[noprocrasted]

The problem I see here isn't that the space has been poisoned by scammers. It's that bridging on-chain state with real world state is fundamentally impossible without sacrificing a lot of the blockchain's guarantees (you need some centralized, trusted party to act as a bridge) at which point you may as well let your bridge just be the sole source of truth and run a conventional (publicly-readable if necessary) database.

> specifying and enforcing intellectual property rights

The incentive to care and participate in the real-world, court-enforced intellectual property system is that if you don't and you piss off enough people, goons with guns will show up and take you/your stuff/money away. Those goons can behave like that because they have the legal system's approval to do so and thus don't risk their own freedom.

Let's say this thing existed - what's the incentive for someone to care and participate into that system? Do you have your own goons with guns? Do you convince the conventional legal system to send their own goons? In both cases, why not just skip the blockchain then and let you run a conventional database, since what actually matters is your choice to send goons to enforce the desired state (and their willingness to do so), and not necessarily what some blockchain says?

[K0balt]

Obviously blockchain doesn’t replace meatspace governance, which ultimately relies on a monopoly of coercive force.

But you can contractually bridge technological measures and the courts (electronic signatures are a common example) and programmable money could be used by governments to reduce frictions that do not serve any useful purpose, handle intrinsic taxation, self-banking, and on-chain credit systems.

Obviously the crypto-sovereign fantasy is unworkable, but technology can greatly reduce frictions and facilitate cooperation by reducing reliance on trust. Not needing to trust because trust is enforced by a technological system is a very effective tool.

The object would be to use blockchain to facilitate the functions of governance, not to replace them.