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I think a lasting application for blockchain tech has already come. Land registration on blockchain is not exciting enough to keep making the news but it's bein

I think a lasting application for blockchain tech has already come. Land registration on blockchain is not exciting enough to keep making the news but it's being slowly implemented around the world since before the pandemic cryptocurrency bubble. Rollout is slow so I personally don't know if it will reach the same kind of fame NFT has. But I imagine a government's point of view on a cryptographically verifiable way to associate a property with an individual owner and a transparent history of ownership and built in fraud protection is very positive.

heyitsguay 5y ago
Cool, i just registered your address. Feel free to leave any furniture you don't want to keep.
- hanniabu 5y ago
  Not sure if this was just a joke or if you seriously think this is how it works
  - heyitsguay 5y ago
    Less glibly, can you explain or point to references explaining how to solve this problem without relying on external identity verification services to confirm that a registrant is in fact that property owner? It seems like, if you have to do that, your records are more efficiently stored as a database with whatever authority is doing that verification.
  - kgin 5y ago
    I think the joke is that a decentralized database doesn’t really solve any of the hard parts of knowing who owns what more that a sql database at the county records office. Establishing the real world legal realities of what those db records represent, centralized or decentralized, is still just as messy and difficult.
- knaik94 5y ago
  Registered with who? This joke makes me think of the weird world of registering star names, from an organization that's not the International Astronomical Union. You might have potentially gotten scammed. Humans are the weakest link in any realistic security model.
  - joelbondurant 5y ago
    Brilliant, I'm going to start selling star names on multiple blockchains so kids with Gary V level intellect can get porked.
  - hiq 5y ago
    > Humans are the weakest link in any realistic security model. That's the point, a blockchain doesn't solve this. So what do you think it brings in this case?
yxhuvud 5y ago
The government of point of view is they have a central ledger of property ownerships and no need for any decentralised solution.
- mjn 5y ago
  Even when they don't have such a ledger, it's not clear that blockchains do much to solve that problem either. The hard part is not the ledger, but the agreement on who owns what, with detailed surveys that are agreed to demarcate "ownership" and therefore enforced by law. For example: Greece is still in the process of trying to centrally account for ownership of land [1]. There are certain regions where that was accomplished many years ago (e.g. some of the former Italian possessions in the Ionian, where the Italian-era surveys were accepted by the modern Greek state). But in many regions, property boundaries are still informally demarcated and based on oral tradition, which not everyone agrees on. The difficult part is that aspect of it: agreeing on who owns what, and precisely where the boundaries are. Once everyone agrees on the results of surveys and demarcations, actually tracking the result in a ledger is comparatively easy, as evidenced by the fact that nobody has trouble retrieving 19th-century Italian property ledgers. [1] https://int.ert.gr/greek-land-cadastre-will-be-complete-by-first-half-2021-stathakis-says/ https://int.ert.gr/greek-land-cadastre-will-be-complete-by-f...
- knaik94 5y ago
  At some point in the future, legal contracts and deeds will have to become digitized and more than just a pdf scanned version of a paper document. Decentralized allow transfers to be much faster and much more easily verified and most importantly allows redundancy of the database. Transparency and redundancy are the benefits of a decentralized ledger. There have been pilot projects in countries like Sweden and India and even the US. Wyoming has been a test area for the US since 2018 and looks promising. https://www.yahoo.com/now/overstock-subsidiary-put-wyoming-county-090000605.html https://www.yahoo.com/now/overstock-subsidiary-put-wyoming-c...
  - jmull 5y ago
    You don’t need a decentralized blockchain for transparency or redundancy. Also, is transparency is a problem that needs to be solved for land records? That is, what are we missing now? For redundancy, decentralized is either inefficient or insufficient. There has to be something motivating various someones to maintain the infrastructure. That is, money. Since the resources can’t be planned or organized, you can’t have the right amount — there has to be a wide, general incentive or you risk having too little, redundancy. That means either a bunch of money spread all over or a significant risk the decentralized data will simply stop existing. And then there are the issues with a decentralized ledger. E.g., what so you do when it is out-of-sync with the legal authorities? Say I swindle you out of your keys and transfer the blockchain deed to your house to myself. I end up going to jail and am ordered to return the property. Or maybe you sue in civil court and obtain a legal order to recover your property. Only I refuse to transfer it back, or loose my keys and can’t transfer it back, or die without transferring it back. Now there’s a decentralized blockchain that is wrong and can’t be corrected. After all, if it could be reliably corrected at the order of a central authority it’s not actually decentralized. I don’t know how this can be considered promising without a solid plan to address the various issues.
paulgb 5y ago
> Land registration on blockchain is not exciting enough to keep making the news but it's being slowly implemented around the world since before the pandemic cryptocurrency bubble. I've been able to find references to pilot programs in Sweden, Ukraine, and Georgia (the country), but is there anywhere that's actually adopted it such that a blockchain-based registry has the same force of law that a traditional registry has? I'm particularly curious how a registry would handle an “I lost my private key” scenario. As I see it, either the blockchain is absolute and losing keys would mean losing the land, or there's another authority who can override the blockchain's version of the truth. In the latter case, it kind of obliterates the advantages of a blockchain.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  If a blockchain has the highest legal authority, there’s no way I’d use it for anything worth more than $1K or so.
- epa 5y ago
  The non-fungibleness of land requires a central authority to agree to ownership. It may live on chain but if the state does not consider the chain to be the source of record, it's useless. This is why armies exist.
- DennisP 5y ago
  Years ago I read an article in The Economist about problems with land registries in some third-world countries. It was easy for rich people to bribe the registrar to alter records. Poor people who owned land suddenly wouldn't own it anymore, and couldn't prove otherwise. A blockchain-based registry would prevent such forgery. A master key holder could change ownership, but not without a visible record of the change.
  - pornel 5y ago
    In such unstable countries militia can just take your land, and not care what some blockchain says. And if land ownership was actually enforced based on cryptographic proof, then this attack would work even better: https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
bradleyjg 5y ago
Governments neither understand nor care about cryptographically verifiable. They have databases that, not that long ago, replaced giant books with stamps and seals. These dbs works well enough for their purposes.
ohgodplsno 5y ago
Great. You've invented an expensive, badly performing database. Not only does the government have a verifiable way of associating a property with an owner and a history of ownership already, now you're either exposing owners to have their names revealed publicly for eveyrone (People are willing to pay a lot to know who to threaten to steal/occupy a plot of land), or to just keep a shitty database. And then, the owner gets no benefit from it either. In the case of sales, you're still going to go through the state to certify the sale (with an actual, physical person). In the case of terrain where ownership is still blurry (which is already the case in lots of places in Europe, so the absolute fucking mess in the rest of the world is just a nice wrench in your plans), you still need a physical person to look around and figure out who it belongs to for months, before making a decision. Your blockchain doesn't help. Blockchains are shit, expensive databases, part 342
- Tenoke 5y ago
  >now you're either exposing owners to have their names revealed publicly for eveyrone (People are willing to pay a lot to know who to threaten to steal/occupy a plot of land) Land ownership is already public record in many jurisdictions including I'm guessing all of those now using blockchains.
LatteLazy 5y ago
That's fine until people die and take their passwords with them...
dehrmann 5y ago
Seems premature to call it lasting when lots of landowners own a parcel of land longer than blockchains have existed.

