Great talk Charles!
One thing I still dont get is this idea of putting property deeds on a blockchain (which you talked about in the talk). Blockchains are great for enforcing the rules of information transfer (such as domain names) and transactions etc, but how can they be used to govern what happens in the physical world? Even if the guy has his house deed on the blockchain, dont you still need the government to enforce that and evict squatters? And if i remember correctly, blockchains were invented to make make governments irrelevant.
Thanks and to go into more detail with your question, first blockchains are agnostic to the use case and philosophy. They were not invented to obsolete entity XYZ or expose corruption ABC rather they are just a specialized database that has strict rules on how entries are added and never permit deletion. The end result is a distributive, censorship resistance and high integrity database. Satoshi and others decided to apply this construct to currency, but as I mentioned it has been also applied to things like DNS and one can imagine many more use cases.
In respect to land deeds, its a layered problem. First, we have the issue of no breeder documents identifying people within the community. Generally this is done via testimony and familiarity. Such a system cannot scale, which is why governments get into the business of controlling ID documents such as passports, drivers licenses, state ID cards, etc. The hope is that we can build an identity system using a blockchain due to its unique benefits of censorship resistance and high integrity. Does a government have to follow this identity? No, however, the vast majority of those seeking identification are commercial interests (ever use a student ID for example?).
Second, we have the issue of the land itself. As I mentioned in the talk, this is an issue of proving occupancy and ownership in the event of a dispute between parties. For example, how can the government of Afghanistan prove Ahmed versus Mohammad rightfully owns the land? What if there is a multi-generation dispute? Storing registration on a blockchain produces a permanent, immutable living history of the lands occupants. Yes it is true that the government and the people do not have to follow the records, yet this is true for all land claims regardless of sovereignty. It's all about giving a better system for people to track ownership of assets that doesn't require a government to manage or be reliable. Rather they get involved after the fact when there is a dispute.
As for property rights management: I contend that blockchain technology can only make property rights management more convenient but does not make it possible in the first place. Ahmed can register anything he wants in some blockchain, no once cares if there is no socially and/or forcefully enforced agreement (enforced by a state or the "local community" or or a security company) about what the basis for property rights is ("the law" or "the laws" for the libertarian version).
If we assume that it was enough if Ahmed proved that he once lived on the land in question before the war began in order to regain his land then he would still have problems proving that he lived there if there was no one else that verified it (anybody can make a entry in a decentralized database claiming all kinds of things). But I could see how that would work if it was combined with the reputation solution and many reputable individuals testify that he actually lived there. Overall this is possible today too (reputable individuals can testify in front of a local court/arbitrator), blockchain technology would just digitize it and scale it better.
I only had roughly 13 minutes so I couldn't cover something I really wanted to talk about that is private law. Most countries actually give people the right to decide both the legal system and the method of arbitration for commercial transactions. For example, I could enter into a contract living in New York with a man from Hong Kong and agree to follow Swiss law and arbitration. But one doesn't have to stop there. One can follow private legal systems such as Unidroit or even the middle ages Lex Mercatoria.
The reason why governments permit this degree of legal flexibility stems from trade. Shipping is a notorious industry with hundreds of years of maritime law and legions of international agreements that allow for remarkably complex private legal arrangements and arbitration. Tribal and religious law is another example permitting flexibility. The point of all of this discourse is to convey that the next evolution of our ecosystem will be to take private law and codify it into smart contracts using some language like E and make blockchains the arbitrator.
Courts should uphold the decisions as they meet the standards of international agreements on contracts and a blockchain arbitrator should meet all criterion for objectivity. Of course, this is still hypothetical; however, there are some good papers on how one can structure such things ->
http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/548/469.
Agree, I would just like to see the language to be more precise. It always sounds as if blockchain technology and smart contracts in particular can replace any human element.
I rather believe that its another set of tools to aid us in building more fair and transparent relationships. Remember starting a company before legalzoom and rocketlawyer? You had to go to a third party and pay out the ass. Now you can spend a few hundred and have professionally written articles of incorporation and legal templates for everything from non-disclosure agreements to no complete clauses. As law becomes more digital, it should become more like software in that we'll have open source legal libraries and APIs that the community can rapidly iterate and refine.
Alot of smart people are thinking ahead and ofcourse noone is smart enough to see that many steps ahead... but there is some substance there... that blockchain can completely cut out some people like notaries because of a reputation/voting system, but nonetheless it won't be without a big fight from the gov't which will think that it is untested thus can lean to anarchy. Prediction markets can cut out professionals as consultants for information.... there are just so many possibilities and it just takes the world of coders to use imaginations that they have an abundance of to harness in the right direction, funneled via blockchain tech which the genius of satoshi presented us.
I wish I could have covered provably fair elections as well. There is really a renaissance coming and it's really exciting to see it from the frontlines.
Topic: My TEDx Bermuda Presentation on Cryptocurrencies (Read 8083 times)
