“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” George Orwell
Post Category → Politics
The Shirky Principle
“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution” – Clay Shirky
This is also known as Regulatory Capture”
“When a regulatory agency, created to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or political concerns of special interest groups that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating.”
Blockchain property deeds and wealth liberation
In his under-appreciated classic “The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else“, Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto argues that the legal structure of property and property rights is a major determinant of the economic success of a country. “Every developed nation in the world at one time went through the transformation from predominantly informal, extralegal ownership to a formal, unified legal property system [and this] allowed people everywhere to leverage property into wealth.”
Trillions of dollars of economic value are trapped in informal assets that cannot, for example, be leveraged to secure loans or otherwise bootstrap wealth creation.
Imagine if you had an inexpensive, fraud-proof way to register and regulate these assets? Could this finally be the breakthrough use of blockchain?