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California announces DMV-run blockchain through partnership with Tezos

31 points by DocFeind 4y ago

hot_gril 4y ago
> DMV-run blockchain Isn't this an oxymoron? I could see the point of the DMVs using a blockchain, but that of course depends on details that I don't expect them to handle properly.
kennyloginz 4y ago
Following the theory that the must funny thing that can happen, will happen - I predict that Kevin Mitnick will be called upon to rescue DMV data after this plan backfires and California has a mass ransomware issue.
slater 4y ago
DMV and crypto nonsense - two things that take ages and ages! :D
smazga 4y ago
That...actually makes good sense. No mention of coins or magic money. Just a good use for a persistent shared ledger. I guess the devil is in the implementation details. Still an interesting idea, though.
- lfodofod 4y ago
  From an European perspective the idea of a government registry tracking vehicle ownership seems downright bizarre. Our DMVs generally just track keepers and not owners. For land it makes sense, but cars? why?
  - detaro 4y ago
    ... as if we don't have vehicle registration certificates and databases of them in Europe?
    - lfodofod 4y ago
      Vehicle registration has nothing to do with ownership, you don’t have to own a car to register it. In Europe we don’t have titles for cars like in the US. You don’t have to perform a weird ritual of signing over the title to sell a car, you don’t need a written contract at all.
- credit_guy 4y ago
  But why would you need a persistent shared ledger, and not just a plain old database? The point of blockchain is to establish trust via technology when the participants are not trustworthy. Is DMV not trustworthy? If so why? I have a driver's license, and it never occurred to me not to trust DMV, and I never heard anyone else being worried about that either.
  - mistrial9 4y ago
    California DMV has had ID forgery problems for decades. IMO insider or sub-contractors complicit. They don't talk about it in public.
    - lern_too_spel 4y ago
      A distributed ledger doesn't solve that problem. Just sign the updates to a central database with the ID of the updater. We (people who aren't crypto scammers or scammees) have known how to make audit trails for decades now.
  - fardo 4y ago
    >If so why? Devils advocate, because increasing isolation of the necessarily public information a governmental service manages from the government organization servicing it is a good thing. The role of title transfers could itself be argued to be a form of governmental overreach. For the mere act of interpersonal buying and selling, why ought there be a database managing that? If we agreed such a database must exist (and horses and carriages seem to have done fine without one), wouldn’t it be preferable for individuals to be able to directly interface with that system interpersonally, rather than through a governmental intermediary? If we agree there must be a governmental intermediary, wouldn’t we prefer such an intermediary to solely pay for and maintain dumb infrastructure they are not expected to waste taxpayer time and money manipulating, rather than giving them control over the underlying transactions and wasting a great deal of both?
    - mdmglr 4y ago
      > The role of title transfers could itself be argued to be a form of governmental overreach. For the mere act of interpersonal buying and selling, why ought there be a database managing that? So the gov’t can make money. When you sale the car the new owner must pay tax.
- snapcaster 4y ago
  What makes you think that? This is another stupid attempt to shoehorn a blockchain in some place regular old SQL would work
  - MadcapJake 4y ago
    it's right there in the article: title scammers
    - toomuchtodo 4y ago
      19 states have electronic titling without a blockchain. As long as you have a central authority, you don’t need the blockchain. You do need robust identity verification and controls systems (IAM and audit logs), but the title and liens can still be records in a database. Want to look up if a title is legit? Offer a public page that accepts a VIN and spits out title details, no different than public real estate property records. Solution looking for a problem. This is someone’s pet project. Someone commits fraud? You have an audit log and verbose identity and transaction documentation when you need to go to court or reverse transactions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_lien_and_title https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_lien_and_title
      - yellowapple 4y ago
