planish

This is great!

You take a PeerTube channel name and treat it as if it were a community name on Lemmy (https://peertube.instance/c/channelname) and search it up in your instance and make it federate over.

Yes, the document from the county administration would be much better, than some “magic” contract from the internet that may or may not be enforced by the county.

If the magic contract from the Internet is not actually likely to be enforced by the county, then the county is not actually using the magic Internet contract system. If the system were adopted by the county, then the official records from the system would be known to be enforceable.

I sound like I am for and against blockchain because I am. I don't think you can stand up any existing blockchain system and start slapping government functions onto it and get a good result. People won't understand it well enough or have sufficient resources to be true peers in the system, and if they did it wouldn't scale very well.

But I do think that governmental systems can be improved by taking inspiration form blockchain technology and drawing on its underlying philosophical principles of accountability and consensus.

But one would like to be able to still play Half Life 2 today, even if Valve weren't helpfully around to update it. One would like to be able to read an old Word document or display an old blog post along with its scripts. So either you support the old standards and, for active content, the old APIs, or you lose access to anything that doesn't emit enough cash to pay a person to keep it current.

Tying keys to natural people is indeed an unsolved problem.

The system can be designed to recognize more people than just the current owner as authorized to do a transfer. You could do the whole tax record tracking in the same system, to ensure that property can be seized for back taxes exactly when back taxes are owed.

I think the requirement for constant progress, and the expectation that all software be able to change arbitrarily with a year or so of notice, is in fact a problem with software development.

I do software development all the time, and I find this to be an impediment to my work. I also make the kind of breaking changes that cause this problem.

If you don't have a system of law that even its designated enforcers are obliged to follow, you don't have a legitimate government, you have a mafia.

The easier it is to make cases where a law is broken common knowledge, the easier it is to gather the political will to enforce the law. That mechanism is what obliges the enforcers to actually follow the law, and it can work more or less well depending on the structure of the society, the relative power of different groups of people, and the communication technologies in use. If the President guns someone down in broad daylight, they get thrown out more often if you have a reputable newspaper than if you don't. An election is a convenient substitute for everyone trying to kill each other until we find out who is left.

Blockchains are one technology for establishing common knowledge among a group of participants. They're not magic, they don't even usually work particularly well. But they do offer techniques for binding the administrators of systems of rules to actually follow those rules, which have the potential to be applied more broadly.

Something has gone wrong in software development where software can never be finished.

If you release an app on Google Play and never touch it again, eventually Google will pull it from the store and customers will complain that it no longer runs on new devices. Android 16 will require that all applications now do something, and refuse to run any that do not.

This is the real structural source of the constant subscription demands. Nobody is willing to commit to supporting a stable API for 10 or 20 years, and nobody will keep coming in to bump dependency versions and rewrite systems to Google or Apple's new whims every year unless they get paid for this apparently useless work.

If the county isn't actually using the system you try to present evidence from, of course it will not work.

If you have a list of who owned the land and when, and you have evidence to support each transfer, then you have a log-structured or relatively blockchain-like database.

A central database would be just a list of all the land and who owns it.

Right now, the deed system is a bunch of deeds that say "remember when I got this land, on page 302 of book 75 in the county recorder's office? Well now Jimantha owns it actually, since they bought it from me for ten dollars and a peppercorn.". This is great for accountability: it lets you trace ownership history and provides a piece of evidence to substantiate every transfer, and so helps you answer inconvenient questions like "why should you own that house when it was my grandmother's house and I want to own it?". It also lets you roll transfers back if they are found to be fraudulent, and neatly captures how all current ownership is contingent on the theft of the whole place from any disposessed original inhabitants.

This is also basically how ownership works in many current blockchain systems: you select something you own based on the transaction that gave you ownership, and then you say who should own it now in a signed message.

But the blockchain systems verify signatures cryptographically, whereas the county recorder verifies the authority to transfer stuff on the "you think someone would just tell lies? On the Internet?" principle. And the centralized database doesn't even keep the transfers around for review, it just has the database operator in charge of who owns any given thing at the moment.

Would you rather walk up to a grumpy person with a shotgun and demand that they move out while brandishing a printout of an SQLite database recently recovered after the ransomware attack at the county administrative building? Or with a deed with their spouse's signature on it?

Then the problem is to make the deeds more machine-readable, and to get better at not putting in deeds from people who have no business writing to that part of the ledger, for which pieces of blockchain technology might be useful.

I don't think a person selling an app is capitalism. There's no means of production, there's no apparent attempt to appropriate and profit from stuff that rightly belongs to the people who actually made it. Unless Sync is actually written by a bunch of people who are not getting ownership of the project?