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Many real world systems are "nearly trustless". Of course you still need some sort of court system if someone decides to break bad. But in the 99%+ of times you

Many real world systems are "nearly trustless". Of course you still need some sort of court system if someone decides to break bad. But in the 99%+ of times you're in the happy path, economic transactions occur based on autonomous rules encoded in software. The analogy I like to use is what's harder to buy a $1 million house or $1 million of Microsoft stock? The former process takes weeks, and dozens of man hours from lawyers, realtors, escrow agents, bankers, county property registrars, etc. Whereas a buy order to execute Microsoft shares happens in microseconds. That's because we've built a highly streamlined autonomous system for executing stock transactions. Yes of course, there's a trusted layer built on courts and fiat law at the bottom. And occasionally for a corner case, real lawyers have to get involved. But the vast majority of the time, this layer is completely abstracted away and trading stocks are just bits flipped on a computer. When somebody says something like "let's put houses on the blockchain", the idea isn't to get rid of the fiat law system completely. At the end of the day, you still need courts and sheriffs to enforce property rights. But the idea is that we can wrap the house in an LLC, whose bylaws state that it's governed by on-chain contracts. (Which Delaware Chancery courts will absolutely recognize and enforce.) Now instead of directly transacting at the very low-tech county property registrar we can transact using an on-chain NFT that grants the equivalent of ownership rights to the house. (This is very analogous to how Cede & Co technically owns almost all the stock shares in America, and holds them under your name for you.) That NFT is way more powerful and efficient to transact with than the county property record. It lives on a credibly neutral level that already has billions in native capital and liquidity and exposes a fully Turing complete smart contract system. You can sell your house atomically and instantly to anyone in the world with no lawyers or escrow agents. You can pledge it as collateral and borrow against it. You can fractionalize it and sell a portion. Or roll it into a larger portfolio and slice into tranches. All with no more than few dozen lines of code. Without blockchains all of those operations would take hundreds of pages of legal documents and weeks of back and forth.