        > 19 states have electronic titling without a blockchain. Which means 19 states have their own databases, and exchanging data between them entails 19! (at minimum) separate ad-hoc connections doing a bunch of ETL work to massage between subtly-different database implementations. > As long as you have a central authority And who is that central authority? Nevada is not a central authority over Wyoming. The federal government could be that authority, but that just kicks the can down the road; the US (despite its best efforts) is not a central authority over Canada or Mexico or wherever else. Do we have the UN establish a global DMV? A distributed ledger sidesteps all this. Wyoming and Sweden don't have to trust each other and/or some third party when they can just post their records to the same chain.
        deleted 4y ago
toomuchtodo 4y ago
Blockchain folks trying to show wins as the financial noose tightens.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  not true - there was a California Blockchain Technology Committee that issued several long-winded reports, at the same time as Insurance and Big Banks were internally checking for technology applications. It just takes them years to do anything.. so it appears now. link in the article BWG-Final-Report-2020-July.pdf
mbStavola 4y ago
Completely nonsensical! The justifications in the article aren't very convincing and are all things you can do with a regular, centralized DB setup.
- DeRock 4y ago
  You're trying to frame the justification as something that will help the residents of California, but that's not the motivated party here. Instead, it should be framed as what helps the inevitable grift perpetrated through a government contractor to build this system? In that case the justification is a little more clear: 1. Its complicated enough to hide large costs and perhaps budget overruns 2. It uses a bunch of technology hype lingo, like 'blockchain' and 'NFT', to let the political DMV leadership market to the people that they are embracing the future 3. Its underlying mechanism is at best useless, so there will be no pressure on the contractor to deliver anything of value What a win!
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  The DMV is the obvious centralized source of truth for this data. It's ridiculous that anybody would even think to reach for a blockchain for this use case. Contact your assemblyperson.
- nelsonfigueroa 4y ago
  This was my first thought as well. I don't see what a blockchain will provide that a database can't.
csense 4y ago
> digital wallets that hold car title NFTs So question: Will you be able to atomically exchange your California-registered car title for Ether? What happens if the on-chain car ownership is different than the traditional notion of car ownership? If I lose my private key, do I still have ownership of the car? If I get hacked, and the hacker steals the private key to my car NFT, so the blockchain now says the car belongs to the hacker -- what happens? If "code = law" and what happens on the blockchain is the source of truth, don't these kinds of situations cause massive problems? If you have someone who has the ability to override what the blockchain says and say "Based on a police report of theft we are reassigning car #12345 from address 0x6666 to address 0x9abc," why would anyone want to pay hard Ether for an NFT that could be taken away from them at any time? If they're putting everyone's records on a blockchain, how are they going to handle the massive user education problems (and even tech access problems) of not everyone understanding what private keys are and how to keep them safe?
sjkdfkjdsfhjkhs 4y ago
web3isgoinggreat is gonna have a field day with stolen deeds that lead to cars belonging to people who never paid for it and/or tickets being sent to people who had nothing to do with the car.
flooow 4y ago
Keep getting LinkedIn messages from Tezos recruiters, quoting surprisingly high salaries. By all sensible metrics (e.g. token value, trading volume, actual real-world usage) they are just another dead crypto project. If I were in charge, I would take whatever cash I had extracted from 'bag-holders' and retire. But I suppose they want to keep up appearances for a little while, and this bit of news is probably good for a little more exit liquidity.
- zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
  Tezos is great. There's a fun NFT community that uses Tezos
  - hot_gril 4y ago
    HEN? I made something that integrates what that. Nice community, but HEN had a lot of issues and kept changing hands. Also, the big appeal of Tezos was the PoS, but now that Ethereum has switched to that, I don't see what edge Tezos has.
    - zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
      Yep, HEN. I had a lot of fun with it summer of 2021. Ethereum is proof of stake now, but Tezos is still cheaper, faster, and much less barrier to entry if you want to stake your coins.
      - hot_gril 4y ago
