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You are vastly over-estimating the scale at which local government operates and I'm not saying this is 100% about signing. Searching, pulling GIS files, whatev

You are vastly over-estimating the scale at which local government operates and I'm not saying this is 100% about signing. Searching, pulling GIS files, whatever, it's all essentially the same problem. Your argument is akin to being anti-Twitter because the local government could build a notification system just as well. Maybe San Francisco could, but most of America cannot. Twitter's core function is that it lets you send and receive short messages. That's absolutely great for a local government office, but it didn't make enough sense for any local government to invent Twitter. That's not the job of local government. The value here is in the network effect of agreed upon protocols between interested parties. If parties agree on data sharing protocols, which is something we've all been talking about forever, then the network gains value. > we can transact using an on-chain NFT that grants the equivalent of ownership rights to the house He's literally talking about ownership rights tokenized for convenient settlement with a governance layer that can be overridden by officials. I think that's a fine idea to try out. It will probably reduce friction most of the time. > you can just gloss over because blockchain The idea is that a universally trusted, always-on database allows you to build new types of applications. This seems obvious to me. I was listening to NPR a while ago and they had story on about governments that paid for ransomware attacks so they could access critical records. That's where we're at today. All networks are hard to get off the ground. If you can't tell, I was a fan of the "semantic web" idea. I feel like this time it's going to work because there's a money-layer built into it.

