7 ms·

"but projects like the State of California’s effort to put auto registration on a blockchain are likely to simplify the painful process of dealing with the Depa

"but projects like the State of California’s effort to put auto registration on a blockchain are likely to simplify the painful process of dealing with the Department of Motor Vehicles." This is one of the most outrageously ridiculous sentence fragments I've ever read in my entire life. Just utterly deranged. Like literally what could blockchain offer the California DMV that a centralized database could not?

PaulHoule 4y ago
A permissioned blockchain might be good for that scenario. If each DMV office had its own read/write copy of the database and it replicated to all the others, that would be a workable answer. Each police department and maybe even every police car, could update itself asynchronously, so if a police car went out of network range it would still have a complete copy of the database. If there were 100 million registered cars and 10 kb of data per car that’s a very comfortable 1 TB of data and if each car got updated once a year that is about 10 GB a day which is a lot for a mobile plan but no trouble to update when you get back to the station.
crop_rotation 4y ago
> Like literally what could blockchain offer the California DMV that a centralized database could not? A lot of mumbo jumbo.
nasmorn 4y ago
Additional possibilities to pay out high consulting fees to friends
tyingq 4y ago
I can maybe see some "chain of custody" type stuff for vehicle titles and transfers. But, of course, regular old cryptographic signing into a regular ledger works for that.
- D13Fd 4y ago
  Or they could just use a regular database maintained by the state.
  - tyingq 4y ago
    They can. There's presumably some value in things like digitally signing odometer entries, titles marked as salvage, etc, from dealerships to discourage meddling. It's an area where corruption/fraud has been around a long time. Edit: Note that I never pitched a blockchain. I mentioned digitally signed entries in a regular ledger would work. And I'm not saying signing is a panacea. Just adds some accountability that either the key owner made the entry, or lost control of their key. So it shores up historical holes like bribing an underpaid DMV employee to doctor your title.
    - D13Fd 4y ago
      > There's presumably some value in things like digitally signing odometer entries, titles marked as salvage, etc, from dealerships to discourage meddling. It's an area where corruption/fraud has been around a long time. What value do you presume? Having the odometer readings digitally signed in a blockchain database does zilch to prevent fraud. The fraud happens when the person inputs the reading. Likewise, "titles marked as salvage . . . from dealerships to discourage meddling" -- what about blockchain discourages "meddling" over what can be done with a centralized database in the control of the state?
    - PKop 4y ago
      How does a decentralized system emerge to solve this? Crypto currencies reward the network with tokens self-contained within the network. What would be given to the public to run this network? Also tying the state of physical reality with a digital ledger is...nearly impossible without simply granting authority to a central player to dictate what the truth state is. How can a blockchain guarantee what is written into it comports with the state of the physical world (which exists separate from it?). This can sort of be done centrally, but then you have to trust this party, at which point they should just run a more efficient regular database. But how can a decentralized network write information to this shared database? How can any of the information be verified? Even honest actors have no means of verifying what they are writing to it is true. Think about it.. there is some odometer somewhere whose state is going to be written. How is it determined? When one reads the ledger, how can you trust what you see there matches the true state of the odometer or whatever? See how this chasm between ledger and physical reality can't really be bridged? These sovereign state matters at the end of the day require to defer to what the state says anyways. A rube goldbergian blockchain solution tacked on top solves nothing here.
fauxpause_ 4y ago
Not your keys, not your car (registration).
indymike 4y ago
I for one totally trust an organization that can't operate a "pick a number" machine correctly to get my official ID and driver's license right on the block chain.
kolinko 4y ago
As someone who spent ~8 years in the blockchain space... I absolutely agree with you, and so most of my friends from the space. There is nothing in blockchain that will help with the issues in DMV. If anything, adding blockchain may complicate things.
- lysecret 4y ago
  Absolutely 100% will complicate things.
  - spaceman_2020 4y ago
