Definition: Technological alternative to human institutions – legal, social and financial
What are the problems with car ownership and trade?
- Security (theft)?
- Dispute about sale terms
What happens in a smart property model?
Security has 3 components
- Preventive – Steering wheeling lock
- Detective – Car alarm system
- Corrective – Law enforcement
In real world, security relies largely on #2 and #3, mostly on #3
New World security
We want to move to smart property based model where focus is own preventive measures? Notion of ownership is equivalent to ownership of the private key to control the key as expressed in block chain.
- Now we have also introduced software security problem (private key should be protected)
- Software security is partly a human problem (bug free code)
- Excessive reliance can cause serious problems. Loss of Key –> Car turns into a brick?
- Fallback mechanisms take us back to the centralized system
Dispute mediation is complex(contention on sale of terms)
- legal contract terms don’t come close to capturing the complexity of the real human world contract
- Different way of dispute mediation (fundamentally a human problem)
- Technologically providing public good is difficult
- Interesting problems are social problems
- In fact, smart property model made security harder to solve
- Introduced new problems – software security
Possible benefits of smart property
- Beneficial for small transactions (selling your smartphone ) as you may be unlikely to litigate
- Anonymity & privacy
- Freedom to choose mediator – Paypal acts as mediator in certain payment processes (not subject to public oversight). Introduce the notion of competition between mediators, thats a win
Crypto and the state
- The state is one way to scale society past small groups where everyone trusts each other
- Crypto is another
- Dismantling the state is not an option
- How can the two work together? (is buyer holds title to the car after selling it on blockchain)
The big opportunity
- Find compelling use cases for decentralization
- State regulation of some market is Too much inefficiency
- Cell phone minutes acting as a replacement of currency, state mediated system too laborious
- Co-opt legal and regulatory practices
Assorted Musings 