Back before there was blockchain, banks selling mortgages didn't like having to record ownership of deeds and mortgages with the county recorders. It was slow a

Back before there was blockchain, banks selling mortgages didn't like having to record ownership of deeds and mortgages with the county recorders. It was slow and expensive, and they wanted to shred the mortgages up and sell the pieces. So they created a system called MERS, that would track the notes as they went through the bond market. Except that MERS didn't really do that. It just pretended to. When all the loans went bust, it turned out that they hadn't properly kept track of the ownership of the notes. And MERS itself appeared to have no owners or employees--no one took responsibility for it. It was, you know, decentralized. So loan servicers took to forging signatures on papers to claim ownership of the loans they were foreclosing. And courts in some states let them get away with that. So whenever someone says, hey we have a decentralized to do away with the old system of recorders, I think, we have heard this story before. It does not have a happy ending.