Comment by fareesh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fareesh | Hacker News Reader

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From an Indian pov my take is the boundary markers use-case sounds pretty good. I don't expect an American flying around from EWR to Seattle to ever understand this intuitively without being exposed to the realities in this part of the world, but having thought about it for all of 20 seconds it sounds like a very good idea.

Yes - it is a solution to the problem of power and corruption. In India there is corruption at all levels of government. The wealthy and powerful could absolutely influence some levels and steal land. Even petty regional criminals are able to do it. It has happened to my own family - imagine the odds. 1 billion people here, and I read this article and even I can personally relate to the issue of stolen land.

A blockchain that stored GPS coordinates and could realistically withstand a 51% attack, would solve the problem in my view. Are there other architectures that can also solve this problem? No doubt. Is the blockchain solution perfect? No it isn't.

As we've learned from the "They've stolen my apes" scenarios, the very nature of blockchain as the central authority of trust means that there is no such thing as theft on the blockchain.

Today, corrupt powerful people use violence and intimidation to go move physical markers to change landownership.

If land ownership was on the blockchain, the same corrupt powerful people will use violence and intimidation to force digital transfer of ownership.

The same threats to the safety and wellbeing of family members works equally well to induce the desired actions in the physical word or the digital one.

This is why Tim wrote to be wary of technical solutions for political problems.

I imagine the rich, corrupt land lords in India would be able to steal your land even easier on the blokchain by sending a gang of armed bandits to your farm, torture you until you transfer everything to their wallet... and when you go to the police to denounce the harassment, you get arrested because the police is on the land lord's pocket. The blockchain cannot and will not stop violence in the real world from working around all the cryptography in the world, and it's shocking to me that anyone actually believes that to be somehow the case.

Also: Couldn't the wealthy and the powerful influence the creation of the blockchain and the first data set put on the blockchain as well?

In the US, property records are maintained by a local government authority. That alone doesn’t stop squatters or unauthorized encroachment on your property. Normally, the boundaries of a parcel of land are not a mystery, but enforcing them requires more than just knowing their location

A petty criminal visits your farm with a gun in his hands. You tell him that the blockchain says this land belongs to you. What happens then? Does he say "oh, sorry to bother you, have a nice day" and go away? Or does he just shoot you and take over the land?

Or worse, steal your only phone and take over the land, as ownership of the keys is now ownership of the land.

Blockchain would actually make property theft easier in a poor area where people only have a phone.

Can you help me understand how this would help? The way I see it: if the government were on board with recording property boundaries in a public ledger, it could do it without a blockchain. And if it's not on board, then I don't see how a random third-party ledger would help, since the government wouldn't defer to it.

Not the parent post, but a reasonable implication would be that the government-as-a-whole could be forced to enforce the property boundaries as long as it is difficult for individual government officials to make undetected illegitimate changes to the ledger; such a mechanism would be disempowering the specific officials and force them to follow the rules enforced by the system.

It would have to be a solution that involves the government

> Yes - it is a solution to the problem of power and corruption.

It's not.

Question: who is the rightful owner of the marked land? See my comments in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564

> The wealthy and powerful could absolutely influence some levels and steal land. Even petty regional criminals are able to do it.

So the wealthy and the powerful get the person entering data on the blockchain to enter that the land belongs to them. What exactly has blockchain solved?

But how will poor people own enough computation to ensure rich people can't mount a 51% attack?

If the database relies on trusted nodes run by eg, the government, why can't the government use MySQL and periodically publish a dump?

It would have to be a mix of government and non government nodes for it to work.

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