Tag: honduras

Blockchain and real estate

Based on the title of this blog post, you might assume this might be about Honduras, where there is a proposal to use the blockchain to store land records. The problem with Honduras is that there is no “trusted third party” – nobody even trusts the government, for example, so the best way to store land records is in a decentralised hard to tamper manner.

Over the last few days I’ve been reading up a bit on blockchain and bitcoin and how it works and so on. I haven’t yet got to the math – that it is described as “proof of work” irritates me no end (given that work should be evaluated on output rather than input).

So I see that what makes blockchain secure (apart from the miners having to agree on every transaction, and securing bunches of transactions using cryptographic hashes) is that every block contains within itself a hash of the previous blocks. In other words, the entire sequence of transactions is maintained.

The way “normal currency” (like cash) works is that only possession matters, not history. So the fact that there is a hundred rupee note in my pocket means that I can spend that money, and nobody has a track of how that hundred rupee note reached my pocket. This makes the system insecure since if a pickpocket picks this note, there is no proof (apart from possibly catching him in the act red-handed) that he picked it from my pocket.

With bitcoin, on the other hand, there is a record of how each bit of currency (no pun intended) ended up where it ended up. So even if someone were to magically “steal” my bitcoin, the historical records show that this legitimately belongs to me, and that makes it secure.

This reminds me of the paperwork involved when we bought our apartment in Bangalore last year. Normally you would imagine that a certificate indicating that the title currently rests with the current owner is enough to conduct a real estate transaction. but lawyers and bankers here are not satisfied with that.

The paperwork for the apartment I bought went back sixty odd years, when the land on which the building was built was first “allotted” by the City Improvement Trust Board. If I have to sell this apartment on, along with the certificate that I own this apartment I’ll have to furnish copies of this entire history going 60-70 years back. And the way property deals are done here, I don’t expect the system to change.

So this is what makes real estate such a prime candidate for using blockchain. Not only is a third party (such as the government department that stores land records) not trusted, it is a standard practice to include the entire history of every land or property going back several years. A sale transfers ownership, but in terms of paperwork, a layer gets added, not replaced.

This shows why real estate is such a prime candidate for moving to blockchain for storing transactions. It is ironical that a small and crime-ridden country such as Honduras is showing the way on this. It is time for countries like India to consider similar uses. But first, we will need to digitise existing records and make sure there is exactly one owner for each piece of property, and blockchain can’t help us with that challenge!

Kabaddi and Jesus Navas

I’ve always talked about the Kabaddi style of solving a problem. In Kabaddi, when you are defending, six out of the seven players in the team form a chain in order to encircle the attacker. The seventh defender, however, strikes it alone, in a different direction, trying to draw the attacker into a position where he can be effectively surrounded.

Now there is a footballing analogy to this – the Jesus Navas style. Those of you who watched either Spain’s game with Honduras or the second half of their loss to Switzerland would’ve noticed that Spain effectively followed two lines of attack. The first was the traditional way – attack down the middle in a series of slow passes and build-up. Five of Spain’s front six players would get involved in this attack down the centre, almost rendering their game one-dimensional. And then there was Navas.

I haven’t confirmed this stat but in the game and half that he has played Navas has completed more crosses than anyone else in the tournament. He would strike it on his own down the Spanish right flank, hug the touchline, beat the full back and put in crosses. Minute in and minute out. Sometimes with a little help from full back Sergio Ramos, but mostly alone. It was fantastic to watch.

What this ended up doing was to divert the attention of the opposing defenders to cover Navas. If everyone were to have been attacking down the centre, the defending team could’ve just parked their bus in front of their centre and prevented any scoring. Spain letting free this one guy to take a different route meant that the opposition needed to cover that also leading to insufficient cover in the centre (it is another matter that Spain failed to score against Switzerland. But they did get so many more chances after Navas came on).

I’ve always been fascinated by such strategies at work, in business. You have a bunch of guys who try to attack the problem front-on, in the conventional way, working together, passing to each other frequently. And then there is this one guy who has been left out of this clique who attacks the problem “from the flank”. In his own way, without fear of failure. He knows that he is only an auxiliary solver, that he has nothing to lose (Navas lost his place in the XI after the Honduras match but I don’t think he had expected to ever play at all), and he can just go for it. The option value of letting one guy in the team loose in order to search for alternate solutions while everyone else is building up down the middle is immense, I think.

This is similar to Nassim Taleb’s “barbell investment strategy”. Acccording to that, he parks some 90% of his assets in ultra-risk government securities. They don’t give spectacular returns but his money is safe. And the rest of the 10% he uses to punt by buying stuff like out-of-the-money options. If they expire worthlessly, he hasn’t lost much of his wealth. The optionality (here, literally) of that additional 10% is, however, immense, and there is potential for spectacular returns from this strategy. with losses being capped.