    Imo it can be useful for authenticating records, especially in a global context where you might not have access to any local authentication routes. Like if you’re hiring a remote worker who went to college in some small Bangladeshi university, it’s not straightforward to authenticate their degrees. If the record was somehow on the blockchain, you could authenticate it even if there was no local infrastructure in Bangladesh to route your authentication demands.
djl0 4y ago
I've never heard of this project, so I can't speak to its implementation, however blockchain to handle DB + access api for relatively slow db operations I think is one of the rare great current blockchain use-cases. If done well it has the potential to be a piece of open-sourced infrastructure. And once it's done once well, it could be replicated to every dmv-like entity (IE almost every permit or sign-off based process) in the world. And the comparison to a state-run database, I think many of us would agree that is an area where there is plenty of room for improvement. But this is the first I'm hearing of this project, so I'm not advocating for it specifically.
- D13Fd 4y ago
  > blockchain to handle DB + access api for relatively slow db operations I think is one of the rare great current blockchain use-cases Ok, sure, it's OK for car registration to be slow and expensive in compute terms. But what benefit does blockchain have here? What could blockchain possibly add that a private database maintained by the state with otherwise equivalent functionality couldn't do better? This is a textbook situation where there is a trusted third party. In fact, the state is the party whose opinion controls in this situation. It's not like people are registering cars for fun, the are doing it because it's a government requirement.
  - edgyquant 4y ago
    It might remove the need for the state to be involved at all, other than for litigation purposes. You’re basically saying things are fine already, which a lot of people disagree with.
  - djl0 4y ago
    In this case, I'm saying that the state can leverage the blockchain for infrastructure and DB access/permission/security. I haven't worked in this specific space, but having a state-affiliated key signing off on a blob of data and store that on the blockchain (and using a standardized open-source front-end for state-side or citizen-side view and editing) has potential to be a much more elegant and robust solution than every state agency around the world creating it's own front and back-end. I agree that in this case it's not about abstracting trust from centralized authority.
orblivion 4y ago
I haven't owned a car for very long. Are there ever cases where the status of a registration is in dispute? This plan essentially makes their database public, hopefully encrypted, with registrants having means to decrypt their own record. Maybe that could help in some cases.
ethicalsmacker 4y ago
Well, it couldn't make the DMV any worse.
- D13Fd 4y ago
  You say that, but it's clearly not true. Imagine all the problems of the DMV as it is now, plus dealing with a buggy blockchain app where people use malware to steal your car registration. Or, in 10 years, when you have to download and install buggy, poorly-maintained apps and figure out how they work, just to sell your car. It can definitely be worse.
  - ethicalsmacker 4y ago
    Fair enough. It's hard to imagine a worse DMV, but anything is possible!
krsdcbl 4y ago
I have to agree, and on top of everything i deem this a straight up wishful reversal of the likely outcome: Vehicle registration is governed by a central authority _by law_, not by technical necessity. Therefore blockchaining-up the storage of registrations themselves will likely do very little to remove the need to deal with the responsible department -- it might rather make dealing with the DMV _much worse_ since they'll not have full authority over their records anymore, while third parties might be able to interface with them however they see fit, yet with no official communication channels with the department and zero authority over the actual legal side of registrations. And even if they do keep full control over the nodes & contracts and just make it "Blockchain" for the buzzwords sake, the immutable nature of those records could very well end up being of little more use than having a persistent "paper trail", yet make it an absolute nightmare to correct human errors if the tech isn't implemented very carefully, and if personnel isn't very well versed in handling this new system. At the very best, it could give retail more accessible ways of handling registrations directly on sale, but that'd still mandate a huge additional support and oversight effort by the department and might easily result in a much worse shitshow than current bureaucratic issues could ever be.
ghaff 4y ago
The government blockchain projects that I'm aware of that have had some success (AFAIK. I've been away from the space for a while and was only ever peripherally involved, e.g. https://digital.gov.bc.ca/digital-trust/ https://digital.gov.bc.ca/digital-trust/) it was more about having information exchange and a coherent view of information across a multitude of organizations. Not so much the cryptography, immutability, etc. Mind you I'm actually not sure what the CA DMV would gain. It seems they're the only source of truth that matters with respect to CA residents. Title information maybe given that does move from owner to owner.
