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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.

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.