AWS and Blockchain
&gt; He named a region in Asia and explained that the small farmers there mark their landholdings carefully, but then the annual floods sometimes wash the markers away. Then unscrupulous larger landowners use the absence of markers to cut away at the smallholdings of the poorest. “But if the boundary markers were on the blockchain,” he said, “they wouldn’t be able to do that, would they?”<p>The developed world is distinguished from the developing world often by the strength of its institutions, by the general accessibility of legal recourse, by the prevalence of trust within the society at large.<p>Many places in the world have none of those things.  Weak institutions, corrupt legal systems, and low levels of trust undermine development and prevent people from building and maintaining wealth for themselves and their families.<p>For me, the promise of the blockchain is that it can provide a technological framework upon which to build new kinds of institutions—institutions that function as alternatives to the institutions that we all take for granted here in the first world.<p>Is a smart contract better than a written contract?  Maybe it is, if there is no well-functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes.  Is a cryptocurrency better than a national currency?  Perhaps, if your national currency is subject to hyperinflation.  Is an NFT representing property ownership better than property title registered with a state agency?  Yes it is, if the state agency can be bribed to alter or lose records that are inconvenient to large land owners.<p>It&#x27;s important to remember that what might seem redundant or useless to those of us who reside in the first world may not be redundant or useless to those who live elsewhere.