> The house I'm in was financed by my wife and I purchasing a plot of land, for cash, then offering that land as security to a bank, who then created a loan for a fairly sizable chunk of cash with which we paid a builder to construct the house.
This begs the obvious question: contract law is all about enforcement. Clearly no one would be right to dispute you own this land and home, you have the deeds and the tax history, which could all be hashed on to the blockchain right now for a nominal fee. But the fact is that the State is what upholds the court system and the need to prove this and they hold the threat of theft and violence if you don't comply and arbitration in their 'legal system' is expensive, slow, and arcane. People being thrown out of their own homes they paid for in full in 2008 was real because the banks created all these complex derivatives and no one knew who owned what in the those CDO and MBS. So when things got messy, and the banks claimed the home the sheriff's showed up and did what they always do: rendered unto Caeser. You may pay your taxes that directly pays their salaries but they work for the State, not you the resident and home owner.
This is why we don't need technologists in Bitcoin as much as we need other professionals like legal people to help create an automated arbitration system, divorced entirely from the whims of Mankind: you can clearly prove you've owned this land and home and when you made the purchase(s) for it and the tax history in a timestamped and verified way on the the ONLY immutable ledger, amazing... but we cannot and do not have an enforcement system to ensure you are entitled to keep this land and home should an adversary come and take it other than violence.
And this needs to be solved, which is why I would hope HN would be a good breeding ground for such thought instead of this endless non-sense about Bitcoin is just for speculation, as if hedgefunds and FOREX markets aren't a hotbed for illicit, corrupt and even more complex legalized forms of gambling in the fiat Word. And have caused the collapse of the economy countless times in just the 20th and 21st Century that always ends up in hotwars in the end, fought mainly by the people who ironically just wanted to protect their homes from 'foreign adversaries' when it's most often the domestic threat they should have been most vigilant about.
Hell, most people don't even realize that the FOREX is the biggest Industry in the entire World, and yet people just forget about things like LIBOR interest rate rigging when it's convenient and time to bash Bitcoin on here.
We get it, you missed out on making billions in fiat by ignoring it, get over you not going to be Chamath or Elon and help build the future we all want and maybe have a chance of creating a post-scarce World.