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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

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.

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.