Nursie 4y ago
> You are vastly over-estimating the scale at which local government operates Not really, they could all deploy the same DB solution, we could open source it and containerise it and give it away for free. It could be run as a managed service for a small fee. There's no need for each local government to design their own or even run their own. Exactly the same as with a blockchain solution. > Your argument is akin to being anti-Twitter because the local government could build a notification system just as well My argument is not in the least bit akin to being anti-twitter. My argument is more like saying twitter is possible with multiple different back-ends, conceptually. I'm saying look, your short message service can be implemented in a bunch of different ways - in the back end it could run on a NoSQL server of some sort, or some sort of RDBMS, of which there are many, or we could probably mash something up with SQLite to get off the ground. The important thing that's addressing the need is to build a short message service. In contrast you're there insisting that only an MSSQL system will enable twitter. But with MSSQL we get archiving for free! And with MSSQL we can just UPDATE a record and it will be changed! Huh, how about that?! Nobody else can do that! And I'm here scratching my head and saying that's just an implementation detail, sure, it could work, there will be license fees etc, but it's not the only way, and we still need to do the rest of the work. > If parties agree on data sharing protocols, which is something we've all been talking about forever, then the network gains value. Yep. And those protocols are still going to have to be designed and deployed by someone, a blockchain solution doesn't magic these into existence any more than any other solution does. APIs and UIs will still have to be built. Data schemas will still have to be defined. It doesn't reduce engineering effort. > He's literally talking about ownership rights tokenized for convenient settlement with a governance layer that can be overridden by officials. Sure, and maybe it would work great, but that doesn't require a blockchain either, it doesn't need to be an NFT on a public blockchain to provide that low-friction experience. Throwing 'blockchain' at a massively complex situation doesn't solve anything in and of itself. It seems to me that saying 'blockchain' allows its proponents to mentally skip to the end of the process, where the value actually comes from one of the early or middle steps. Step 1: Figure out how to encapsulate land registry records in a simple but comprehensive way Step 2: Make legislative changes such that these records are now the source of truth Step 3: Expose these records in an easily digestible and transferable way "Blockchain" is part of one of several solutions to step 3. That's literally all it is in that picture. (edit/addendum - > If you can't tell, I was a fan of the "semantic web" idea. I always found that really naive, perhaps I just never understood it, but it seemed to rely on honest actors categorising their content in ways that would allow it to be retrieved, catalogued and processed correctly, then presented to users. Some of the professors at my University, Southampton, were well into it. Even back in the late 90s I was jaded enough to know that anything relying on people to be honest and not use all sorts of SEO tricks to game the system was doomed. I know there was more to it than that, and some of its ideas did filter into the modern web in various ways.)
tsimionescu 4y ago
> The idea is that a universally trusted, always-on database allows you to build new types of applications. If you think a government bureaucrat or judge will trust a blockchain because "proof of X" when a dispute does happen, you've got some weirdly conflicting beliefs about government. Furthermore, if you think they would trust it more because it's public then they would trust a DB that, say, Price Waterhouse Coopers were running that any county clerk could sign in to with an audited account and put some information in, then again I really don't understand what is your mental picture of the government. However you slice it, the fact remains that, if there is ever a dispute on the ownership of your property, the government will want to consult an official paper trail of how that ownership came about. The more layers of abstraction you add, the more places your trail could be attacked, the longer it will take to do it, the more expensive experts will have to be hired for the trial and so on. Permissionless databases also lend themselves well to a kind of DoS attacks, where someone can trivially bury the real data in mountains of low-effort fake data (perhaps with some high-effort fakes thrown in as well). If the county clerk's intern can mint an NFT for each house in the real registry, I can easily mint 100,000,000 fake NFTs for the same houses as well - good luck disputing the ownership then if your house purchase wasn't registered in the paper registry. A permissioned DB run by a trusted entity (which could easily be some company, even though I hate that this is what usually happens, and would much rather see the government handling internally) that is responsible for auditing who has access to modify the digital registry and so on is the only possible solution for improving the bureaucracy of this. And even then, it will only improve it so much, since you will still need to send documents that prove you are who you say you are, and the other party is who they say they are, and you both agreed to the contract that made this transfer possible. Of course, much of this can also be fixed by using a government-certified digital certificate proving your identity (this is a common service in the EU at least).
kingaillas 4y ago
>I was listening to NPR a while ago and they had story on about governments that paid for ransomware attacks so they could access critical records. That's where we're at today. Was that before or after listening to NPR and their story about private companies that paid for ransomeware attacks (https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1003972313 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1003972313, many many others)?
dmitriid 4y ago
> You are vastly over-estimating the scale at which local government operates You, and every other crypto bro vastly underestimates the scale at which local government operates. And the scale here means not "number of transactions per second", but "number of edge cases that need to be handled on a daily basis." Some time ago I was in a conversation about how blockchain is going to solve everything around property registrations. Blockchain is just a slow distributed database that solves jack shit on its own, of course. Here are some simple examples that land registries have to deal with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564 Good luck to you and your summer intern minting NFTs for that. And that's before we go into the whole definition of ownership https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27217681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27217681

