Wall Street Journal

Two prominent financial experts said that two-thirds of the world's population suffer from the absence of a formal system of registration of property rights in their countries.

The lack of such a system resulted in undeveloped resources and assets valued at about $ 170 trillion, or 63% of the value of assets in the United States.

The absence of a formal registration system for real estate and property leads to a decline in the value of private assets and a reduction in the wages of workers using such assets, and to depriving landlords from exploiting them as additional collateral for obtaining loans or documentation for public services.

Societies are losing benefits they could have accumulated if they were able to employ those assets in the best possible way.

One notable example is the Tunisian shopkeeper Mohamed Bouazizi, who set fire to himself and sparked the Arab Spring in 2010.

Bouazizi and others like himself were protesting not on religious issues but on the absence of property rights and the rule of law, according to a newspaper article published in a US newspaper on Friday.

Advanced data from studies, satellite imagery and GPS have resulted in an "organized knowledge" of the location of any visible assets on earth.

In an article in the Wall Street Journal, experts Phil Gram and Hernando de Soto say that apart from developed countries and some developed parts of developing countries, there are no accessible records showing who owns those assets and funds.

The two experts attribute the so-called "large economic gap" between 2.5 billion people who can register property rights and five billion people in need in the world, to the inability of the latter to follow the example of the former.

Despite this grim picture, Gram and De Soto preach a new technology that provides a global property rights registration system, known as blockchain technology.

Blockchain is one of the new and emerging technologies to support and realize the digital economy. It can provide seamless and efficient means to encrypt digital transaction systems and address growing threats to information security. This technology feeds innovation in many financial, legal and scientific fields to drive the economy to growth.

Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com, has assigned members of his professional team to update the process of collecting and maintaining property rights records worldwide.

Blockchain is a "promising" technology for its record-keeping capability, access to millions of users to access its database, and the ability to update proprietary real estate data.

Source:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-blockchain-can-end-poverty-1516925459