heyitsguay 5y ago

Cool, i just registered your address. Feel free to leave any furniture you don't want to keep.

hanniabu 5y ago
Not sure if this was just a joke or if you seriously think this is how it works
- heyitsguay 5y ago
  Less glibly, can you explain or point to references explaining how to solve this problem without relying on external identity verification services to confirm that a registrant is in fact that property owner? It seems like, if you have to do that, your records are more efficiently stored as a database with whatever authority is doing that verification.
- kgin 5y ago
  I think the joke is that a decentralized database doesn’t really solve any of the hard parts of knowing who owns what more that a sql database at the county records office. Establishing the real world legal realities of what those db records represent, centralized or decentralized, is still just as messy and difficult.
knaik94 5y ago
Registered with who? This joke makes me think of the weird world of registering star names, from an organization that's not the International Astronomical Union. You might have potentially gotten scammed. Humans are the weakest link in any realistic security model.
- joelbondurant 5y ago
  Brilliant, I'm going to start selling star names on multiple blockchains so kids with Gary V level intellect can get porked.
- hiq 5y ago
  > Humans are the weakest link in any realistic security model. That's the point, a blockchain doesn't solve this. So what do you think it brings in this case?

yxhuvud 5y ago

The government of point of view is they have a central ledger of property ownerships and no need for any decentralised solution.

