Most of the ways businesses need to trust each other can’t be captured by rules on the blockchain. It’s things like - I trust my supplier won’t go bankrupt. I trust my supplier will deliver work of a consistent quality. I trust that if I have some problem, I can call someone on the phone and they’ll take my call, listen to my problem and take responsibility for fixing the issue.

How would you express any of this stuff on a blockchain in a useful way? We could have “blockchain yelp” but it’s hard to protect that against fake reviews. And seeing a mix of reviews isn’t enough to know if you should go into business with someone.

Some of the "better" arguments i've seen are obsoleting/maintaining anything that is quasi public record. Think all sorts of land/legal transactions where it's basically "once x and y and z have said yes, process transaction from x to z"

Codifying ANY logic is doable, but especially simple logic like that has it's upsides in how many middle men it can help eliminate, and the TONS of human error that comes with it.

In the examples you're giving, you could have codified "here's what happens if the supplier cannot complete the transaction" or "here's what happens if parties cannot agree on the quality of the work" or a zillion other things that already exist.

You did, however, hit on the big one, that when something goes wrong or something is misunderstood or somehow someone needs to talk to a human...well good fucking luck.

The obvious downside of all the decentralization mantra is that of course it means you're liable for your own mistakes, which is just NOT a business model that ever works. That said, the crypto space has gotten massively more centralized (because it turns out market forces still don't give a fuck about your philosophy), and I think the future of the tech lies somewhere else entirely, where end users functionally never interact with it.

> Some of the "better" arguments i've seen are obsoleting/maintaining anything that is quasi public record. Think all sorts of land/legal transactions where it's basically "once x and y and z have said yes, process transaction from x to z"

The validity of any transaction can only be determined and guaranteed by the state, so honestly just having the state host a central database seems much easier

I’d be quite happy seeing the state host a signed, public append only log for records like this. Basically blockchain without the mining. Anyone can subscribe, but only the state (or anyone paying a nominal fee per byte) can write.

It could be used for notarising contracts, recording crop yields, declaring bankruptcies, listing property sales - you name it. Pay $1/kb and your data will be stored forever.

Anyone can replicate the changes to their own computer to validate the hashes and prove the government isn’t changing anything.

I think that would capture 90% of the value of a blockchain with almost none of blockchain’s downsides and it would be trivially easy to implement.

yup, basically Git + a PR submission system

Yes blockchain based tokens (so anything but pure currency) always runs into issues when they meet the physical world. Oracles are just trust anchors and as you say there's no way to avoid the reality that physical auditing is necessary to ensure clean exchange of goods and services. OpenBazaar has run into numerous issues over the years and it's been out there as a marketplace before Ethereum ever existed; they all stem from the general difficulty of interfacing with the physical world.

This isn't the case for digital only assets though. There are certainly much fewer digital assets people use than physical ones, but they're there. Domain names, forum membership, entry gates, game skins, etc. How many times have you entered a community and thought it would be great to have a tiny bar to contribution, like a small membership fee, enough to weed out spammers and young children?

This is aside from enterprise oriented chains like Ripple that just use chains help facilitate regular business.

wouldn't you just put all those things into a contract and put the contract into the blockchain along with their signature as proof?

You seem to be arguing that blockchain has to magically solve real world physical problems, but paper contracts don't do that either. You still end up in court. Its just a question of how you are substantiating they really signed the contract.

No GP is arguing that since the blockchain cannot solve any of the mentioned problems, it does not provide any real benefit. The dispute for companies today are seldomly about whether they signed a contract (the part the blockchain could help settle - though you still need to provide the legal entity -> cryptographic key mapping) but how to interpret the contract and align the legal world(words on a page) with the real world (widgets delivered, machines broken, etc.).

If the problem was about enforcing a signature, you do not need a blockchain, each party to a contract can just store the cryptographic signature themselves or with one or more trusted custodians. That is a fundamental feature of cryptographic signatures not blockchains. And then you need some mapping from legal entities to public keys, but this might as well be a centralized database run by the government (potentially outsourced to a private contractor), after all in many jurisdictions the government already keeps a list of legal entities and metadata about them.

> If you could rely on blockchains instead of trusting based on past cooperation

What about blockchains would make them an effective stand-in for building trust over time? One is a ledger, the other is an interpersonal relationship, and the two really are not the same.

If I'm going to take a risk, I'd rather take a risk where there's some human expectation of managing bumps in the road, and which has some means of redress if sufficient malice is involved, instead of one where a smart contract bug means that I've lost a lot of money.

The blockchain can prove that I bought the car and own it now. But that has never been the problem.

Trust is still required because I need to trust the seller that the car isn't a lemon and he didn't put explosives into the back seat.

The blockchain solves none of that.

Also, did you receive a car in the first place.

blockchain could be used to put reputation systems on them.

Reinventing existing trust mechanisms but with an extra (computationally expensive) layer of things that can go wrong is the opposite of an improvement.

How would that work?

We have Yelp, Google reviews, Amazon reviews… how would something like that work on a blockchain/ledger and not be gamed just like the review systems we have now?

And how would we avoid this reputation blockchain from being populated by maliciously deceptive information, be it positive reputation promoted by the business through bribed or fake customers, or negative reputation promoted by unethical competitors?

I see no reason why a reputation system needs distributed consensus. It needs asymmetric encryption (signatures), but not a blockchain.

I as a business would not want to work with people who do not trust me to fulfill my (e.g. contractual or financial) obligations.

If they have to trust me to pay them, do my job, fulfill my contract anyways, what value is there in some sort of digital system that technically decentralizes trust, but where the other side still has to trust me I did nothing malicious with it?

If anything all that the developments in cryptocurrencies show is that a technically trustworthy infrastructure can (and will) be used for nefarious means. That means even if you were to use such an infrastructure you'd still have some interface to the real world, where people cannot pay, not do their job, do their job in a way you did not agree, etc. So you still would have to protect your interest in the traditional way and you'd still have to trust the other side.

So using a blockchain is just like using a database and giving up a certain amount of control over it.

How would a blockchain replace trust in a supplier's ability to deliver on time and with the right quality?

Bitcoin can't make up for lack of trust in your business partner.

Given a set of parties that I trust and I am willing to do business with, why should I spend money and technical resources, and give up privacy, for the privilege of using a blockchain to state to the world that I trust them? Why should I embrace a dependency on a crypto provider, or trust someone because the crypto provider's blockchain says that I should?

EDIT: replaced "cryptoscammer" with "crypto provider" for generality.