what-the-grump 4y ago
Reduction of complexity somehow yields mobility and fractionalization of a complex physical asset? Why is this a good thing when you skip all the protection, nearly 500 years of property law and understanding all so you can digitize something into meaningless bits? Replace NFT with deed, and what you think we can’t execute the transfer quick enough? No we can but we don’t because, we want to title search, violation search, inspect, appraise, survey the freaking thing you are about to blow your life’s savings on. There is a reason why people continue to lose millions and billions on NFTs and crypto and why systems to slow and prevent rampant fraud exist. There is no real technical problem with a real estate transaction that has not been solved. I closed on my house remotely, in 6 weeks, never having met anyone except my broker. 6 weeks were spent doing due diligence inspections. I have an NFT of the Brooklyn bridge to sell you, cheap, 200 million dollars.
- hnthrow1010 4y ago
  The "quiet part" that crypto builders won't say loudly about this is that they aren't trying to solve technical problems with real estate transactions. They're trying to make it so you can have real estate transactions with the authority being based on consensus of an unelected and unaccountable group of programmers/miners/validators running a blockchain, instead of the authority of a local government. The "problem" they have is really political in nature, not technical. At least, I cannot see any other reason why they would care about this when there seems to be even less interest in trying to deploy permissioned blockchains operated by governments.
gpspake 4y ago
I have a degree in finance. Never heard of Cede & Co and I just read the wiki. Cool. Thanks for the fun fact.
lbwtaylor 4y ago
>>The analogy I like to use is what's harder to buy a $1 million house or $1 million of Microsoft stock It's interesting, both have registries, so why is one harder? Is it because the registry is better? No, it's because real property transactions are more complex: - What condition will the property be delivered in and when? - What happens if the condition is not as specified? - what personal property is included in the transaction? What condition is it in? - Are there disputes over the property lines? - Are there easements? How do they work? - Are there third party consents needed? How do those work? - Will the seller vacate immediately, or will they rent back? - How will you pay for the property and when? - What happens if you don't pay? How much is the deposit and what are the terms of the deposit? The complexity of the transaction derives from the complexity of the subject matter. Sure, if you could standardize those items, you could make property more like stocks, and people are trying to do that, which so far limited success. But for the average person, this is a huge investment, and they will want to spend time and create a transaction that works for them. Almost none of the complexities related to the transfer of real property relate to issues with the county registry. Sure registries could improve, but very little would change. One of the expenses is paying for title insurance. Sure in some sense a perfect ledger would obviate the need for that insurance. But given there seems to be more fraud in blockchain than in normal US real estate transactions, not sure the insurance price goes down, rather than up...
- Quekid5 4y ago
  Exactly. Microsoft stock is basically fungible whereas houses and most other real-world property very much are not.
  - bradwood 4y ago
    But for houses, you could use an NFT to represent digital ownership of the underlying physical asset.
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      The problem is the very definition of "the underlying physical asset".
e63f67dd-065b 4y ago
Tell me you’ve never bought a house without telling me you’ve never bought a house. Buying houses are expensive because: - Realtors are a state-sanctioned monopoly for real estate transactions and suck up a % of the costs. They also provide the necessary service of aggregating information about the market and negotiating on your behalf - Due diligence on the state of the property. This means inspecting that there’s no mold growing everywhere, checking that proper maintenance has been carried out, etc - Property law developed over literal centuries to provide the legal framework that we have now, if you damage something as you move out I can sue you to recover costs involved, we have statements about property state before closing, if the building doesn’t meet code we negotiate about who pays the costs - Property registries matter because legally speaking that’s a part of how you prove ownership. The county knows who to send the tax bill, if you default creditors can impose a lien, these are legal technologies that developed over time This is why you can’t just pledge your house as collateral and borrow against it in a HELOC like you can borrow against your stock portfolio. The bank needs to verify that nobody else has a claim on your property and that the property actually exists and is worth as much as you say it is. A house NFT has none of the legal protections of a SPA and all of the risks. If it’s not up to code you’re fucked, if the county has a tax lien there’s nothing you can do, etc. Us engineers like to think that everything is an engineering problem, and that’s often true, but law seldom works that way.
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  > Realtors are a state-sanctioned monopoly for real estate transactions You know you can buy a house without a single realtor involved yeah?
- boughtahouse 4y ago
  I have bought two properties in two different first-world countries and also bought NFTs with Ethereum. The idea of houses on a blockchain are pretty much a pipe dream. But there are a lot of systems in traditional house buying that could be made easier with crypto-like ideas. Saying “real estate should be on-chain” should be read as asking for more NFT-like features in how real estate is transacted. - as a cash bidder you need to provide proof of funds to the estate agent, which might just be a screenshot of your entire bank account balance. privacy with a zk-proof could be used in theory here to hide your balance while still giving the agent confidence you can meet the bid - blind bidding process is usually opaque and broken, subject to discrimination and some winks and handshakes behind closed doors between friendly parties. a blockchain would give transparency and treat transactions equally regardless of race, sexuality, and friend or family ties. - settlement times are extremely long in the order of months, not seconds. this is sometimes just because some party including the agents are on holidays, or slow to respond to emails, or forget to sign some paper, or whatever. - escrow and exchange of funds in some cases could in theory happen with smart contracts where both parties sign a message to perform the exchange, which would reduce the significant commissions and fees. - the process feels archaic compared to buying most other types of property.
Nursie 4y ago
As with many proposed blockchain solutions - what's important there is that you've wrapped everything in a legal vehicle that makes fast transfer possible, NOT the fact that the record sits on a blockchain. That record could sit anywhere. A database perhaps. It's not really the NFT that's the 'win' there, if indeed it is a win.
- yata69420 4y ago
  You'd need some kind of shared database that all parties can trust. It'd have to be regularly audited but also kept as up to date as possible. It should have very precise access controls. Also, it should be as fast as possible, and there should be a record of everything that's ever changed. If you want a full copy of it, you should be able to request it at any time. It sounds like a lot of work to build that though. Maybe we can find some nerds to make it for "equity" on the chance that such a database has value? They could use it for other stuff too if they want.
  - Nursie 4y ago
