comes from people making copies of the list of transfers.

If you're interested, this is called triple-ledger accounting, you just have to keep all the receipts. This has the advantage that you can keep transactions private until the point that it needs to be made public.

There are all kinds of problems that unforgeable append-only public ledgers make less crap while not solving the fundamental problem that people are at the center of all people-related transactions. For instance I can bribe a notary to backdate a notarization. Can't bribe a blockchain. This is good. There are lots of things like this.

I think that the devil is in the details. Imagine this situation.

Someone comes, takes your home and says "this is mine!".

Now you have to go to your government and prove that the person stole from you because it is yours. Some governments are efficient at providing this proof, some aren't.

Some countries in Africa have a huge problem with this. Where ppl go to other people's houses and sell them even though it is not theirs. And because it takes up to two years for someone to prove the ownership, sure the government will enforce the ownership eventually but two years is a long time. I've seen pictures of houses where the owner sprayed "This house is not for sale" to avoid this issue.

Now imagine a system where proving ownership is fast, nearly free and very hard to forge. The incentive to cheat the system is much smaller than before. Using a blockchain to handle proof of ownership is a great way to have a secure and nearly free.

Sometimes it is not about being able or not but how cheap / expensive it is and how slow / fast the process is.

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