> Parties can prove things without others needing to trust anyone.

Yes, but the only things you can prove without trust are events that happen 100% inside the blockchain. Which, AFAICT the only use for a system that works that way that I've seen is cryptocurrency. The other one people were really hot on was supply chain, but, from what I understand, when you have supply chain trust issues, they don't look like "oh gee someone edited a database record", they look more like https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-09/trader-bu...

Which, ironically, that's not a great use case for cryptocurrency either. Traditional escrow services are a better fit. If the trader had bought that tanker full of rocks with BTC, there would have been no way to reverse the transaction after it had been determined to be fraudulent.

So, yeah, blockchain is mathematically provable to have certain properties. But, like with any proof, those properties only hold for as long as the proof's assumptions hold. And it's really, really difficult for us laypeople to recognize when the assumptions do or do not hold when they're defined in terms of technical jargon that uses a familiar term like "trust" but assigns it a subtly but critically different definition from the everyday meaning.

You’re describing a number of limitations, some of them more valid than others.

I don’t think blockchain is worth the hype it got a few years ago, but still, with these limitations, there are use cases. That doesn’t change because you say ‘this use case doesn’t work’.

>but, from what I understand, when you have supply chain trust issues, they don't look like "oh gee someone edited a database record", they look more like https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-09/trader-bu...

>Normally, in such cases of non-delivery a trading house could make a claim against a cargo’s insurance policy. But Mercuria found that just one out of seven contracts used by the Turkish company to insure the cargo was real. The rest had been forged.

Can't forge a smart contract.

Fair, though that would be a much more compelling observation if anyone had ever succeeded in implementing a full-fledged insurance policy in the form of a smart contract.

I'm curious, for example, how you'd get an errors and omissions clause working in Etherium. Like, how would Ether arbitrate a claim against that policy? Assume, for the sake of argument, that hard AI has not been invented yet.

You're correct that hard AI would be necessary for the blockchain to perform autonomous arbitration in cases where human discretion is necessary.

In practice, this is solved by giving the contract the capability to query an external system (referred to as an oracle), which provides the results of the independent arbitration as an input to the contract.

Thing is, "without trusting anyone" isn't that relevant most times. The entire system of property rights is based on trusted notaries. Works as well as anything.

It doesn’t work internationally, but we’re used to that because there never was an alternative.

> Works as well as anything.

Which is to say, just barely well enough to keep going.

And then there's the whole thing with how its scaling issues are mitigated via the platform dependency on the state's monopoly on violent enforcement. Emphasis on monopoly.

So the big problem in your opinion, is that we're not allowed to legally beat each other up like animals over property disputes.

All right.

By the way, I don't think blockchains allow you to beat up people, either.

The big problem, in my opinion, is that a lot of people think we'd inevitably be beating each other up like animals, if it wasn't for the powers that be, who kindly protect us from ourselves.

And it is already legal to beat up and kill each other over a property dispute. It just has to be a large enough dispute for the parties involved to be able to afford rebranding it as a "war".

Do you know this saying "those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it". You're that saying.

Also "war" is the thing that happens between parties above which no legal frame or enforcement institution exists. Countries. There's no actual "international court" (there's the UN one, but it has no powers). This is why wars happen. So in fact, mentioning wars defeats your own point - yes, people will literally kill each other like savages when no legal repercussions exist. Wars show that.

Because we have no world government, we can only apply mitigation strategies like sanctions, diplomacy, economic interdependence. These work, but only until a true scarcity occurs, where taking someone else's stuff is a solution. Then it's back to wars.

To add, it's also completely legal for the powers that be to treat you like an animal if you try to make yourself independent of them.

Unlike the existing system of governance, a blockchain doesn't have the mandate to beat up people.

I prefer a subset of people who can beat me up for a subset of reasons, rather than all people for any reason.

Your boot, sir.