    > You'd need some kind of shared database that all parties can trust Government run then, the institution that is involved with contract oversight here, an easily identifiable authority in this situation. If you don't trust that here, then there's no point in bothering with sales contracts in the first place. > It'd have to be regularly audited but also kept as up to date as possible. It should have very precise access controls. Also, it should be as fast as possible, and there should be a record of everything that's ever changed. If you want a full copy of it, you should be able to request it at any time. So like a database with auditing switched on? The type that is already run all over the world for all sorts of things? > If you want a full copy of it, you should be able to request it at any time. Like a database that offloads snapshots every so often? And maybe has an API in front of it allowing querying of public data? Like are run ... everywhere? For all sorts of things already? > It sounds like a lot of work to build that though. I mean, it sounds exactly like a ton of running systems with fairly standard options, so no, it seems like it would be fairly trivial. And of course we all know that there are no development costs for blockchain solutions. Nobody needs to build a webpage, or develop smart contracts, or security audit them, or build in permission systems so there can be authority oversight, or provide APIs, no, they all just appear fully formed and fully secure out of the ether... no boring 'work' to build that! "Blockchain gives you that for free" must be one of the biggest fallacies out there. > Maybe we can find some nerds to make it for "equity" on the chance that such a database has value? Doesn't sound to me like we need to give these 'nerds' a continuing stake in a public service. Any old software company can build that sort of thing out for you for a one-off fee. Adding profit motives for unrelated third parties seems to me like a pretty poor choice. But what do I know, perhaps we should introduce more avenues for speculation around the housing market, that sounds healthy.
agentultra 4y ago
I mean, I was always taught that eval’ing untrusted code was bad but here we are. Let’s keep doing that. Have you read any of the proofs behind any of these algorithms? Ever notice how often some one finds a crack and disappears millions of dollars? Think we’ll actually make it secure some day? I’m also not convinced this even needs technology. Some things are better locked up on paper in slow, bureaucratic institutions surrounded by layers of administrators. Makes it a lot harder to break in and steal stuff. Most people aren’t buying properties online like games on Steam. If it takes 6 weeks or 5 it won’t make much of a difference. Even if you want to digitize proof of property ownership it would be orders of magnitude more efficient to host your blockchain on a handful of Raspberry Pi’s. You could probably manage all property sales on an entire continent with it. Not dealing the Sybil attack problem is a lot cheaper and easier than trying to deal with it.
mckmk 4y ago
In this ‘house NFT within the court system’ paradigm, what happens if the court disagrees with the blockchain on who is the rightful ‘owner’ of the house NFT?
- cableshaft 4y ago
  Considering it's a physical house they sould be able to do more than they can when someone steals bitcoin. So I imagine they can either legal pressure on the illegitimate owner to transfer the NFT to the other owner (which has worked with some bitcoin transactions in the past), or if that doesn't work, then the system of smart contracts created for something like houses would most likely have something in it that allows the smart contract owners to mark that NFT as void in the blockchain (while it remains in the perpetrators wallet, it would no longer be associated with the physical benefits) and have a fresh NFT minted based on the data in the previous one and sent to the legitimate wallet. Barring all that, they could just not recognize the owner and send police to physically remove someone who thinks they own it because the have the NFT. That's one reason why some people like bitcoin so much, the government can't (easily) take it from you by force (because there's no physical aspect to it) like they can a home or gold.
  - mckmk 4y ago
    >Barring all that, they could just not recognize the owner and send police to physically remove someone who thinks they own it because the have the NFT. That's one reason why some people like bitcoin so much, the government can't (easily) take it from you by force (because there's no physical aspect to it) like they can a home or gold. If this were to happen and the blockchain and the physical world diverge, how would potential house NFT buyers know whether the physical house purportedly linked hasn't been overridden by local government? If the answer is for local registries to publish a list; then that list is the only thing that matters. The entire blockchain component becomes completely superfluous and a centrally managed electronic exchange would be faster, easier and cheaper.
    - cableshaft 4y ago
shreyshnaccount 4y ago
Makes no sense. Microsoft stock and houses are very different. I can run an illegal alligator fighting ring in one and not the other.
- mellavora 4y ago
  Bannon? Is that you?
  - shreyshnaccount 4y ago
    Touché but I'm not wrong am I?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bfung 4y ago
> Many real world systems are "nearly trustless"… > But in the 99%+ of times you're in the happy path, economic transactions occur based on autonomous rules encoded in software. In the happy path, people just “trust” that the system works; that the merchant and cc company transact properly, that cc company and bank work together, that the software underpinning all this is tested and has no errors, that the bank and cc company can help in disputes of fraud from the merchant… It’s actually based on a lot more trust than the normal person realizes and polar opposite to nearly trustless.
RandomLensman 4y ago
For me that creates two big questions: (1) Do we really want high frequency markets in real estate? Is that socially and economically desirable? (2) Land and property records so far have survived centuries (if not millennia), can we hope that an NFT solution will have the same long-term compatibility?
- shakow 4y ago
  > Land and property records so far have survived centuries (if not millennia) Not really, no. Just taking the European example, there have been countless cases of litigious states of affair after e.g. invasions, revolutions, nationalizations, privatizations, etc. E.g. a house in Romania post Ceaucescu fall, a noble family's domain in Russia in 1917 or France in 1790, a German estate in East Prussia in 1945, a property in Kosovo, etc.
  - RandomLensman 4y ago
    So France 1790 is kind of making my point - if that was the last break it's more than 200 years ago. And, yes, well aware of post socialism etc. issues. Not all have to do with records themselves but rather whether certain transfers of property were legal or not - which is different from pure record keeping. Where I live in Europe nothing litigious for about 200+ years and I can easily pull records for my place beyond 100 years without any need for reading/parsing technology.
m00dy 4y ago
thank you for writing this.
zby 4y ago
The comparison of buying $1 million house or $1 million of Microsoft stock is a bit complicated - because in nearly all of the transactions you don't formally really buy the Microsoft stock. Here is Matt Levine quote: """ Nobody owns stock. What you own is an entitlement to stock held for you by your broker. But your broker doesn't own the stock either. What your broker owns is an entitlement to stock held for it by Cede & Co., which is a nominee of the Depository Trust Company, which is a company that is in the business of owning everyone's stock for them. """ https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-07-14/banks-forgot-who-was-supposed-to-own-dell-shares https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-07-14/banks-... Also: https://bitsonblocks.net/2019/02/07/who-legally-owns-all-the-shares-not-you/ https://bitsonblocks.net/2019/02/07/who-legally-owns-all-the... compiles similar information on Singapore and Hongkong (googled - not verified).
Kon-Peki 4y ago
> Whereas a buy order to execute Microsoft shares happens in microseconds. To be perfectly pedantic, you still aren't the owner of the Microsoft stock. Your broker makes a record of you being the beneficiary of X shares of Microsoft stock, with about a dozen asterisks. Each of those asterisks fall off over the course of the next few days and then it is all finalized - your broker owns a bunch of shares for your benefit. It only feels like it is instantaneous because they assume everything will work out (it usually does). They can do this, because everything is reversible if it doesn't. Now, if you would like to be the actual owner of Microsoft stock, you can do that. If you've never done that before, expect the process to take a few weeks. But go right ahead - head over to ComputerShare [1] and start the process. If you really want, you can even get them to issue you some paper stock certificates in your own name, but that takes even more time and comes with a lot of extra fees. [1] https://www-us.computershare.com/Investor/#DirectStock/Summary?IssuerId=SCUSMSCO&PlanId=SPP1&sv=t https://www-us.computershare.com/Investor/#DirectStock/Summa...
Aunche 4y ago
Microsoft teams of lawyers, accountants, and regulators ensure that Microsoft is indeed worth what investors think it is. If you want to transfer your house, you need to do due diligence to do the same.
BearsEatBeats 4y ago
> "You can sell your house atomically and instantly to anyone in the world with no lawyers or escrow agents. You can pledge it as collateral and borrow against it. You can fractionalize it and sell a portion." Who enforces seizure when lendee defaults but the lender is "anyone in the world"?
- warkdarrior 4y ago
  The smart contract, man. It's smart contracts all the way down.