- PKop 4y ago
  But how could title information be decentrally controlled? How would random 3rd parties running a node (and why would they do this? What would be their compensation?) be able to verify anything about the state of some thing that exists in the physical world like claim to title? How is consensus reached? If one reads the chain, how do you verify what it says is true? All of this still requires a central authority to decide these things, so they should just manage the database themselves. The "public" would not be permitted to just write to this permisionlessly.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    These are private/business blockchains, not public ones. Again, know nothing about the CA DMV case so no idea what the rationale is. And, yes, in a lot of cases, it makes more sense for one entity to be the sole arbiter of truth.
    - PKop 4y ago
      In what sense are they "blockchains" (as understood in the "crypto" sense) if they are not de-centrally written to? Is there proof of work? Distributed consensus? Can the public read entries from the ledger and verify something cryptographically? Who is the arbiter of truth in private/business blockchain? Public blockchains that produce currencies reward operators of nodes with a token that is self-contained within the system. How does any of this map to private/business chains, or any other "blockchain" that is somehow mapping some truth state external to the chain into it? It seems these words are thrown around without any meaning, for marketing purposes.
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
The thing that struck me is that, besides that deranged sentence, the author comes off as quite reasonable. He said he was an early believer in crypto and blockchains, but he doesn't deny all the crazy bad shit that has gone on with crypto. So the fact that one of the best examples he can think of to defend the utility of blockchain is this deranged sentence just shows how hard it is for people to give up on things that they've invested a lot of their personal belief in. There is just "no there there", but it will take a long time for folks to realize it.
- jsutton 4y ago
  On the contrary, there is a there there, it just takes a tremendous effort and coordination to get to a point where it's actually useful.
  - mjburgess 4y ago
    Useful for what? A peer-to-peer decentralised network of database nodes which is "immutable" only insofar as a peer cannot afford to outspend the network... is useful for what ? The only use-case identified so far is defeating state regulation of finance, ie., crime.
    - s1gnp0st 4y ago
      What of the crime of indirect taxation via unlimited monetary expansion which disproportionately hurts the poor and helps the already rich?
      - nathan_compton 4y ago
        To the extent that this is an accurate characterization of the status quo, its a social problem, not a technological one. No amount of technology will save us from power and its abuse and, in fact, the idea that technology will save us from the problem of building and participating in a just society is, in my opinion, part of the spectacle that keeps us docile in the face of power.
avmich 4y ago
> Like literally what could blockchain offer the California DMV that a centralized database could not? "After attempts to restore from backups failed because backups turned out to be incorrect, DMV head had to admit that they lost some data from the centralized database after a black-hat hackers attack. 'Please go to DMV and re-register your vehicle', the head was quoted as saying, 'because you're required by law to drive in a registered vehicle'"
spaceman_2020 4y ago
Man, blockchain tech is falling so far behind on the user experience front that it’s not even funny. There was a bug on Sushiswap, a few days back, that required revoking access to the contract for each token. To do that, you had to first somehow find the exact contract, find it on Etherscan, give it “write” access from your wallet, then revoke access to each token one by one from your wallet. This process has literally not changed in 3 years. Metamask is almost 100% the same as it was in 2020. All that money and dev energy is going into building increasingly esoteric DeFi ponzis. None of them want to fix the actual problem of bringing more users. Total active crypto users outside of exchanges is in the tens of thousands at most.
asdfman123 4y ago
You see, it’s fully decentralized. When dealing with automobile licensing, no single centralized authority has full contr… okay, I see your point now.
dns_snek 4y ago
Proponents would likely say that a public blockchain would make it easy to prove, verify ownership of <vehicle/property>, maybe even transfer it, but then so could a centralized database with a publicly accessible API. It's an modernization issue at the end of the day, not a data storage issue.

