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It actually solves it quite well. It enforces you to input it properly, and not do half assed job due to immutability, because whatever you input in there will

It actually solves it quite well. It enforces you to input it properly, and not do half assed job due to immutability, because whatever you input in there will stay there, attached with credentials/metadata of whoever entered it. Currently the main problem is that docs are in sorry state, it was a rush job - and that state is very profitable for some people making dubious claims to old property. It would be easy to notice fraud, and all real estate deals need to go through proper notary anyways - would they risk their license if their failures would be visible - for ever? Mind you I'm not trying to propose a global solution, I'm proposing blockchain use for government entities and entities that work closely with them. It is just that governments aren't centralized on modern world, and you can leverage decentralized nature of blockchain to have a common dataset and standard available to all of those entities.

stonogo 6y ago
It doesn't enforce anything. People can just transcribe wrong things into blockchains, then have to append patches to the information. Unless you can prove malfeasance nobody is going to lose a license over a mistake. I think you're vastly overestimating how much anyone would care just because blockchains are involved. Notary records are already "forever," no computers required, and there's nothing inherent to blockchains that causes people to type more carefully. Plus there are lots of situations in real estate law (like ground rent where the freeholder is not identifiable) which don't fit into cute little data structures. This isn't a problem with documentation being a rush job, it's a problem with some of the records of ownership being hundreds of years old. Seeing as how I would have to hire a special archivist just to access data on an 8" floppy disk, I'm not confident that the blockchain is a long-term (i.e. centuries) solution to any of these problems.
majormajor 6y ago
> It enforces you to input it properly, and not do half assed job due to immutability, because whatever you input in there will stay there, attached with credentials/metadata of whoever entered it. This is an unrealistic level of infallibility to ask of people. Like taking the backspace key off a keyboard to enforce people not making typos.
perl4ever 6y ago
>all real estate deals need to go through proper notary anyways I don't know if you are American or familiar with how real estate works here. It is decentralized in a way that most countries are not, and there is insurance that people buy against mistakes and problems with transferring property. In a way, you could argue that a single blockchain to track real property would be more centralized than the current system. "the vast majority of U.S. states have opted for a system of document recording in which no governmental official makes any determination of who owns the title or whether the instruments transferring it are valid" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_insurance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_insurance "A recording system combined with title insurance decentralizes records, creating redundancy. For example, when many records were destroyed in San Francisco's 1906 earthquake, out-of-town title companies maintained records that allowed landowners to prove ownership of their property."
- Xelbair 6y ago
  As i said - over here, not in USA. we use completely different system. There is a central record for each separate local government(located at the regional judicial office), with copies being sent to up the chain. But the thing is - over here whatever is in that local deed book is the current legal state of the property. Licensed notary is obliged by law to check the current legal state of the property, verify identity of the ones making the change, and do the change itself - but due to sorry state of the books first part isn't always reliable. I am also not proposing a solution for USA problems, but for my country.
  - valarauko 6y ago
    I'm not sure which country you're describing, but Andhra Pradesh in India had signed an MoU with the Etherium Foundation for property records. I still don't see the Blockchain could have resolved the mess that is property records in India. How would it have worked? Would each property owner hold the private keys verifying their ownership, and possession of the keys proves ownership? My friend in Andhra Pradesh discovered that a portion of the family's land had been sold by a relative, and each party had "legal" paperwork to show for it. All you need to do is pay off the right guy in the local office to smooth things along. I can see the value of a distributed ledger for something like this, but it's an all or nothing proposition.
tomrod 6y ago
And doesn't allow for changes to the data model, right?
- Xelbair 6y ago
  Quite frankly yes. Because in most cases, speaking from experience, after model change they will be using a new model without doing proper conversion of old data. This happened to cadastral data over here - new schema required some fields explicitly, while old data did not have them digitized, and country-wide system was made with such assumptions. It does not work to this day properly. Archive the old chain, deploy the new one with migrated latest state from the old chain transformed to new model. keep working.
  - tomrod 6y ago
    And deployment requires a central authority to define. Inherently, this cuts most use cases off at the knees. Some small country your route your shipment through changes requirements? Broken.
    - Xelbair 6y ago
      This wasn't about shipments, but about either transaction log, or property deed ownership system controlled by government.

stonogo 6y ago

It doesn't enforce anything. People can just transcribe wrong things into blockchains, then have to append patches to the information. Unless you can prove malfeasance nobody is going to lose a license over a mistake. I think you're vastly overestimating how much anyone would care just because blockchains are involved. Notary records are already "forever," no computers required, and there's nothing inherent to blockchains that causes people to type more carefully. Plus there are lots of situations in real estate law (like ground rent where the freeholder is not identifiable) which don't fit into cute little data structures. This isn't a problem with documentation being a rush job, it's a problem with some of the records of ownership being hundreds of years old. Seeing as how I would have to hire a special archivist just to access data on an 8" floppy disk, I'm not confident that the blockchain is a long-term (i.e. centuries) solution to any of these problems.

majormajor 6y ago

> It enforces you to input it properly, and not do half assed job due to immutability, because whatever you input in there will stay there, attached with credentials/metadata of whoever entered it. This is an unrealistic level of infallibility to ask of people. Like taking the backspace key off a keyboard to enforce people not making typos.

perl4ever 6y ago

>all real estate deals need to go through proper notary anyways I don't know if you are American or familiar with how real estate works here. It is decentralized in a way that most countries are not, and there is insurance that people buy against mistakes and problems with transferring property. In a way, you could argue that a single blockchain to track real property would be more centralized than the current system. "the vast majority of U.S. states have opted for a system of document recording in which no governmental official makes any determination of who owns the title or whether the instruments transferring it are valid" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_insurance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_insurance "A recording system combined with title insurance decentralizes records, creating redundancy. For example, when many records were destroyed in San Francisco's 1906 earthquake, out-of-town title companies maintained records that allowed landowners to prove ownership of their property."

Xelbair 6y ago
As i said - over here, not in USA. we use completely different system. There is a central record for each separate local government(located at the regional judicial office), with copies being sent to up the chain. But the thing is - over here whatever is in that local deed book is the current legal state of the property. Licensed notary is obliged by law to check the current legal state of the property, verify identity of the ones making the change, and do the change itself - but due to sorry state of the books first part isn't always reliable. I am also not proposing a solution for USA problems, but for my country.
- valarauko 6y ago
  I'm not sure which country you're describing, but Andhra Pradesh in India had signed an MoU with the Etherium Foundation for property records. I still don't see the Blockchain could have resolved the mess that is property records in India. How would it have worked? Would each property owner hold the private keys verifying their ownership, and possession of the keys proves ownership? My friend in Andhra Pradesh discovered that a portion of the family's land had been sold by a relative, and each party had "legal" paperwork to show for it. All you need to do is pay off the right guy in the local office to smooth things along. I can see the value of a distributed ledger for something like this, but it's an all or nothing proposition.

tomrod 6y ago

And doesn't allow for changes to the data model, right?

Xelbair 6y ago
Quite frankly yes. Because in most cases, speaking from experience, after model change they will be using a new model without doing proper conversion of old data. This happened to cadastral data over here - new schema required some fields explicitly, while old data did not have them digitized, and country-wide system was made with such assumptions. It does not work to this day properly. Archive the old chain, deploy the new one with migrated latest state from the old chain transformed to new model. keep working.
- tomrod 6y ago
  And deployment requires a central authority to define. Inherently, this cuts most use cases off at the knees. Some small country your route your shipment through changes requirements? Broken.
  - Xelbair 6y ago
    This wasn't about shipments, but about either transaction log, or property deed ownership system controlled by government.