what-the-grump 4y ago

Reduction of complexity somehow yields mobility and fractionalization of a complex physical asset? Why is this a good thing when you skip all the protection, nearly 500 years of property law and understanding all so you can digitize something into meaningless bits? Replace NFT with deed, and what you think we can’t execute the transfer quick enough? No we can but we don’t because, we want to title search, violation search, inspect, appraise, survey the freaking thing you are about to blow your life’s savings on. There is a reason why people continue to lose millions and billions on NFTs and crypto and why systems to slow and prevent rampant fraud exist. There is no real technical problem with a real estate transaction that has not been solved. I closed on my house remotely, in 6 weeks, never having met anyone except my broker. 6 weeks were spent doing due diligence inspections. I have an NFT of the Brooklyn bridge to sell you, cheap, 200 million dollars.

hnthrow1010 4y ago
The "quiet part" that crypto builders won't say loudly about this is that they aren't trying to solve technical problems with real estate transactions. They're trying to make it so you can have real estate transactions with the authority being based on consensus of an unelected and unaccountable group of programmers/miners/validators running a blockchain, instead of the authority of a local government. The "problem" they have is really political in nature, not technical. At least, I cannot see any other reason why they would care about this when there seems to be even less interest in trying to deploy permissioned blockchains operated by governments.