        Same. I put a lotttt of time into a project involving that in 2021, not enough to understand the inner workings of Tezos but enough to understand all the quirks of HEN. Part of the project was essentially a HEN client. The project was successful in the beginning but died when most of the rest of the team went to fight in a literal war, and the market crashed at the same time. > Tezos is still cheaper, faster, and much less barrier to entry if you want to stake your coins Yeah but those advantages only come from Tezos being used less, right? If not, how did they manage to design something strictly better than Ethereum?
dragonwriter 4y ago
> California DMV, said that the agency hopes to finalize its “shadow ledger,” or a full replication of the state’s title database on the blockchain, within the next three months before building consumer-facing applications, including digital wallets that hold car title NFTs > “The DMV’s perception of lagging behind should definitely change,” Gupta told Fortune in an exclusive interview. Yeah, jumping on the NFT bandwagon now totally conflicts with a perception of lagging behind. :eyeroll: Now we can go from “All my apes are gone” to "all my cars are gone”.
- hot_gril 4y ago
  The tiny sliver of hope I have is that they're working with a somewhat big name instead of whatever bogus contractors they've probably used in the past.
mdmglr 4y ago
How much money did the California state gov’t squander on this partnership with Tezos for something of dubious value as a title blockchain?
timcavel 4y ago
[dead]
jcpham2 4y ago
Hey look, someone is actually finally using blockchain for the stuff we were talking about in IRC chatrooms ten years ago - car titles, deeds, voting... Any ledger-ized industry where you'd like to reduce the total amount of fraud taking place. And then I read the comments saying "centralized db rulez"
kylehotchkiss 4y ago
Why can’t people in California use iOS wallet drivers licenses yet? Instead we get blockchain nonsense?
- hot_gril 4y ago
  And trying to force everyone who already has a driver's license to gather paperwork to get a RealID.
  - kylehotchkiss 4y ago
    That piece seems to be nationwide, but if you want to quickly get docs, Google fi will generate a bill for you quickly (if your current carrier won’t) and banks can show a new address on next statement.
    - hot_gril 4y ago
      That's a nice tip. Personally I want to never get a RealID. They keep pushing the flights deadline back anyway, and maybe the more of us lag, the longer they'll have to delay it.
olliej 4y ago
Why? What purpose does a slow, expensive, and energy intensive linked list serve?
- hot_gril 4y ago
  It's not all that energy-intensive. Tezos is proof-of-stake.
  - olliej 4y ago
    Ah ok, so just slow and expensive? Also what happens if someone decides to do a 50% attack? All the registrations get erased?
    - hot_gril 4y ago
      Slower and more expensive than a regular DB, yeah. But still reasonably quick and cheap for something infrequent like a car title operation, which would normally cost you a lot more in DMV fees. > Also what happens if someone decides to do a 50% attack? All the registrations get erased? I'm not sure exactly what a 51% stake gets to do to contracts. Probably you could show verification of a transferred title then undo that transfer, but not erase titles created before the attack or force new transfers. Anyway, if someone managed to pull that off (which is a big if), Tezos would be sufficiently broken that the DMV/Tezos would have to snapshot the blockchain before the attack and take things back to centralization. There'd be a big disruption, and whatever happened after the attack would be undone.
      - olliej 4y ago
        No, it is definitionally more expensive than a normal db. The entire security model of anything blockchain is “it’s too expensive to get to 50%”, and as such is littered in large losses in the small blockchains where 50% was not too expensive. There is nothing that a block chain does that has any value over a database of you are assuming trusted participants. The only thing block chains do is - questionably - resolve that problem. Now let’s go and look at a dmv example: do we believe that the dmv is going to allow anyone to write whatever they want in this nonsense? Let’s look at other constraints: vehicles can and are seized - when that happens the car owner has no say in the ownership, and so this idiotic application of blockchain nonsense can’t do the other thing it’s ostensibly good “the owner of the real thing controls the blockchain representation of that thing”. Similarly, mistakes are common in the real world, and a typo in the dmv can’t make a car permanently ownerless, so reversing changes has to be supported, so there goes “immutable” (which is always a nonsense goal). Seriously, the sooner these blockchain grifters are gone the better. The only thing blockchain has enabled consistently is crime: fraud, grifting, and ransomware. Certainly the latter is arguably the only example of something that is impossible without blockchain, so I guess blockchains did do at least one thing new.