Nursie 4y ago

> You are vastly over-estimating the scale at which local government operates Not really, they could all deploy the same DB solution, we could open source it and containerise it and give it away for free. It could be run as a managed service for a small fee. There's no need for each local government to design their own or even run their own. Exactly the same as with a blockchain solution. > Your argument is akin to being anti-Twitter because the local government could build a notification system just as well My argument is not in the least bit akin to being anti-twitter. My argument is more like saying twitter is possible with multiple different back-ends, conceptually. I'm saying look, your short message service can be implemented in a bunch of different ways - in the back end it could run on a NoSQL server of some sort, or some sort of RDBMS, of which there are many, or we could probably mash something up with SQLite to get off the ground. The important thing that's addressing the need is to build a short message service. In contrast you're there insisting that only an MSSQL system will enable twitter. But with MSSQL we get archiving for free! And with MSSQL we can just UPDATE a record and it will be changed! Huh, how about that?! Nobody else can do that! And I'm here scratching my head and saying that's just an implementation detail, sure, it could work, there will be license fees etc, but it's not the only way, and we still need to do the rest of the work. > If parties agree on data sharing protocols, which is something we've all been talking about forever, then the network gains value. Yep. And those protocols are still going to have to be designed and deployed by someone, a blockchain solution doesn't magic these into existence any more than any other solution does. APIs and UIs will still have to be built. Data schemas will still have to be defined. It doesn't reduce engineering effort. > He's literally talking about ownership rights tokenized for convenient settlement with a governance layer that can be overridden by officials. Sure, and maybe it would work great, but that doesn't require a blockchain either, it doesn't need to be an NFT on a public blockchain to provide that low-friction experience. Throwing 'blockchain' at a massively complex situation doesn't solve anything in and of itself. It seems to me that saying 'blockchain' allows its proponents to mentally skip to the end of the process, where the value actually comes from one of the early or middle steps. Step 1: Figure out how to encapsulate land registry records in a simple but comprehensive way Step 2: Make legislative changes such that these records are now the source of truth Step 3: Expose these records in an easily digestible and transferable way "Blockchain" is part of one of several solutions to step 3. That's literally all it is in that picture. (edit/addendum - > If you can't tell, I was a fan of the "semantic web" idea. I always found that really naive, perhaps I just never understood it, but it seemed to rely on honest actors categorising their content in ways that would allow it to be retrieved, catalogued and processed correctly, then presented to users. Some of the professors at my University, Southampton, were well into it. Even back in the late 90s I was jaded enough to know that anything relying on people to be honest and not use all sorts of SEO tricks to game the system was doomed. I know there was more to it than that, and some of its ideas did filter into the modern web in various ways.)

tsimionescu 4y ago

> The idea is that a universally trusted, always-on database allows you to build new types of applications. If you think a government bureaucrat or judge will trust a blockchain because "proof of X" when a dispute does happen, you've got some weirdly conflicting beliefs about government. Furthermore, if you think they would trust it more because it's public then they would trust a DB that, say, Price Waterhouse Coopers were running that any county clerk could sign in to with an audited account and put some information in, then again I really don't understand what is your mental picture of the government. However you slice it, the fact remains that, if there is ever a dispute on the ownership of your property, the government will want to consult an official paper trail of how that ownership came about. The more layers of abstraction you add, the more places your trail could be attacked, the longer it will take to do it, the more expensive experts will have to be hired for the trial and so on. Permissionless databases also lend themselves well to a kind of DoS attacks, where someone can trivially bury the real data in mountains of low-effort fake data (perhaps with some high-effort fakes thrown in as well). If the county clerk's intern can mint an NFT for each house in the real registry, I can easily mint 100,000,000 fake NFTs for the same houses as well - good luck disputing the ownership then if your house purchase wasn't registered in the paper registry. A permissioned DB run by a trusted entity (which could easily be some company, even though I hate that this is what usually happens, and would much rather see the government handling internally) that is responsible for auditing who has access to modify the digital registry and so on is the only possible solution for improving the bureaucracy of this. And even then, it will only improve it so much, since you will still need to send documents that prove you are who you say you are, and the other party is who they say they are, and you both agreed to the contract that made this transfer possible. Of course, much of this can also be fixed by using a government-certified digital certificate proving your identity (this is a common service in the EU at least).

kingaillas 4y ago

>I was listening to NPR a while ago and they had story on about governments that paid for ransomware attacks so they could access critical records. That's where we're at today. Was that before or after listening to NPR and their story about private companies that paid for ransomeware attacks (https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1003972313 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1003972313, many many others)?

dmitriid 4y ago

> You are vastly over-estimating the scale at which local government operates You, and every other crypto bro vastly underestimates the scale at which local government operates. And the scale here means not "number of transactions per second", but "number of edge cases that need to be handled on a daily basis." Some time ago I was in a conversation about how blockchain is going to solve everything around property registrations. Blockchain is just a slow distributed database that solves jack shit on its own, of course. Here are some simple examples that land registries have to deal with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564 Good luck to you and your summer intern minting NFTs for that. And that's before we go into the whole definition of ownership https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27217681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27217681