PaulHoule 4y ago

A permissioned blockchain might be good for that scenario. If each DMV office had its own read/write copy of the database and it replicated to all the others, that would be a workable answer. Each police department and maybe even every police car, could update itself asynchronously, so if a police car went out of network range it would still have a complete copy of the database. If there were 100 million registered cars and 10 kb of data per car that’s a very comfortable 1 TB of data and if each car got updated once a year that is about 10 GB a day which is a lot for a mobile plan but no trouble to update when you get back to the station.

crop_rotation 4y ago

> Like literally what could blockchain offer the California DMV that a centralized database could not? A lot of mumbo jumbo.

nasmorn 4y ago

Additional possibilities to pay out high consulting fees to friends

tyingq 4y ago

I can maybe see some "chain of custody" type stuff for vehicle titles and transfers. But, of course, regular old cryptographic signing into a regular ledger works for that.

D13Fd 4y ago
Or they could just use a regular database maintained by the state.
- tyingq 4y ago
  They can. There's presumably some value in things like digitally signing odometer entries, titles marked as salvage, etc, from dealerships to discourage meddling. It's an area where corruption/fraud has been around a long time. Edit: Note that I never pitched a blockchain. I mentioned digitally signed entries in a regular ledger would work. And I'm not saying signing is a panacea. Just adds some accountability that either the key owner made the entry, or lost control of their key. So it shores up historical holes like bribing an underpaid DMV employee to doctor your title.
  - D13Fd 4y ago
    > There's presumably some value in things like digitally signing odometer entries, titles marked as salvage, etc, from dealerships to discourage meddling. It's an area where corruption/fraud has been around a long time. What value do you presume? Having the odometer readings digitally signed in a blockchain database does zilch to prevent fraud. The fraud happens when the person inputs the reading. Likewise, "titles marked as salvage . . . from dealerships to discourage meddling" -- what about blockchain discourages "meddling" over what can be done with a centralized database in the control of the state?
  - PKop 4y ago
    How does a decentralized system emerge to solve this? Crypto currencies reward the network with tokens self-contained within the network. What would be given to the public to run this network? Also tying the state of physical reality with a digital ledger is...nearly impossible without simply granting authority to a central player to dictate what the truth state is. How can a blockchain guarantee what is written into it comports with the state of the physical world (which exists separate from it?). This can sort of be done centrally, but then you have to trust this party, at which point they should just run a more efficient regular database. But how can a decentralized network write information to this shared database? How can any of the information be verified? Even honest actors have no means of verifying what they are writing to it is true. Think about it.. there is some odometer somewhere whose state is going to be written. How is it determined? When one reads the ledger, how can you trust what you see there matches the true state of the odometer or whatever? See how this chasm between ledger and physical reality can't really be bridged? These sovereign state matters at the end of the day require to defer to what the state says anyways. A rube goldbergian blockchain solution tacked on top solves nothing here.

fauxpause_ 4y ago

Not your keys, not your car (registration).

indymike 4y ago

I for one totally trust an organization that can't operate a "pick a number" machine correctly to get my official ID and driver's license right on the block chain.

kolinko 4y ago

As someone who spent ~8 years in the blockchain space... I absolutely agree with you, and so most of my friends from the space. There is nothing in blockchain that will help with the issues in DMV. If anything, adding blockchain may complicate things.

lysecret 4y ago
Absolutely 100% will complicate things.
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  Imo it can be useful for authenticating records, especially in a global context where you might not have access to any local authentication routes. Like if you’re hiring a remote worker who went to college in some small Bangladeshi university, it’s not straightforward to authenticate their degrees. If the record was somehow on the blockchain, you could authenticate it even if there was no local infrastructure in Bangladesh to route your authentication demands.

