Exactly, and while the government database "land registry" could, of course, be replaced with a government "HouseChain" it wouldn't actually solve any Problem but would introduce a ton of new ones.
However, if you have no government, the housechain could be a way for a decentralized society to implement the concept of a land registry. Once everyone agrees that the housechain is proof of ownership, then measures can be taken to enforce that without necessarily evoking a central government.
I'm not sold on the idea of a society without a central government, but I think the blockchain would help — or even enable — such an experiment.
The people in charge of enforcement would become a de facto government. What distinguishes a government from any other organization is the monopoly on violence (more precisely, the monopoly on deciding when and how violent measures can be employed), and enforcing property rights sometimes requires violence (e.g. if someone refuses to leave your home, eventually the police will have to physically remove them against their will).
Blockchains do nothing at all to help anything about this situation. You could use a blockchain to manage ownership, but it would be far more efficient to use a central database of some kind that is held by whatever organization is responsible for enforcing property rights. In the end you are not going to care how your ownership is managed, you are only going to care that, if someone tries to violate your rights, the police will come and protect you. You need to trust that the enforcement will actually be applied, but what difference does it make if you use a blockchain?
In a decentralized society, there may be multiple organizations deciding on when and how violent measures can be employed — and they could be as small as one person. If each organization thinks a different person is the owner of a property, that would be very unstable. However, if they all agree that a certain blockchain implementation of deeds is what decides ownership, then they can co-exist more peacefully. Not saying there aren't other hurdles, but that is certainly one of the big ones.
That does require that most of the society agrees on some set of principles, but that's true of a centralized government too: most of the society has to agree they are legitimate. Going back to the decentralized society, everyone would agree that the blockchain determines ownership and currency. So, an organization that accept those is viewed as legitimate, one that doesn't is illegitimate. In that scenario, illegitimate organizations would be less stable than legitimate ones.
So, the existence of a system that allows people to all agree in things like currency and ownership without giving that power to one specific organization is a step forward into making decentralized societies possible. Is it sufficient? Most likely not.
It is indeed not. I'm not claiming that all problems are solved and that decentralized governments are easy or even possible. Just that blockchains solves some of the problems in that area.
> In a decentralized society, there may be multiple organizations deciding on when and how violent measures can be employed [...] a system that allows people to all agree in things like currency and ownership without giving that power to one specific organization
What, did you read Snow Crash as u- in stead of dystopian? What's to say they'll all agree?!?
The important point is what happens when two of those organisations disagree. What happens when I have Mr Chen's Robot Dog Republic saying I own a property -- because they have the blockchain to prove it -- and evicting you on my behalf, while you have the Cosa Nostra Pizza Delivery Co. saying you own it -- because they have the blockchain to prove that -- and evicting me on your behalf?
Civil war, that's what happens.
Decentralising stuff that everyone needs to agree on sucks.
You cannot get your hacked bitcoins back even if you are the government with police and army. Lots of things that government does can be replaced with a smart contract. Hey, you can even have direct democracy - vote with your citizen token for a change in a smart contract and voala the law changed and immediately enforced.
It could be the norm. It all depends on how the society is organized. If there is a system of law and a court and you prove someone stole something from you, the government will coerce that person to give you back or pay some sort of fine. For instance, even if the system says you own those bitcoins, a court can rule that you give it back to the person you hacked and also pay for the costs of the case. The same goes for smart contracts. A court may rule that the contract is invalid and require one of the parties to pay the other, regardless of the smart contract. So, that technology doesn't, in and on itself, revolutionize any of that. However, it could be made into law that a court cannot revert a smart contract or that the contents of a digital wallet belongs to whoever has it, regardless of how it was obtained.
In the absence of a governing authority, property disputes would revert to being settled by violence or the threat thereof.
Why should my band of armed thugs defer to what it says on the blockchain when they could instead hit you with a $5 wrench until you vacate the premises? https://xkcd.com/538
I'm hopeful that when the Ponzi schemes fade away, we'll end up with a slightly more informed populace that has inadvertently received an introduction to political science, state-building, the origins of power, etc. Civics teachers take note! :)
Almost the entire populace will be more informed -- except for the Ponzi-"coin" proponents, because they're busy innoculating themselves against reason by... Well, being Ponzi-"coin" proponents; strengthening their own biases by debating in favour of these ludicrous schemes. Like, right here on this page.
Then in the end, we all live by the rules established by whoever has the largest band of thugs. Good thing we got rid of government and created this libertarian utopia.
Because everyone else around them would help defend the validity of the deeds, as they all own property in the same way. Like I said before, I'm far far away from having all the answers about how to set up a decentralized society and I'm not even sure I would like to live in such a society. However, issuing deeds and currency is an important job that currently you need a central government you trust to do. With a blockchain that problem is solved. There are plenty of other problems besides that. But it is one less item in the checklist.
> Because everyone else around them would help defend the validity of the deeds, as they all own property in the same way.
That feels a bit like saying that everyone will pitch in to stop mugging since we all carry physical cash in the same way. Maybe some civilians would intervene some of the time, but most will not risk their own bodily autonomy to defend another's property.
Issuing deeds and currency feels like the easy part of creating an agreed upon land registry or economy. I have a printer and know how to use SQLite, so nothing is stopping me from issuing my own physical currency or deeds today. I could even save paper and put them on my own personal blockchain. Convincing others to honor my currency or deeds sounds like the hard part.
It is not the easy part if you want a decentralized government because no one person can be tasked with issuing and governing over those, otherwise that person will have power over everyone and kind of defeat the purpose. That doesn't mean that there aren't other equally or even harder challenges. I was not claiming that blockchains was the last problem stopping us from becoming decentralized. Anyway, like you said, nothing prevents you from issuing your currency and deeds today. And, before blockchains, the only way to have a decentralized government would be for many people to do that. However, that system is more fragile than a system built on a single blockchain everyone agrees on.
