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One year: What I have learned
I have been working with blockchain technology for many years and appreciate the challenges ahead of me in adopting it. On Valentine’s Day 2024, the first Smart Contracts for the Square Deal Network (SDN) were deployed. Here are some of the things I learned after deployment. It took five years to design the heart of…
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Is it a Property or a Parcel?
Consumers refer to properties using an address but when buying and selling, what changes hands is called a parcel. Counties record parcel transfers to protect owners’ real property rights. Parcels pre-date the postal system. Record keeping is performed at the parcel level because it is possible to sell real estate that does not have a…
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The Square Deal and Fair Compensation
At the turn of the century, Theodore Roosevelt introduced a domestic policy known as the Square Deal, which emphasized “substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service.” Theodore Roosevelt, “The New Nationalism,” in The New Nationalism (New York: The Outlook Company, 1910), 3-34. Over the past decade, service providers in most industries, including real…
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Labeling AI-generated Content
The proliferation of AI has the potential to confuse real estate buyers because it is hard to tell real from imaginary images. I have a simple suggestion that although not perfect, begins to address the situation. I stumbled upon an article written in the spring that reminded me of some tagging work I investigated over…
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Replication as a Natural Act
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” Dr. Ian Malcolm, Spielberg, Steven. Jurassic Park. Universal Pictures, 1993. This famous line from Jurassic Park questions the ethical bounds of scientific experimentation. It should be no surprise that the phrase also applies to technical recommendations. When there are multiple…
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Using a Wallet for Identity
I have been working on making blockchain more approachable to consumers and have developed a model using common shopping practices found in bricks-and-mortar stores: I can repeat the process down an entire block of shops. When online, I can use a payment service (or credit card, yikes!) and only have to supply an address for…
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Blockchain and Sanity
First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. Nicholas Klein (1914) David Gerard, the author of Attack of the Fifty Foot Blockchain (2017), declares that if “you were silly enough to put personal data into an append-only ledger which is a proof-of-work blockchain — that’d…
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Blockchain-as-a-Channel
I chuckle when another “software-as-a-service” is announced because I remember when dashes in the name conveyed mystery. Since I like nostalgia, I thought I would introduce my handle, “Blockchain-as-a-Channel” which represents a new advertising channel for real estate that complements print and web advertising. Economic Service Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud computing have become accepted in…
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Governance Standards are Coming
The IEEE is moving a framework for blockchain governance through the P2145 Blockchain Governance Standards Working Group. The framework provides guidance on structure, roles and responsibilities between blockchain participants. It is good practice to document these as the project begins and a governance document sample outline is included. Defining roles is especially critical to provisioned…
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Winter’s End is Near
Cryptocurrency has been depressed for over a year since Bitcoin peaked in November of 2021. The downturn has been called a crypto winter that was partially due to the reduced disposable income of investors due to inflation. While cryptocurrency was depressed, we experienced a collapse of FTX, a major exchange. FTX was an easy-to-use exchange…