djl0 4y ago

I've never heard of this project, so I can't speak to its implementation, however blockchain to handle DB + access api for relatively slow db operations I think is one of the rare great current blockchain use-cases. If done well it has the potential to be a piece of open-sourced infrastructure. And once it's done once well, it could be replicated to every dmv-like entity (IE almost every permit or sign-off based process) in the world. And the comparison to a state-run database, I think many of us would agree that is an area where there is plenty of room for improvement. But this is the first I'm hearing of this project, so I'm not advocating for it specifically.

D13Fd 4y ago
> blockchain to handle DB + access api for relatively slow db operations I think is one of the rare great current blockchain use-cases Ok, sure, it's OK for car registration to be slow and expensive in compute terms. But what benefit does blockchain have here? What could blockchain possibly add that a private database maintained by the state with otherwise equivalent functionality couldn't do better? This is a textbook situation where there is a trusted third party. In fact, the state is the party whose opinion controls in this situation. It's not like people are registering cars for fun, the are doing it because it's a government requirement.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  It might remove the need for the state to be involved at all, other than for litigation purposes. You’re basically saying things are fine already, which a lot of people disagree with.
- djl0 4y ago
  In this case, I'm saying that the state can leverage the blockchain for infrastructure and DB access/permission/security. I haven't worked in this specific space, but having a state-affiliated key signing off on a blob of data and store that on the blockchain (and using a standardized open-source front-end for state-side or citizen-side view and editing) has potential to be a much more elegant and robust solution than every state agency around the world creating it's own front and back-end. I agree that in this case it's not about abstracting trust from centralized authority.

orblivion 4y ago

I haven't owned a car for very long. Are there ever cases where the status of a registration is in dispute? This plan essentially makes their database public, hopefully encrypted, with registrants having means to decrypt their own record. Maybe that could help in some cases.

ethicalsmacker 4y ago

Well, it couldn't make the DMV any worse.

D13Fd 4y ago
You say that, but it's clearly not true. Imagine all the problems of the DMV as it is now, plus dealing with a buggy blockchain app where people use malware to steal your car registration. Or, in 10 years, when you have to download and install buggy, poorly-maintained apps and figure out how they work, just to sell your car. It can definitely be worse.
- ethicalsmacker 4y ago
  Fair enough. It's hard to imagine a worse DMV, but anything is possible!

krsdcbl 4y ago

I have to agree, and on top of everything i deem this a straight up wishful reversal of the likely outcome: Vehicle registration is governed by a central authority _by law_, not by technical necessity. Therefore blockchaining-up the storage of registrations themselves will likely do very little to remove the need to deal with the responsible department -- it might rather make dealing with the DMV _much worse_ since they'll not have full authority over their records anymore, while third parties might be able to interface with them however they see fit, yet with no official communication channels with the department and zero authority over the actual legal side of registrations. And even if they do keep full control over the nodes & contracts and just make it "Blockchain" for the buzzwords sake, the immutable nature of those records could very well end up being of little more use than having a persistent "paper trail", yet make it an absolute nightmare to correct human errors if the tech isn't implemented very carefully, and if personnel isn't very well versed in handling this new system. At the very best, it could give retail more accessible ways of handling registrations directly on sale, but that'd still mandate a huge additional support and oversight effort by the department and might easily result in a much worse shitshow than current bureaucratic issues could ever be.

ghaff 4y ago

The government blockchain projects that I'm aware of that have had some success (AFAIK. I've been away from the space for a while and was only ever peripherally involved, e.g. https://digital.gov.bc.ca/digital-trust/ https://digital.gov.bc.ca/digital-trust/) it was more about having information exchange and a coherent view of information across a multitude of organizations. Not so much the cryptography, immutability, etc. Mind you I'm actually not sure what the CA DMV would gain. It seems they're the only source of truth that matters with respect to CA residents. Title information maybe given that does move from owner to owner.