mjn 5y ago
Even when they don't have such a ledger, it's not clear that blockchains do much to solve that problem either. The hard part is not the ledger, but the agreement on who owns what, with detailed surveys that are agreed to demarcate "ownership" and therefore enforced by law. For example: Greece is still in the process of trying to centrally account for ownership of land [1]. There are certain regions where that was accomplished many years ago (e.g. some of the former Italian possessions in the Ionian, where the Italian-era surveys were accepted by the modern Greek state). But in many regions, property boundaries are still informally demarcated and based on oral tradition, which not everyone agrees on. The difficult part is that aspect of it: agreeing on who owns what, and precisely where the boundaries are. Once everyone agrees on the results of surveys and demarcations, actually tracking the result in a ledger is comparatively easy, as evidenced by the fact that nobody has trouble retrieving 19th-century Italian property ledgers. [1] https://int.ert.gr/greek-land-cadastre-will-be-complete-by-first-half-2021-stathakis-says/ https://int.ert.gr/greek-land-cadastre-will-be-complete-by-f...
knaik94 5y ago
At some point in the future, legal contracts and deeds will have to become digitized and more than just a pdf scanned version of a paper document. Decentralized allow transfers to be much faster and much more easily verified and most importantly allows redundancy of the database. Transparency and redundancy are the benefits of a decentralized ledger. There have been pilot projects in countries like Sweden and India and even the US. Wyoming has been a test area for the US since 2018 and looks promising. https://www.yahoo.com/now/overstock-subsidiary-put-wyoming-county-090000605.html https://www.yahoo.com/now/overstock-subsidiary-put-wyoming-c...
- jmull 5y ago
  You don’t need a decentralized blockchain for transparency or redundancy. Also, is transparency is a problem that needs to be solved for land records? That is, what are we missing now? For redundancy, decentralized is either inefficient or insufficient. There has to be something motivating various someones to maintain the infrastructure. That is, money. Since the resources can’t be planned or organized, you can’t have the right amount — there has to be a wide, general incentive or you risk having too little, redundancy. That means either a bunch of money spread all over or a significant risk the decentralized data will simply stop existing. And then there are the issues with a decentralized ledger. E.g., what so you do when it is out-of-sync with the legal authorities? Say I swindle you out of your keys and transfer the blockchain deed to your house to myself. I end up going to jail and am ordered to return the property. Or maybe you sue in civil court and obtain a legal order to recover your property. Only I refuse to transfer it back, or loose my keys and can’t transfer it back, or die without transferring it back. Now there’s a decentralized blockchain that is wrong and can’t be corrected. After all, if it could be reliably corrected at the order of a central authority it’s not actually decentralized. I don’t know how this can be considered promising without a solid plan to address the various issues.

paulgb 5y ago

> Land registration on blockchain is not exciting enough to keep making the news but it's being slowly implemented around the world since before the pandemic cryptocurrency bubble. I've been able to find references to pilot programs in Sweden, Ukraine, and Georgia (the country), but is there anywhere that's actually adopted it such that a blockchain-based registry has the same force of law that a traditional registry has? I'm particularly curious how a registry would handle an “I lost my private key” scenario. As I see it, either the blockchain is absolute and losing keys would mean losing the land, or there's another authority who can override the blockchain's version of the truth. In the latter case, it kind of obliterates the advantages of a blockchain.

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
If a blockchain has the highest legal authority, there’s no way I’d use it for anything worth more than $1K or so.
epa 5y ago
The non-fungibleness of land requires a central authority to agree to ownership. It may live on chain but if the state does not consider the chain to be the source of record, it's useless. This is why armies exist.
DennisP 5y ago
Years ago I read an article in The Economist about problems with land registries in some third-world countries. It was easy for rich people to bribe the registrar to alter records. Poor people who owned land suddenly wouldn't own it anymore, and couldn't prove otherwise. A blockchain-based registry would prevent such forgery. A master key holder could change ownership, but not without a visible record of the change.
- pornel 5y ago
  In such unstable countries militia can just take your land, and not care what some blockchain says. And if land ownership was actually enforced based on cryptographic proof, then this attack would work even better: https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/

bradleyjg 5y ago

Governments neither understand nor care about cryptographically verifiable. They have databases that, not that long ago, replaced giant books with stamps and seals. These dbs works well enough for their purposes.

ohgodplsno 5y ago

Great. You've invented an expensive, badly performing database. Not only does the government have a verifiable way of associating a property with an owner and a history of ownership already, now you're either exposing owners to have their names revealed publicly for eveyrone (People are willing to pay a lot to know who to threaten to steal/occupy a plot of land), or to just keep a shitty database. And then, the owner gets no benefit from it either. In the case of sales, you're still going to go through the state to certify the sale (with an actual, physical person). In the case of terrain where ownership is still blurry (which is already the case in lots of places in Europe, so the absolute fucking mess in the rest of the world is just a nice wrench in your plans), you still need a physical person to look around and figure out who it belongs to for months, before making a decision. Your blockchain doesn't help. Blockchains are shit, expensive databases, part 342

Tenoke 5y ago
>now you're either exposing owners to have their names revealed publicly for eveyrone (People are willing to pay a lot to know who to threaten to steal/occupy a plot of land) Land ownership is already public record in many jurisdictions including I'm guessing all of those now using blockchains.

LatteLazy 5y ago

That's fine until people die and take their passwords with them...

dehrmann 5y ago

Seems premature to call it lasting when lots of landowners own a parcel of land longer than blockchains have existed.