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cvalue13

here’s the story I like to tell about what, in the real world, constitutes “meaning and utility”:

some may know the U.S. is (almost) entirely unique in having private citizens own oil and gas interests (as opposed to almost every other country, where the sovereign owns the interests).

the ownership of those oil and gas interests are reflected entirely and only across real estate deeds and oil and gas “lease” contracts, with chain of title requiring a level of proof from present day back to - literally - the original (non-native in most cases) acquisition of the land from the U.S. government at the founding of the country.

Today, when a multi-billion dollar oil and gas company seeks to acquire any amount of interests in oil and gas, be it for $1,000,000.00 or $10,000,000,000.00, there begins a process of sometimes hundreds of so-called “land men” who thereby spend months traveling to local county courthouses (only a few have digitized to any useful degree) and for hours combing through records in basements to prove up a sufficient - never perfect, merely sufficient - record of title to the underlying assets. This may be a review of a single document for a single lease being acquired, or tens of thousands of documents that merely survey the acquisitions of hundreds of thousands of oil and gas leases.

And to finalize this chaotic and arcane picture of how the world turns, know that many, many, of these documents are terrible, sloppy, vague, no sensible documents of Mr. Jimmy Smith transfers something to Mr. Johnny Smith for $5 dollars type “proof” ownership.

Not to pass over that ALSO inevitably inheritance and estate law issues further cloud the type and universe of existing documents, and I could list another dozen bizarre and confounding issues within and crowding the entire process.

I give this back story and example all to say this: the entire U.S. Oil and Gas industry, and so the lion’s share of regional if not global energy security, all rests upon the back of this absolutely, astronomically, arcane and ridiculous document history of what can at times barely be called documents formed by people who can barely be called literate, and that’s all that “represents ownership” of essentially the foundation of global national security.

So then, when someone understandably wonders aloud whether these “smart contracts” might have any “meaning and utility,” I first want to pull back the curtain of the present system of recording ownership to even important things and say, “we get by on far, far less today.”