How does a central government database not also solve those problems?
Chef@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Land deeds and property titles.
Maintaining a provable chain of ownership and legal transfer of land and property is required for mortgages, for title insurance, inheretance, etc.
A public, decentralized ledger of land/property transfers could revolutionize home ownership, lending, insurance, etc
Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
half_built_pyramids@lemmy.world 11 months ago
There’s only a few recorders who actually check title, called Torrens, when you record something in the US. 99% of them work under abstract where literally anyone can record anything as long as they pay the county recorder and meet the basic requirements like have a notary stamp.
There’s a good chance if you’re in the US that I could just record a deed giving me ownership of your house or apartment complex. I’d have to fraudulently sign your name as grantor, but the county isn’t going to stop me. You’ll have to stop me.
There’s a whole huge industry around recording and verifying deeds for sales to deal with that type of nonsense. First, they won’t want to get dismantled. Fidelity is huge for example. Sort of like how TurboTax inserts themselves between you and paying taxes. Fidelity inserts themselves between you buying and selling a house.
A verified Blockchain would essentially turn everything into torrens instead of abstract title. I think that’s a good thing and I’d rather pay the government to verify the transaction than done for profit company that’s going to review title as quickly and cheaply as possible.
Nevermind having to deal with a title insurance industry – like all insurance – that’s inherently be incentivised to reduce costs by not paying claims.
TCB13@lemmy.world 11 months ago
A verified Blockchain would essentially turn everything into torrens instead of abstract title. I think that’s a good thing and I’d rather pay the government to verify the transaction than done for profit company that’s going to review title as quickly and cheaply as possible.
You can pay for the govt for that service without introducing blockchain-based BS in the process. After all that’s what most countries do, land rights and transactions are recorded, stored and verified by some governmental branch.
planish@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
One of the good things about using a blockchain system is that it forces you to set out and follow a set of programmatic, and thus at least minimally fair, rules for how the system is going to work. It means you are running on some kind of rule of law, and for it to work everyone involved has to be able to replicate the history of the system and agree that it is correct.
It seems a fairly natural fit for something like land, especially in the US, where we know for a fact that huge swathes of it were seized in the past from Native Americans, or revoked after being given to Black folks at the end of the civil war, or otherwise moved around by the government in suspiciously ad-hoc ways that we have later come to regret.
If you can design the entire system to grind to a halt if rights are not respected or someone tries to rewrite the rules on the basis of they have the guns, it could be a powerful force for the rule of law and the maintenance of a consensus reality.
mrbubblesort@kbin.social 11 months ago
How do you prove someone in the central government didn't take a bribe and tamper with the records? What if you're from a country where the central government is less than stable? How would you prove ownership if something were to happen to that database? How do you prove that someone is who they say they are? How do citizens and businesses access that database? Is there a standardized format for it? Does it use some proprietary software built by the lowest bidder?
Not saying that blockchain has all the answers or that it is the right tool in all cases, but these are some of the problems it is trying to solve.
Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
If you live in such a shitty country, the records would probably not be respected anyway. Also a blockchain still has to allow new inputs from a trusted source. And that source could still make up a fake sale and give your land to someone else.
(And no, priavate wallets wouldn’t work to protect that transaction… because what if you lose your wallet?)
pjhenry1216@kbin.social 11 months ago
If the government is unstable what authority do you have to claim the land is yours. Land ownership is literally backed only by the government. Forced change of ownership must also be possible, therefore the same weaknesses would exist in Blockchain as elsewhere. Tracking property who's ownership isn't inherently authorized by the system itself is pointless. The rules will change. The government will never back a system that controls physical property unless they have the authority to change it. You can try to argue individual sovereignty, but that simply doesn't exist. You only own the land as long as the government backs you up on that. If the government collapses, no Blockchain will convince a new government that they can't take the land from you.
planish@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
A central database would be just a list of all the land and who owns it.
Right now, the deed system is a bunch of deeds that say “remember when I got this land, on page 302 of book 75 in the county recorder’s office? Well now Jimantha owns it actually, since they bought it from me for ten dollars and a peppercorn.”. This is great for accountability: it lets you trace ownership history and provides a piece of evidence to substantiate every transfer, and so helps you answer inconvenient questions like “why should you own that house when it was my grandmother’s house and I want to own it?”. It also lets you roll transfers back if they are found to be fraudulent, and neatly captures how all current ownership is contingent on the theft of the whole place from any disposessed original inhabitants.
This is also basically how ownership works in many current blockchain systems: you select something you own based on the transaction that gave you ownership, and then you say who should own it now in a signed message.
But the blockchain systems verify signatures cryptographically, whereas the county recorder verifies the authority to transfer stuff on the “you think someone would just tell lies? On the Internet?” principle. And the centralized database doesn’t even keep the transfers around for review, it just has the database operator in charge of who owns any given thing at the moment.
Would you rather walk up to a grumpy person with a shotgun and demand that they move out while brandishing a printout of an SQLite database recently recovered after the ransomware attack at the county administrative building? Or with a deed with their spouse’s signature on it?
Then the problem is to make the deeds more machine-readable, and to get better at not putting in deeds from people who have no business writing to that part of the ledger, for which pieces of blockchain technology might be useful.
pjhenry1216@kbin.social 11 months ago
How does forced repossession of property work? You didn't pay your bills. The only asset you have is the land. Court authorized giving it up in a lawsuit. I don't know. Either way, there must be some way to enforced transfers without voluntarily relying on the person.
And who's managing the keys? The land owner? What happens if they lose them? What happens if they die prior to transferring property?
planish@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Tying keys to natural people is indeed an unsolved problem.
The system can be designed to recognize more people than just the current owner as authorized to do a transfer. You could do the whole tax record tracking in the same system, to ensure that property can be seized for back taxes exactly when back taxes are owed.
Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
A central database would be just a list of all the land and who owns it.
Says who? Why would it not be a list of who owned/owns that land and when they owned it?
Would you rather walk up to a grumpy person with a shotgun and demand that they move out while brandishing a printout of an SQLite database recently recovered after the ransomware attack at the county administrative building? Or with a deed with their spouse’s signature on it?
Yes, the document from the county administration would be much better, than some “magic” contract from the internet that may or may not be enforced by the county.
planish@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
If the county isn’t actually using the system you try to present evidence from, of course it will not work.
If you have a list of who owned the land and when, and you have evidence to support each transfer, then you have a log-structured or relatively blockchain-like database.
tsz@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Land ownership (in the US) already is public. What problem would this solve? What problems would it create? How would the solutions outweigh the problems?
bloopernova@programming.dev 11 months ago
Squibbles@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Blockchain suffers from the same problem. What happens when someone compromises the network by taking over 50% of the computing power then transfers all deeds to themselves? Or hacks or exploits a bug in the smart contract and does the same? Hopefully if that happens then you can appeal to some higher authority to get it fixed, but then what is the point of using the blockchain or smart contracts in the first place since you could get the same result under our current system without the computing overhead of blockchain.
TCB13@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Those take over attacks are even more likely when we’re talking about govt blockchains when, effectively, the only user would be the govt itself.
TCB13@lemmy.world 11 months ago
You know that decent governments have ways to account for that don’t you?