31 points by DocFeind 4y ago

> DMV-run blockchain Isn't this an oxymoron? I could see the point of the DMVs using a blockchain, but that of course depends on details that I don't expect them to handle properly.

kennyloginz 4y ago

Following the theory that the must funny thing that can happen, will happen - I predict that Kevin Mitnick will be called upon to rescue DMV data after this plan backfires and California has a mass ransomware issue.

slater 4y ago

DMV and crypto nonsense - two things that take ages and ages! :D

smazga 4y ago

That...actually makes good sense. No mention of coins or magic money. Just a good use for a persistent shared ledger. I guess the devil is in the implementation details. Still an interesting idea, though.

lfodofod 4y ago
From an European perspective the idea of a government registry tracking vehicle ownership seems downright bizarre. Our DMVs generally just track keepers and not owners. For land it makes sense, but cars? why?
- detaro 4y ago
  ... as if we don't have vehicle registration certificates and databases of them in Europe?
  - lfodofod 4y ago
    Vehicle registration has nothing to do with ownership, you don’t have to own a car to register it. In Europe we don’t have titles for cars like in the US. You don’t have to perform a weird ritual of signing over the title to sell a car, you don’t need a written contract at all.
credit_guy 4y ago
But why would you need a persistent shared ledger, and not just a plain old database? The point of blockchain is to establish trust via technology when the participants are not trustworthy. Is DMV not trustworthy? If so why? I have a driver's license, and it never occurred to me not to trust DMV, and I never heard anyone else being worried about that either.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  California DMV has had ID forgery problems for decades. IMO insider or sub-contractors complicit. They don't talk about it in public.
  - lern_too_spel 4y ago
    A distributed ledger doesn't solve that problem. Just sign the updates to a central database with the ID of the updater. We (people who aren't crypto scammers or scammees) have known how to make audit trails for decades now.
- fardo 4y ago
  >If so why? Devils advocate, because increasing isolation of the necessarily public information a governmental service manages from the government organization servicing it is a good thing. The role of title transfers could itself be argued to be a form of governmental overreach. For the mere act of interpersonal buying and selling, why ought there be a database managing that? If we agreed such a database must exist (and horses and carriages seem to have done fine without one), wouldn’t it be preferable for individuals to be able to directly interface with that system interpersonally, rather than through a governmental intermediary? If we agree there must be a governmental intermediary, wouldn’t we prefer such an intermediary to solely pay for and maintain dumb infrastructure they are not expected to waste taxpayer time and money manipulating, rather than giving them control over the underlying transactions and wasting a great deal of both?
  - mdmglr 4y ago
    > The role of title transfers could itself be argued to be a form of governmental overreach. For the mere act of interpersonal buying and selling, why ought there be a database managing that? So the gov’t can make money. When you sale the car the new owner must pay tax.
snapcaster 4y ago
What makes you think that? This is another stupid attempt to shoehorn a blockchain in some place regular old SQL would work
- MadcapJake 4y ago
  it's right there in the article: title scammers
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    19 states have electronic titling without a blockchain. As long as you have a central authority, you don’t need the blockchain. You do need robust identity verification and controls systems (IAM and audit logs), but the title and liens can still be records in a database. Want to look up if a title is legit? Offer a public page that accepts a VIN and spits out title details, no different than public real estate property records. Solution looking for a problem. This is someone’s pet project. Someone commits fraud? You have an audit log and verbose identity and transaction documentation when you need to go to court or reverse transactions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_lien_and_title https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_lien_and_title
    - yellowapple 4y ago
      > 19 states have electronic titling without a blockchain. Which means 19 states have their own databases, and exchanging data between them entails 19! (at minimum) separate ad-hoc connections doing a bunch of ETL work to massage between subtly-different database implementations. > As long as you have a central authority And who is that central authority? Nevada is not a central authority over Wyoming. The federal government could be that authority, but that just kicks the can down the road; the US (despite its best efforts) is not a central authority over Canada or Mexico or wherever else. Do we have the UN establish a global DMV? A distributed ledger sidesteps all this. Wyoming and Sweden don't have to trust each other and/or some third party when they can just post their records to the same chain.
      - deleted 4y ago

toomuchtodo 4y ago

Blockchain folks trying to show wins as the financial noose tightens.

