If you read upthread, the example given was that of Asian farmers who struggle with markers being damaged by floods.

A cheap device that was able to locate reference points with GPS to some sort of online land registry would potentially avoid these disputes. Blockchain could be a tool to mitigate the limited connectivity available.

It’s potentially a way to make information more available and maybe facilitate certain transactions.

Again, it’s just a technology. It may make sense as a solution or not.

> A cheap device that was able to locate reference points with GPS to some sort of online land registry would potentially avoid these disputes.

Okay, and why would you use a blockchain over a state-held database?

Because it doesn't matter what your blockchain says about ownership, the state that issued the title deeds are the ones who decide where the boundaries are.

If the state is not recording it, recording it in a blockchain doesn't help.

So what happens when a rich baron approaches a farmer who's exact GPS ownership record is registered on the blockchain and says "transfer digital ownership of your land to me, or i kill your sister"?

Exactly the same thing as what happens without a blockchain.

Weak institutions are absolutely a problem in human society, but they are not solved by decentralization technology.

Even better for the land owner, they (or more likely a "subcontractor") can force the transfer once and even if courts get involved and decide in favor of the farmer, the records can't be corrected if they are based on blockchain technology.

A less violent example would be a fraud based on social engineering.

It sounds like you’re throwing hands up and stating that no change is possible.

Land records are by definition ledgers. A distributed ledger is also a ledger. Does it protect you from a physical harm? Of course not.

Weak institutions are a problem, but technolgy can be used to strengthen them. If you can make facts more available and easier to access, perhaps you can push disputes to local magistrates and improve access to justice.

> It sounds like you’re throwing hands up and stating that no change is possible.

No, they're saying there must be a point to the change. If adding blockchain doesn't help in any way, why add it to the mix?

Do they work that way in rural Africa?

If no one knows if you own something, then you don't own it. Literally the entire concept of "ownership" it based on socialized distribution of that information.

Which means anyone within range of an item for ownership rights to matter, by definition, is either aware of your claim by some means and respecting it, or unaware and you now get to see how good your legal or kinetic protections of it are.

EDIT: The parent poster is possibly referring to an entirely different problem - many underdeveloped nations have antiquated automation for their land title systems, which makes proving ownership difficult due to a lack of computerization. This is a problem for the owners occupying the land, because they can't prove to third parties this claim is legal and thus use it as collateral for seeking lines of credit.

One of the interesting things the Bush Jr. admin of all things spearheaded was a project which looked at funding and helping update these systems in some nations as a means of economic development.

But of course, blockchain here is still useless. The problem isn't that the ledger of ownership is "secret" (which doesn't make any sense) it's that it can't be verified because the record keeping is manual. Once again, "blockchain" fixes nothing that a central database wouldn't do faster, cheaper and better.

Many of these seem like downsides.

> Blockchains cannot be corrupted by bad actors managing the central system. As I've noted in another comment, a Postgres DBA can be bribed to modify a property record and wipe the backups. That can't happen to a blockchain record.

What is to happen if a land-owner drops their cell-phone with their private keys, and now needs to re-gain ownership of their land? Well, either the government/admins can update the blockchain to have a new private key as an owner (in which case they could be bribed to do the same), OR the blockchain will be inaccurate, it will have an old address owning some land even though no one can use that address. See also, a farmer dies and has no beneficiary.

Also, how is new land added to the blockchain and old land removed? If the government needs to exercise eminent domain to build a railway, the farm's boundaries are changed. Perhaps the farmer does not want to make the update... so how does the land get updated to align with reality?

Natural disasters can also make land change drastically.

> Blockchains can streamline the availability of credit, making it easier for a property owner to leverage their property to grow their business

This just seems bad. Easier access to credit has not been great.

> Blockchains are natively replicated on a massive basis

They are if you have a lot of nodes. Which you do if you use bitcoin/eth/whatever (but then the cost of doing anything is incredibly expensive for those in the global south, so it's unusable). If each town builds their own to manage their land, it would be just as replicated as a .json file in s3 people can mirror if they want, which is to say archive.org might save a copy, a few farmers and companies in the area might, but most people would not care. Heck, people mirroring a json dump of a database would be more likely to happen than people figuring out how to spin up weird blockchain software I bet.

When you say "blockchain", are you referring to something like bitcoin? In other words, a proof of work blockchain? If we put all the world's data on a POW blockchain, we will cook the planet very quickly, and we won't have any energy for anything else.