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A comment on Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies. Parent comment

Re:Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against bl... by philistine on Friday January 28, 2022 @10:36PM (#30123534)
You both are talking from the unsaid point of view that an immutable public ledger is a good thing. The reality of our world disagrees with your unsaid compact.

Nothing needs an immutable public ledger. Any fraud due to shipping, or banking, or taxes, is a problem of inaccurate entry of data into a ledger, not nefarious changes to what already exists.

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Re:Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against bl... by brian_cloutier on Saturday January 29, 2022 @01:44AM (#30124325)
Immutable ledgers are a godsend and are useful in many different contexts:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lab_notebook

- https://www.newamerica.org/digital-impact-governance-initiat...

Adjustments needed for shipping, banking, or taxes are trivially accommodated; those are additional events which can be appended to the log.

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Re:Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against bl... by philistine on Sunday January 30, 2022 @02:09PM (#30140073)
None of your examples are all, at the same time, immutable, public, or ledgers. The Georgian land thingie is the most interesting, but a Georgian judge could definitely order a change in ownership due to incorrect data entered into the ledger, so it's not immutable.
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Re:Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against bl... by brian_cloutier on Sunday January 30, 2022 @09:32PM (#30143817)
> a Georgian judge could definitely order a change in ownership due to incorrect data entered into the ledger, so it's not immutable.

There seems to be a misunderstanding. The ledger is immutable. That doesn't mean the state is immutable! Immutable state is not very useful. A judge could absolutely order that the ownership of some parcel is changed, but the change will appear as a separate record and everybody will be able to see the change and nobody can credibly deny that the change happened, not even the judge.

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