Dear Steem community,
Recently over coffee, a friend asked me questions about real-estate properties and businesses on the blockchain, seeing that I have been advising a few small projects over the past year. It was a long talk, but I'll try to summarize it. It has a lot to do with both Steem, Tau, and my decision to run as witness:-
There are plenty of unsolvable problems that no blockchains or any other technologies will ever be able to solve. For example: really knowing what's in the real world around us, from legal ownership to the things that I'm saying here in this post. Blockchains or any records of anything in life would rely on sensors (or oracles, human-beings, etc) to sense. But sensors ultimately require input, which is something that cannot be 100% trusted since we can just provide kind of signals, true or false, as input. So relationships and social networks still matter in the end even if we are to use the blockchain as a trust protocol for meta-information.
Calling something smart-contract and printing data into it doesn't immediately make it trustworthy, obviously. So if an entrepreneur is going into the business of trying to shove things like identities and real-estate titles into a blockchain as proof-of-something in the real world, is it actually going to hold water if there are no massive communities revolving around it, using the platform's token as an everyday currency?