mistrial9 4y ago
not true - there was a California Blockchain Technology Committee that issued several long-winded reports, at the same time as Insurance and Big Banks were internally checking for technology applications. It just takes them years to do anything.. so it appears now. link in the article BWG-Final-Report-2020-July.pdf

mbStavola 4y ago

Completely nonsensical! The justifications in the article aren't very convincing and are all things you can do with a regular, centralized DB setup.

DeRock 4y ago
You're trying to frame the justification as something that will help the residents of California, but that's not the motivated party here. Instead, it should be framed as what helps the inevitable grift perpetrated through a government contractor to build this system? In that case the justification is a little more clear: 1. Its complicated enough to hide large costs and perhaps budget overruns 2. It uses a bunch of technology hype lingo, like 'blockchain' and 'NFT', to let the political DMV leadership market to the people that they are embracing the future 3. Its underlying mechanism is at best useless, so there will be no pressure on the contractor to deliver anything of value What a win!
lern_too_spel 4y ago
The DMV is the obvious centralized source of truth for this data. It's ridiculous that anybody would even think to reach for a blockchain for this use case. Contact your assemblyperson.
nelsonfigueroa 4y ago
This was my first thought as well. I don't see what a blockchain will provide that a database can't.

csense 4y ago

> digital wallets that hold car title NFTs So question: Will you be able to atomically exchange your California-registered car title for Ether? What happens if the on-chain car ownership is different than the traditional notion of car ownership? If I lose my private key, do I still have ownership of the car? If I get hacked, and the hacker steals the private key to my car NFT, so the blockchain now says the car belongs to the hacker -- what happens? If "code = law" and what happens on the blockchain is the source of truth, don't these kinds of situations cause massive problems? If you have someone who has the ability to override what the blockchain says and say "Based on a police report of theft we are reassigning car #12345 from address 0x6666 to address 0x9abc," why would anyone want to pay hard Ether for an NFT that could be taken away from them at any time? If they're putting everyone's records on a blockchain, how are they going to handle the massive user education problems (and even tech access problems) of not everyone understanding what private keys are and how to keep them safe?

sjkdfkjdsfhjkhs 4y ago

web3isgoinggreat is gonna have a field day with stolen deeds that lead to cars belonging to people who never paid for it and/or tickets being sent to people who had nothing to do with the car.

flooow 4y ago

Keep getting LinkedIn messages from Tezos recruiters, quoting surprisingly high salaries. By all sensible metrics (e.g. token value, trading volume, actual real-world usage) they are just another dead crypto project. If I were in charge, I would take whatever cash I had extracted from 'bag-holders' and retire. But I suppose they want to keep up appearances for a little while, and this bit of news is probably good for a little more exit liquidity.

zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
Tezos is great. There's a fun NFT community that uses Tezos
- hot_gril 4y ago
  HEN? I made something that integrates what that. Nice community, but HEN had a lot of issues and kept changing hands. Also, the big appeal of Tezos was the PoS, but now that Ethereum has switched to that, I don't see what edge Tezos has.
  - zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
    Yep, HEN. I had a lot of fun with it summer of 2021. Ethereum is proof of stake now, but Tezos is still cheaper, faster, and much less barrier to entry if you want to stake your coins.
    - hot_gril 4y ago
      Same. I put a lotttt of time into a project involving that in 2021, not enough to understand the inner workings of Tezos but enough to understand all the quirks of HEN. Part of the project was essentially a HEN client. The project was successful in the beginning but died when most of the rest of the team went to fight in a literal war, and the market crashed at the same time. > Tezos is still cheaper, faster, and much less barrier to entry if you want to stake your coins Yeah but those advantages only come from Tezos being used less, right? If not, how did they manage to design something strictly better than Ethereum?