gpspake 4y ago

I have a degree in finance. Never heard of Cede & Co and I just read the wiki. Cool. Thanks for the fun fact.

lbwtaylor 4y ago

>>The analogy I like to use is what's harder to buy a $1 million house or $1 million of Microsoft stock It's interesting, both have registries, so why is one harder? Is it because the registry is better? No, it's because real property transactions are more complex: - What condition will the property be delivered in and when? - What happens if the condition is not as specified? - what personal property is included in the transaction? What condition is it in? - Are there disputes over the property lines? - Are there easements? How do they work? - Are there third party consents needed? How do those work? - Will the seller vacate immediately, or will they rent back? - How will you pay for the property and when? - What happens if you don't pay? How much is the deposit and what are the terms of the deposit? The complexity of the transaction derives from the complexity of the subject matter. Sure, if you could standardize those items, you could make property more like stocks, and people are trying to do that, which so far limited success. But for the average person, this is a huge investment, and they will want to spend time and create a transaction that works for them. Almost none of the complexities related to the transfer of real property relate to issues with the county registry. Sure registries could improve, but very little would change. One of the expenses is paying for title insurance. Sure in some sense a perfect ledger would obviate the need for that insurance. But given there seems to be more fraud in blockchain than in normal US real estate transactions, not sure the insurance price goes down, rather than up...

Quekid5 4y ago
Exactly. Microsoft stock is basically fungible whereas houses and most other real-world property very much are not.
- bradwood 4y ago
  But for houses, you could use an NFT to represent digital ownership of the underlying physical asset.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    The problem is the very definition of "the underlying physical asset".

e63f67dd-065b 4y ago

Tell me you’ve never bought a house without telling me you’ve never bought a house. Buying houses are expensive because: - Realtors are a state-sanctioned monopoly for real estate transactions and suck up a % of the costs. They also provide the necessary service of aggregating information about the market and negotiating on your behalf - Due diligence on the state of the property. This means inspecting that there’s no mold growing everywhere, checking that proper maintenance has been carried out, etc - Property law developed over literal centuries to provide the legal framework that we have now, if you damage something as you move out I can sue you to recover costs involved, we have statements about property state before closing, if the building doesn’t meet code we negotiate about who pays the costs - Property registries matter because legally speaking that’s a part of how you prove ownership. The county knows who to send the tax bill, if you default creditors can impose a lien, these are legal technologies that developed over time This is why you can’t just pledge your house as collateral and borrow against it in a HELOC like you can borrow against your stock portfolio. The bank needs to verify that nobody else has a claim on your property and that the property actually exists and is worth as much as you say it is. A house NFT has none of the legal protections of a SPA and all of the risks. If it’s not up to code you’re fucked, if the county has a tax lien there’s nothing you can do, etc. Us engineers like to think that everything is an engineering problem, and that’s often true, but law seldom works that way.

EdwardDiego 4y ago
> Realtors are a state-sanctioned monopoly for real estate transactions You know you can buy a house without a single realtor involved yeah?
boughtahouse 4y ago
I have bought two properties in two different first-world countries and also bought NFTs with Ethereum. The idea of houses on a blockchain are pretty much a pipe dream. But there are a lot of systems in traditional house buying that could be made easier with crypto-like ideas. Saying “real estate should be on-chain” should be read as asking for more NFT-like features in how real estate is transacted. - as a cash bidder you need to provide proof of funds to the estate agent, which might just be a screenshot of your entire bank account balance. privacy with a zk-proof could be used in theory here to hide your balance while still giving the agent confidence you can meet the bid - blind bidding process is usually opaque and broken, subject to discrimination and some winks and handshakes behind closed doors between friendly parties. a blockchain would give transparency and treat transactions equally regardless of race, sexuality, and friend or family ties. - settlement times are extremely long in the order of months, not seconds. this is sometimes just because some party including the agents are on holidays, or slow to respond to emails, or forget to sign some paper, or whatever. - escrow and exchange of funds in some cases could in theory happen with smart contracts where both parties sign a message to perform the exchange, which would reduce the significant commissions and fees. - the process feels archaic compared to buying most other types of property.

