There seems to be this underlying pull for many crypto/blockchain enthusiasts that this technology frees us from the constraints of governments and society. "The truth is in the blockchain" and "There is no government in charge" are common refrains.

The thing is, unless you want to be a true hermit, you can't escape the bounds of society. Nobody really cares about the "truth", they care what society says is acceptable (and what governments will enforce). I'm pretty sure there were a lot of contracts between Native American tribes and American settlers that were basically ignored, and everyone knows this, but there aren't any title companies that are worried about this fact.

Crypto clearly has the potential to make enforcing trade and currency restrictions far more difficult. When it's too difficult to enforce a rule, governments can (1) stop enforcing it; or (2) ratchet up the penalty when someone does get caught as a deterrent. The second option can lead to unpopular disproportionate punishment, and slowly melts away towards the first one (e.g., war on drugs).

Crypto-currency won't take down governments, especially overnight, but they clearly have a long-term potential to alter some levers of power.

As for government, I happen to prefer democracies, and they are especially beholden to truth. When saying that the blockchain's killer app might be the truth, I'm thinking about how it could help save our democracies.

As for The Truth, as in the ultimate truth, for when you'd use quotation marks -- the "truth" -- I'm not going there. We need only concern ourselves with the notion of truth as opposed to lies.

To clarify the distinction, see how this doesn't work:

"Is it true that you were in Symphony Hall at the time of the murder?"

"Is it 'true'?... What do you mean by that slippery word, 'true'? This notion of 'truth' is simply whatever we agree on and therefore irrelevant."

Edit:

And if the truth is simply what is agreed upon, then are lies simply what is not agreed upon?

If so, perhaps we can agree together that the year is 1984.

I was saying that blockchain might help address fraud, against untruth or deceit. For example I believe that yes, the American Indians would have been better off with unalterable titles to their lands. Would it have changed history? I don't know, but in other situations it might, and for that I point you to Hernando de Soto Polar's site. https://desoto.com

I was also saying that the claim that "nobody cares about the 'truth'" (and so blockchain is not useful) is misplaced, and that in this case there's no good point for using the word truth in quotes as if it were something illusory. There are times when quotes around the word truth make sense, like in philosophy, but this is not one of them. An exception is if you are talking about the potential to use the blockchain to make lies permanent.

And third I was responding to your statement that people who support the blockchain are often hoping to be freed "from the constraints of governments and society", and that my comment was a good example of this. Your comment might be correct about others, but I'm not a libertarian or anarchist. Rather, I'm a bit worried that technology like machine learning and even just social media have the potential to weaken and even destroy our democracies by using lies (doctored video, for example) as political tools.

But you don't even need machine learning and social media. In Russia, lies have undermined what began as democracy under Yeltsin to such a degree that it is now for all intents and purposes a dictatorship. In Russia the playbook is basically as follows: an event occurs that makes the Kremlin look bad. The Kremlin uses its media outlets to make up alternative truths (lies), several versions, some more implausible than others. The person seeking the truth, what actually happened, is now looking into a hall of mirrors. Not being able to see anything clearly and having to spend their energy disproving several false versions, no meaningful discourse happens. The event, in this way, has been neutralized by lies. If a blockchain can help with this kind of problem, then I'm interested.

Edit: Btw, I'm not like a cryptocurrency enthusiast, don't program Ethereum contracts, own no BTC or any other crypto, and believe and have argued here at HN that BTC is a bad currency because of volatility with makes credit and debt impossible. Additionally BTC is used for crime and as a way to cash in on fraud, malware, threats and so on, and I'm not interested in any of that.

Here's his website: https://www.desoto.com/

And from one of many many articles:

"In the late 1980s and early 90s, de Soto played a key role in ending the Peruvian Terrorist group Shining Path’s violence by getting the Peruvian government to recognize poor property owners’ land deeds."

https://medium.com/transpartisan-notes/blockchain-hernando-d...

That isn't any objective truth though, it's merely the consensus as defined by the majority of current participants weighed by the processing power they command.

It may seem like a subtle distinction, but I think it helps make the benefits and risks clearer.

But the consensus-based proof-of-work (or proof of storage, or proof of memory, etc.) models aren't really necessary or even clearly desirable.

There are timestamping systems dating from long before "blockchain" (at least 1990, probably before) which involve sequential hashes, with each subsequent hash also including the previous one (in some respects this is a very simple blockchain), and then if desired you can roll them up through a directed graph to one master hash produced periodically and published immutably -- printed in a newspaper was one approach, or posted to Usenet, but you could think of others -- such that it validates all previous hashes as having been created before a particular time.

Guardtime was doing this back in 2007 or 2008 and printing the top-level daily or weekly hashes in the newspaper; I noticed they are now marketing themselves as a "blockchain" company, which is astute marketing (and I'd do the same if I were them, probably), but the ability to do secure timestamping existed in several forms without blockchain.

The reasons these systems weren't used have less to do with technical feasibility than lack of pressure to implement them.

Isn't this "in principal" what a blockchain is? Just because they didn't call it a blockchain back then doesn't mean it isn't.

You could also consider Git to be a blockchain of sorts.

What distinguishes Bitcoin in particular is proof of work which provides a means by which distributed untrusted actors can transact in a trusted way. The actual chain of hashes just records these transactions.

Taking an expansive definition of blockchain as a log of sequential, cryptographically verifiable transactions seems okay enough. At the point where we're nitpicking what is/isn't blockchain, that's not a useful exercise, because the real question is whether this is the right solution for the right problem.

On the other hand, "blockchain" is a highly loaded term, and choosing to label something on the margins "blockchain" means diffusing the legitimacy of application onto the marketing term, or vice versa. In that sense, I'd be hesitant to lump this marginal example into "blockchain" specifically instead of just "cryptography stuff".

That isn't any objective truth though, it's merely the consensus as currently defined by the majority of participating processing power.