Blockchains and Offline Assets — Eric Jorgenson

If you think about it though, the one piece of core Web 2 infrastructure where the blockchain is actually the most natural way to engineer things is … attribution. What else is a company like Branch Metrics (my former employer) or the internal attribution system at giants like Facebook, but a large, distributed, semi-private ledger of online events... See more

-Using blockchains to implement new and experimental forms of ownership for land and other scarce assets, as well as new and experimental forms of democratic governance.

Managing digital assets on public ledgers makes it clearer which assets exist and who owns what, which was previously a struggle on the web. 

The three fundamental pillars of this argument are,

1. Blockchains are differentiated from traditional finance through their strong property rights – the inalienable right to store and transmit value.


2. Centralization provides a means by which powerful entities can influence the outcomes of blockchains.


3. The value stored in a property rights system is direc

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Namely, some of its key properties include an ecosystem where, by default, whatever you create is instantly inter-operable with anything else on-chain, and where there’s a permanent public record of ownership of things like tokens, contracts, policies and a range of other assets.

The narrative of ownership is integral to decentralized financial technology. Traditional online bank accounts represent balances as numbers stored in a centralized database, which can notionally be withdrawn or exchanged for goods and services at any point. As the story goes, this requires placing trust in a banking institution. Blockchain protoco... See more

Some believe that decentralization requires the entire social network to be on a blockchain. This is unnecessary and even undesirable. Social networks generate petabytes of data every year, which can be very expensive to store on-chain. Blockchains also make it difficult to delete data forever, which is a desirable feature for users. A network desi... See more

Many believe that general-purpose blockchains like Ethereum, Cardano, Avalanche, and Solana will come to power everything on the web, including financial apps, social apps, and even Amazon-like marketplaces. But there’s a show-stopping problem that’s being widely overlooked: on-chain storage.