This is an extremely nuanced matter, and it always has been. It's just nice to see a narrative that is expansive enough to account for that, for once. Especially here on HN.
The first section talks about property-records as being kept in a database, and it also talks about villages maintaining "in-memory" property records (in a pre-literate time). A cool method that humans have developed for durable record-keeping are Rai-stones.
Here are some of my note on those, in case we have any anthropology nerds lurking:
Rai Stones are variously-sized -- 3.5 centimeters to 3.6 meters in height -- circular, stone disks with engravings. They are used as currency, decoration, jewelry by the Yapese people of the Yap islands in micronesia. Because some of them are gigantic and weight a few thousand kilograms, they are difficult to transport. To facilitate easier transactions, the Yapese maintain a ledger -- via oral-tradition -- of who owns which fraction of which Rai Stone, not unlike a blockchain.
An interesting case of the use of the ledger to establish ownership over a stone, is when one of these massive stones was being transported by a ship, and the ship sunk into the middle of the pacific. It was never seen again, by any other human being -- it might not have even survived as a single piece -- yet, its ownership is still recorded in the ledger.
In principle, if all of the stones disappeared from the face of the earth, the oral ledger would still contain a list of who owns what.
Crypto-currencies can be considered as digital Rai Stones -- the value is in the ledger not the actual artifacts.
Ref: https://github.com/interlock-network/knowledgebase-public/bl...
I’m not fully through it but I will say it starts a bit rough and suspect but he does a great job of clarifying points and providing accurate details on the basics of cryptography, blockchains, and the rise of digital currency.
