What Problem Blockchains Solve

I'm not sure having humans in the pipeline ameliorates this issue as much as you think it does.

Take the existing legal system in the US – laws are interpreted by courts/judges/etc, who AFAICT generally choose to interpret laws by their letter rather than their spirit.

As an example, you can look at the recent Kyle Rittenhouse trial with regards to whether or not it was legal for Rittenhouse to be carrying his firearm. The way the law was written, it basically carved out an exception so that 17 year olds can open carry, even though that was unlikely to be the intent of the law's drafters. But of course the judge found Rittenhouse to be not in violation because that's how the law was written. Smart contracts don't seem much different, except you're removing the inefficiency of someone having to judge what the letter of the law is.

1. If you need to share all the data and the data distribution methods across multiple legal entities — there's no one 'owner' of the data like a company. If you are doing a blockchain implementation for an internal project... why? Why are you not just using a regular database like Postgres or MongoDB or Oracle or ScyllaDB? But if you are going to be sharing all this data across 50-100 companies, and no one themselves wants to "own" the project and host it, and if everyone wants to be participating as a near equal partner in a solution? Okay. Maybe distributed ledger is warranted.

2. If you need to be able to add more entities who want to participate in the distributed ledger. Or, conversely, drop out entities that are no longer participating, but everyone else still wants to preserve the history of their transactions. If you do deploy to a centrally-owned databsase, if the managing entity ever wants, for any reason, they can pull the plug on the whole operation. A distributed ledger ensures you can add people at any time — no one can lock you out from joining. And also it ensures that if you ever want to leave, the data and the work continue.

3. If you need strongly-consistent views of data, and you don't care about transactional limits. Most distributed ledger technologies are greatly bottlenecked in terms of transactions per second. And I mean some are limited to less than 10 transactions per second. Others can scale to thousands of operations per second. But many centrally-managed and even distributed databases can operate at millions of operations per second. So blockchain is not going to do anything like "eventual consistency." It just won't. And because of that, you'll have these strong throughput (ops per second) limits.

IMO, nothing. Regarding security/integrity of records, block chain is not better but with more complexity. And for the so claimed decentralization, it is a catch 22: centralized organizations are there for reasons, and block chain resolved none of them. So now you can see a funny situation that so called decentralized transactions are through centralized exchanges. But if you do need exchanges, why not simply go for banks?

Blockchain is not a grammar for intellectual property rights.

You literally need to create a grammar for that, and an application layer, which is not part nor parcel to the blockchain architecture.

Nor should it be.

You should be able to make an assertion of rights, and then provide proof of those rights, based on multiple computing paradigms, whether from a SQL or NoSQL database, or embedded within a computer file itself, or so on.

There's a whole body of work in my life associated with this idea, and no, blockchain doesn't automagically solve for many or any of the problems I saw looming back in the 1990s:

https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Peter+P.+Corless

That sort of law and a business contract are quite different though. But if the legal system was immutable code we couldn’t fix that law whereas with a softer humans in the loop system we can.

For contracts you don’t know what you want up front. Same issue in a lot of programming where you don’t know all the requirements up front. You horse trade towards mutual agreement but things are usually always open for renegotiation. There was a very dry article published yesterday that had this great insight:

“A key tenet of economic analysis is that enterprises are unable to devise contracts that cover all possible eventualities, eg in terms of interactions with staff or suppliers. Centralisation allows firms to deal with this "contract incompleteness" (Coase (1937) and Grossman and Hart (1986)). In DeFi, the equivalent concept is "algorithm incompleteness", whereby it is impossible to write code spelling out what actions to take in all contingencies.”

https://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt2112b.htm