dragonwriter 4y ago

> California DMV, said that the agency hopes to finalize its “shadow ledger,” or a full replication of the state’s title database on the blockchain, within the next three months before building consumer-facing applications, including digital wallets that hold car title NFTs > “The DMV’s perception of lagging behind should definitely change,” Gupta told Fortune in an exclusive interview. Yeah, jumping on the NFT bandwagon now totally conflicts with a perception of lagging behind. :eyeroll: Now we can go from “All my apes are gone” to "all my cars are gone”.

hot_gril 4y ago
The tiny sliver of hope I have is that they're working with a somewhat big name instead of whatever bogus contractors they've probably used in the past.

mdmglr 4y ago

How much money did the California state gov’t squander on this partnership with Tezos for something of dubious value as a title blockchain?

timcavel 4y ago

[dead]

jcpham2 4y ago

Hey look, someone is actually finally using blockchain for the stuff we were talking about in IRC chatrooms ten years ago - car titles, deeds, voting... Any ledger-ized industry where you'd like to reduce the total amount of fraud taking place. And then I read the comments saying "centralized db rulez"

kylehotchkiss 4y ago

Why can’t people in California use iOS wallet drivers licenses yet? Instead we get blockchain nonsense?

hot_gril 4y ago
And trying to force everyone who already has a driver's license to gather paperwork to get a RealID.
- kylehotchkiss 4y ago
  That piece seems to be nationwide, but if you want to quickly get docs, Google fi will generate a bill for you quickly (if your current carrier won’t) and banks can show a new address on next statement.
  - hot_gril 4y ago
    That's a nice tip. Personally I want to never get a RealID. They keep pushing the flights deadline back anyway, and maybe the more of us lag, the longer they'll have to delay it.

olliej 4y ago

Why? What purpose does a slow, expensive, and energy intensive linked list serve?

hot_gril 4y ago
It's not all that energy-intensive. Tezos is proof-of-stake.
- olliej 4y ago
  Ah ok, so just slow and expensive? Also what happens if someone decides to do a 50% attack? All the registrations get erased?
  - hot_gril 4y ago
    Slower and more expensive than a regular DB, yeah. But still reasonably quick and cheap for something infrequent like a car title operation, which would normally cost you a lot more in DMV fees. > Also what happens if someone decides to do a 50% attack? All the registrations get erased? I'm not sure exactly what a 51% stake gets to do to contracts. Probably you could show verification of a transferred title then undo that transfer, but not erase titles created before the attack or force new transfers. Anyway, if someone managed to pull that off (which is a big if), Tezos would be sufficiently broken that the DMV/Tezos would have to snapshot the blockchain before the attack and take things back to centralization. There'd be a big disruption, and whatever happened after the attack would be undone.
    - olliej 4y ago
      No, it is definitionally more expensive than a normal db. The entire security model of anything blockchain is “it’s too expensive to get to 50%”, and as such is littered in large losses in the small blockchains where 50% was not too expensive. There is nothing that a block chain does that has any value over a database of you are assuming trusted participants. The only thing block chains do is - questionably - resolve that problem. Now let’s go and look at a dmv example: do we believe that the dmv is going to allow anyone to write whatever they want in this nonsense? Let’s look at other constraints: vehicles can and are seized - when that happens the car owner has no say in the ownership, and so this idiotic application of blockchain nonsense can’t do the other thing it’s ostensibly good “the owner of the real thing controls the blockchain representation of that thing”. Similarly, mistakes are common in the real world, and a typo in the dmv can’t make a car permanently ownerless, so reversing changes has to be supported, so there goes “immutable” (which is always a nonsense goal). Seriously, the sooner these blockchain grifters are gone the better. The only thing blockchain has enabled consistently is crime: fraud, grifting, and ransomware. Certainly the latter is arguably the only example of something that is impossible without blockchain, so I guess blockchains did do at least one thing new.