Nursie 4y ago

As with many proposed blockchain solutions - what's important there is that you've wrapped everything in a legal vehicle that makes fast transfer possible, NOT the fact that the record sits on a blockchain. That record could sit anywhere. A database perhaps. It's not really the NFT that's the 'win' there, if indeed it is a win.

yata69420 4y ago
You'd need some kind of shared database that all parties can trust. It'd have to be regularly audited but also kept as up to date as possible. It should have very precise access controls. Also, it should be as fast as possible, and there should be a record of everything that's ever changed. If you want a full copy of it, you should be able to request it at any time. It sounds like a lot of work to build that though. Maybe we can find some nerds to make it for "equity" on the chance that such a database has value? They could use it for other stuff too if they want.
- Nursie 4y ago
  > You'd need some kind of shared database that all parties can trust Government run then, the institution that is involved with contract oversight here, an easily identifiable authority in this situation. If you don't trust that here, then there's no point in bothering with sales contracts in the first place. > It'd have to be regularly audited but also kept as up to date as possible. It should have very precise access controls. Also, it should be as fast as possible, and there should be a record of everything that's ever changed. If you want a full copy of it, you should be able to request it at any time. So like a database with auditing switched on? The type that is already run all over the world for all sorts of things? > If you want a full copy of it, you should be able to request it at any time. Like a database that offloads snapshots every so often? And maybe has an API in front of it allowing querying of public data? Like are run ... everywhere? For all sorts of things already? > It sounds like a lot of work to build that though. I mean, it sounds exactly like a ton of running systems with fairly standard options, so no, it seems like it would be fairly trivial. And of course we all know that there are no development costs for blockchain solutions. Nobody needs to build a webpage, or develop smart contracts, or security audit them, or build in permission systems so there can be authority oversight, or provide APIs, no, they all just appear fully formed and fully secure out of the ether... no boring 'work' to build that! "Blockchain gives you that for free" must be one of the biggest fallacies out there. > Maybe we can find some nerds to make it for "equity" on the chance that such a database has value? Doesn't sound to me like we need to give these 'nerds' a continuing stake in a public service. Any old software company can build that sort of thing out for you for a one-off fee. Adding profit motives for unrelated third parties seems to me like a pretty poor choice. But what do I know, perhaps we should introduce more avenues for speculation around the housing market, that sounds healthy.

agentultra 4y ago

I mean, I was always taught that eval’ing untrusted code was bad but here we are. Let’s keep doing that. Have you read any of the proofs behind any of these algorithms? Ever notice how often some one finds a crack and disappears millions of dollars? Think we’ll actually make it secure some day? I’m also not convinced this even needs technology. Some things are better locked up on paper in slow, bureaucratic institutions surrounded by layers of administrators. Makes it a lot harder to break in and steal stuff. Most people aren’t buying properties online like games on Steam. If it takes 6 weeks or 5 it won’t make much of a difference. Even if you want to digitize proof of property ownership it would be orders of magnitude more efficient to host your blockchain on a handful of Raspberry Pi’s. You could probably manage all property sales on an entire continent with it. Not dealing the Sybil attack problem is a lot cheaper and easier than trying to deal with it.

mckmk 4y ago

In this ‘house NFT within the court system’ paradigm, what happens if the court disagrees with the blockchain on who is the rightful ‘owner’ of the house NFT?

cableshaft 4y ago
Considering it's a physical house they sould be able to do more than they can when someone steals bitcoin. So I imagine they can either legal pressure on the illegitimate owner to transfer the NFT to the other owner (which has worked with some bitcoin transactions in the past), or if that doesn't work, then the system of smart contracts created for something like houses would most likely have something in it that allows the smart contract owners to mark that NFT as void in the blockchain (while it remains in the perpetrators wallet, it would no longer be associated with the physical benefits) and have a fresh NFT minted based on the data in the previous one and sent to the legitimate wallet. Barring all that, they could just not recognize the owner and send police to physically remove someone who thinks they own it because the have the NFT. That's one reason why some people like bitcoin so much, the government can't (easily) take it from you by force (because there's no physical aspect to it) like they can a home or gold.
- mckmk 4y ago
  >Barring all that, they could just not recognize the owner and send police to physically remove someone who thinks they own it because the have the NFT. That's one reason why some people like bitcoin so much, the government can't (easily) take it from you by force (because there's no physical aspect to it) like they can a home or gold. If this were to happen and the blockchain and the physical world diverge, how would potential house NFT buyers know whether the physical house purportedly linked hasn't been overridden by local government? If the answer is for local registries to publish a list; then that list is the only thing that matters. The entire blockchain component becomes completely superfluous and a centrally managed electronic exchange would be faster, easier and cheaper.
  - cableshaft 4y ago

shreyshnaccount 4y ago

Makes no sense. Microsoft stock and houses are very different. I can run an illegal alligator fighting ring in one and not the other.

