Notarization is another great example of "the real world is strange to technical folks." There are a thousand reasons that notarization is a terrible process. There are minimal requirements to be a notary. Notaries have predictable seals. Ordering a fake notary stamp is pretty easy. There's no technical deterrent to backdating requests. Notaries are frequently employed by the people they're notarizing for. Notaries are not trained to recognize fake IDs.

Even the flimsiest of technological improvements could radically improve the trustworthiness of the notarizations, but by and large the system works, so there's not much of a reason to fix it yet.

> This feels strange to those of us from technical spheres, but much of the world works without formal verification of facts.

Including many technical spheres, and particularly including the vast majority of the software world; formal verification exists in software, of course, but is most notable in not being used for most of it. Yet, even without that, there's usually a release process that includes the moral equivalent of a certification—without formal verification or certain knowledge—that the software does what it is supposed to.

This predisposition to believe our fellow humans is actually hard-coded into our genes. This is one of the reasons it's so easy to spread fake news. The ability to lie to someone without direct consequences to yourself (because, for example, you are thousands of miles away) was not part of our ancestral environment, but it is part of our contemporary one, and some of us are exploiting this newly created ecological niche.

I'm going to have request a source here, because this doesn't make much sense. We've spent very nearly all of our evolutionary time pillaging, raping, and murdering each other - not exactly singing kumbaya. There's tribal instinctual stuff that would include 'in-group' trust, but that's something far and away from trusting a person because they're a person as you're implying.

'Fake news' takes advantage of something much more simple. People believe what they want to believe. In other words the people led on by fake news tend to already want to believe what the news is about. When we see something that confirms our biases, many of us don't question it. And this is made even worse since people tend to work as apologists for fake news from sources they like, so instead of being able to discuss the issue of fake news - it ends up dividing people into splits on the 'fake' topic at hand, which in contemporary times is most often political.

> There's tribal instinctual stuff

Well, yeah, that's what I was referring to. If you perceive someone as being from your tribe then you are predisposed to believe what they say, and if you don't then you aren't. Nowadays tribes are much bigger than they used to be, and tend to center around ideologies more than geography. But otherwise it's monkeysphere dynamics at work.

Yup. Exactly. The tax system in many parts of the world works on an honor system. We all, as a society, rely on the idea that most of us are honest, good people. There is no way to audit everyone.

Could smart contracts (maybe in addition to a Trusted Execution Environment) be used to enforce these sorts of guarantees?

I'm slightly irritated that there seems not to be a single problem currently that someone would not be proposing cryptocurrency as a solution.

To be fair to the previous commenter, they did not explicitly propose cryptocurrency as a solution; they're just asking a question. Also, cryptocurrency != blockchain technology.

That said, I do agree with your sentiment that the blockchain-as-a-solution space is getting a bit ridiculous. I can't imagine a way to translate this problem into a smart-contract-solvable form.

How would you enforce a smart contract guaranteeing that data was deleted and not copied?

This begins and ends with the fact that if you can see something, you can record it. The only way to prevent this is through on-site access only with a thorough physical search and no electrical devices allowed.

You can do some clever things to figure out who it is that leaks stuff, but that's another issue.