PKop 4y ago
But how could title information be decentrally controlled? How would random 3rd parties running a node (and why would they do this? What would be their compensation?) be able to verify anything about the state of some thing that exists in the physical world like claim to title? How is consensus reached? If one reads the chain, how do you verify what it says is true? All of this still requires a central authority to decide these things, so they should just manage the database themselves. The "public" would not be permitted to just write to this permisionlessly.
- ghaff 4y ago
  These are private/business blockchains, not public ones. Again, know nothing about the CA DMV case so no idea what the rationale is. And, yes, in a lot of cases, it makes more sense for one entity to be the sole arbiter of truth.
  - PKop 4y ago
    In what sense are they "blockchains" (as understood in the "crypto" sense) if they are not de-centrally written to? Is there proof of work? Distributed consensus? Can the public read entries from the ledger and verify something cryptographically? Who is the arbiter of truth in private/business blockchain? Public blockchains that produce currencies reward operators of nodes with a token that is self-contained within the system. How does any of this map to private/business chains, or any other "blockchain" that is somehow mapping some truth state external to the chain into it? It seems these words are thrown around without any meaning, for marketing purposes.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

The thing that struck me is that, besides that deranged sentence, the author comes off as quite reasonable. He said he was an early believer in crypto and blockchains, but he doesn't deny all the crazy bad shit that has gone on with crypto. So the fact that one of the best examples he can think of to defend the utility of blockchain is this deranged sentence just shows how hard it is for people to give up on things that they've invested a lot of their personal belief in. There is just "no there there", but it will take a long time for folks to realize it.

jsutton 4y ago
On the contrary, there is a there there, it just takes a tremendous effort and coordination to get to a point where it's actually useful.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  Useful for what? A peer-to-peer decentralised network of database nodes which is "immutable" only insofar as a peer cannot afford to outspend the network... is useful for what ? The only use-case identified so far is defeating state regulation of finance, ie., crime.
  - s1gnp0st 4y ago
    What of the crime of indirect taxation via unlimited monetary expansion which disproportionately hurts the poor and helps the already rich?
    - nathan_compton 4y ago
      To the extent that this is an accurate characterization of the status quo, its a social problem, not a technological one. No amount of technology will save us from power and its abuse and, in fact, the idea that technology will save us from the problem of building and participating in a just society is, in my opinion, part of the spectacle that keeps us docile in the face of power.

avmich 4y ago

> Like literally what could blockchain offer the California DMV that a centralized database could not? "After attempts to restore from backups failed because backups turned out to be incorrect, DMV head had to admit that they lost some data from the centralized database after a black-hat hackers attack. 'Please go to DMV and re-register your vehicle', the head was quoted as saying, 'because you're required by law to drive in a registered vehicle'"

spaceman_2020 4y ago

Man, blockchain tech is falling so far behind on the user experience front that it’s not even funny. There was a bug on Sushiswap, a few days back, that required revoking access to the contract for each token. To do that, you had to first somehow find the exact contract, find it on Etherscan, give it “write” access from your wallet, then revoke access to each token one by one from your wallet. This process has literally not changed in 3 years. Metamask is almost 100% the same as it was in 2020. All that money and dev energy is going into building increasingly esoteric DeFi ponzis. None of them want to fix the actual problem of bringing more users. Total active crypto users outside of exchanges is in the tens of thousands at most.

asdfman123 4y ago

You see, it’s fully decentralized. When dealing with automobile licensing, no single centralized authority has full contr… okay, I see your point now.

dns_snek 4y ago

Proponents would likely say that a public blockchain would make it easy to prove, verify ownership of <vehicle/property>, maybe even transfer it, but then so could a centralized database with a publicly accessible API. It's an modernization issue at the end of the day, not a data storage issue.