mellavora 4y ago
Bannon? Is that you?
- shreyshnaccount 4y ago
  Touché but I'm not wrong am I?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

bfung 4y ago

> Many real world systems are "nearly trustless"… > But in the 99%+ of times you're in the happy path, economic transactions occur based on autonomous rules encoded in software. In the happy path, people just “trust” that the system works; that the merchant and cc company transact properly, that cc company and bank work together, that the software underpinning all this is tested and has no errors, that the bank and cc company can help in disputes of fraud from the merchant… It’s actually based on a lot more trust than the normal person realizes and polar opposite to nearly trustless.

RandomLensman 4y ago

For me that creates two big questions: (1) Do we really want high frequency markets in real estate? Is that socially and economically desirable? (2) Land and property records so far have survived centuries (if not millennia), can we hope that an NFT solution will have the same long-term compatibility?

shakow 4y ago
> Land and property records so far have survived centuries (if not millennia) Not really, no. Just taking the European example, there have been countless cases of litigious states of affair after e.g. invasions, revolutions, nationalizations, privatizations, etc. E.g. a house in Romania post Ceaucescu fall, a noble family's domain in Russia in 1917 or France in 1790, a German estate in East Prussia in 1945, a property in Kosovo, etc.
- RandomLensman 4y ago
  So France 1790 is kind of making my point - if that was the last break it's more than 200 years ago. And, yes, well aware of post socialism etc. issues. Not all have to do with records themselves but rather whether certain transfers of property were legal or not - which is different from pure record keeping. Where I live in Europe nothing litigious for about 200+ years and I can easily pull records for my place beyond 100 years without any need for reading/parsing technology.

m00dy 4y ago

thank you for writing this.

zby 4y ago

The comparison of buying $1 million house or $1 million of Microsoft stock is a bit complicated - because in nearly all of the transactions you don't formally really buy the Microsoft stock. Here is Matt Levine quote: """ Nobody owns stock. What you own is an entitlement to stock held for you by your broker. But your broker doesn't own the stock either. What your broker owns is an entitlement to stock held for it by Cede & Co., which is a nominee of the Depository Trust Company, which is a company that is in the business of owning everyone's stock for them. """ https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-07-14/banks-forgot-who-was-supposed-to-own-dell-shares https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-07-14/banks-... Also: https://bitsonblocks.net/2019/02/07/who-legally-owns-all-the-shares-not-you/ https://bitsonblocks.net/2019/02/07/who-legally-owns-all-the... compiles similar information on Singapore and Hongkong (googled - not verified).

Kon-Peki 4y ago

> Whereas a buy order to execute Microsoft shares happens in microseconds. To be perfectly pedantic, you still aren't the owner of the Microsoft stock. Your broker makes a record of you being the beneficiary of X shares of Microsoft stock, with about a dozen asterisks. Each of those asterisks fall off over the course of the next few days and then it is all finalized - your broker owns a bunch of shares for your benefit. It only feels like it is instantaneous because they assume everything will work out (it usually does). They can do this, because everything is reversible if it doesn't. Now, if you would like to be the actual owner of Microsoft stock, you can do that. If you've never done that before, expect the process to take a few weeks. But go right ahead - head over to ComputerShare [1] and start the process. If you really want, you can even get them to issue you some paper stock certificates in your own name, but that takes even more time and comes with a lot of extra fees. [1] https://www-us.computershare.com/Investor/#DirectStock/Summary?IssuerId=SCUSMSCO&PlanId=SPP1&sv=t https://www-us.computershare.com/Investor/#DirectStock/Summa...

Aunche 4y ago

Microsoft teams of lawyers, accountants, and regulators ensure that Microsoft is indeed worth what investors think it is. If you want to transfer your house, you need to do due diligence to do the same.

BearsEatBeats 4y ago

> "You can sell your house atomically and instantly to anyone in the world with no lawyers or escrow agents. You can pledge it as collateral and borrow against it. You can fractionalize it and sell a portion." Who enforces seizure when lendee defaults but the lender is "anyone in the world"?

warkdarrior 4y ago
The smart contract, man. It's smart contracts all the way down.