The big thing about blockchains is that it allows people to all agree on a certain asset, without giving control of that asset to a single party. That is big news for anyone group wanting to live in a decentralized society, because it was one of the big problems.
Reality (eg, Jews in Nazi germany) shows that this is bullshit.
If the local government and population is on your side, then you're fine.
If however you're a minority that's now deemed to be the enemy, then what supposedly belongs to you doesn't matter one bit. You can prove it as mathematically as you want, and you can have your neighbors on your side, but if a bigger army of goons shows up to take your stuff, they'll take it.
Ultimately this is an entirely political problem, and the blockchain will simply be completely ignored if things go to shit.
I think you're missing the point. I agree with everything you said. The validity of everything comes from the people (the majority at least) agreeing on the legitimacy of something. Everyone agrees on the legitimacy of the dollar, so that's why it has value. However, by agreeing on that, we give USA's central bank a lot of control over it and, therefore, power. If everyone agrees that dollars are worthless, but bitcoins have value instead, then the central bank has a lot less control. Moreover, a society without a central government would never be able to agree on any fiat money without the blockchain. Now, such society could do so. Also, that society would have a hard time evaluating the legitimacy of deeds without the blockchain. So that is yet another feature that can help building such society if one so inclines.
Things like BTC are even worse. BTC has two main sources of control:
1. The developers. Somebody has to develop the software, and no matter what, this ends up being a very select group. If you have multiple groups, that's still not a lot of people and they'll have to cooperate somehow, which will result in some sort of system you're not involved with.
2. The miners. They group up into pools, and there's not that many of them that are big enough to matter.
Those two groups are the ones truly in control, and they're unelected, unaccountable, and have their own interests and agendas. If you think the banks are bad, then using a system made of a cabal distributed among the globe is hardly better.
Decentralized software development already exists, we trust it and it works. Besides, as long as you speak the same protocol and use the same data, lots of people can roll out their own software. But indeed, if a small enough percentage of the population control enough of the mining power things could collapse or at least degenerate back to a centralized society. It is up to the members of a decentralized society to do their share of mining and be in the lookout for that not to happen. In order for a society to be decentralized and remain so, a big majority has to want that and hold it as one of their values. It has to be something embedded in the culture. It is the opposite problem of trying to build a decentralized society over fiat money. In that case, you want the fewest people possible printing money. That's the reason BTC can work for a decentralized society, but the regular currency we use today would not.
> Decentralized software development already exists, we trust it and it works.
Not in the way needed. You probably means git, which yes, allows for distributed development in that unlike previous systems it doesn't rely on a central server to exchange code.
But that doesn't mean people don't organize. I review people's code. People review mine. There's a list of people that's been agreed that are in control of a project. There's somebody who owns the domain, somebody who builds installers and makes releases, somebody who can say "no" to adding some code.
> Besides, as long as you speak the same protocol and use the same data, lots of people can roll out their own software.
Cryptocurrency is to a huge extent about the contents and management of this data. So nearly anything interesting will need cooperation. This means a small group getting together and figuring out how to change the protocol.
> But indeed, if a small enough percentage of the population control enough of the mining power things could collapse or at least degenerate back to a centralized society.
It already is centralized. The decentralization is more theory than practice.
> It is up to the members of a decentralized society to do their share of mining and be in the lookout for that not to happen.
They already failed, then. And no wonder, because 99.9% of the world is not even capable of having opinions here. Like if you show a random person a diff from the bitcoin git, they couldn't tell you what it does, let alone if it's a good or bad thing.
Even if you can, there's lock-in. If you already put a significant amount of effort and money into say, BTC, there's a cost to pulling out. So a lot of people will stick around even if things aren't exactly to their liking. This means there's a variety of changes that can be made for the worse with impunity on the part of the people in control.
> In order for a society to be decentralized and remain so, a big majority has to want that and hold it as one of their values.
Then it's an outright impossibility. It's the downfall of all libertarian schemes, the idea that everyone is passionate about governance. The vast majority of people want to lounge on the sofa, not to attend regular meetings with their neighbors to discuss a variety of issues like roads and sanitation.
Really, a democracy offers lots of ways of participating that the vast majority doesn't use. I don't see crypto changing that.
> if you have no government, the housechain could be a way for a decentralized society to implement the concept of a land registry. Once everyone agrees that the housechain is proof of ownership, then measures can be taken
Once everyone agrees on anything, they can agree to have a centralised real estate ownership registry. Or a whole centralised government.
Your idea seems to be a thought experiment with weird priors. (Feels like that makes it rather meaningless.)
I don't have the answers, but I'm easily drawn to such thought experiments: all the neighbors would agree with you that you're the owner and not the person who sold you the deed but wants to remain inside of it or some intruder or whatever. So, when you knock on their door and try to remove them, you'll get support from the local people who will try to respect what's in the "housechain". It is in their interest that the deeds are respected, because they also own their houses that way.
That's beside the point, though. I'm just noting that the possibility of have distributed deeds does make it possible to have some of the benefits of a centralized government: deeds and currency, without having one. That obviously only works if everyone in the society has come to the agreement that those things are valuable (just like in case of central governments too). But the point is just that you don't need a central person with all the power of issuing them.
This is only true if people with guns will show up to kick somebody else out of the house that you own the token for or if we figure out a way to completely eliminate antisocial behavior voluntarily.
In the UK ownership is determined by a centralised land registry, and it must be registered if ownership is to change hands.