6 ms·

California DMV wants to issue car titles as NFTs

26 points by mmoustafa 4y ago

mtmail 4y ago
NFT seems to be an idea ("hopes to create") by the chief digital officer. "The DMV worked with Oxhead Alpha and Tezos to create a private instance of the Tezos blockchain, which would increase security compared to relying on a public blockchain." My understanding is they have a blockchain completely run by the California DMV. In the future maybe multiple states, consumer facing applications, NFTs. It's not clear if the blockchain is in active use or used as source-of-truth of title ownership yet.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > “The DMV worked with Oxhead Alpha and Tezos to create a private instance of the Tezos blockchain […]” Given the amount of money California spends with AWS, and the fact that “private blockchain” is literally a turn-key AWS offering…why?
nrclark 4y ago
No, they won't. This will turn out like every other attempt to create "NFTs for X" or "Y but on the blockchain". Oxhead Alpha will milk the DMV until the project's funding runs out, and then it will be quietly killed. I wouldn't be surprised if the DMV's chief digital officer gets a kickback, or if they have a bunch of crypto holdings in that particular blockchain.
- exabrial 4y ago
  Probably an investor. That's usually how these things work. Just ask Pelosi's husband.
mrandish 4y ago
As a California resident for the past several decades, I would much prefer the DMV focus on addressing the far more fundamental issues in basic service fulfillment first.
CacheRules 4y ago
No one needed a reason to hate the DMV more.
Veliladon 4y ago
I know NFT disgust should be an automatic reflex but chains of title are probably one of the few areas where a publicly accessible, append only, blockchain ledger is a clear win for everyone involved.
- owenmarshall 4y ago
  Why? The entire purpose for a title is that you went to a large central entity with guns - the state - who will enforce your claim to property, with those guns if needed. There are precisely zero competitors who can issue an alternate title. The state definitely uses those guns to ensure that, because not doing so is an existential threat. There is one issuer, trusted universally. That problem is solved by a centrally maintained database, not a blockchain.
  - Veliladon 4y ago
    There's not one issuer. In the US there are 51 issuers of car titles alone (50 states + DC) not counting the territories. Plus while the title is signed but not registered with the new owner it's a bearer instrument. People wash titles by taking them out of state because there's no effective way of binding both title histories together.
    - owenmarshall 4y ago
      > there's no effective way of binding both title histories together. The DOJ and the NMVTIS would beg to differ. https://vehiclehistory.bja.ojp.gov/nmvtis_states https://vehiclehistory.bja.ojp.gov/nmvtis_states
    - joecool1029 4y ago
      There is a national system for reporting title information that every state except Hawaii participates in: https://vehiclehistory.bja.ojp.gov/nmvtis_states https://vehiclehistory.bja.ojp.gov/nmvtis_states
    - wolrah 4y ago
      Again though what benefits are offered by adding the complexity of a blockchain compared to simply having a shared central database? Either way to be effective you have to get all the parties involved to agree on using one system, that's the actually hard part, the technical side is trivial by comparison. The only situations where blockchains really make sense are when you have multiple parties involved who don't trust each other AND are unwilling to agree to trust a third party. Digital currency is basically it. Almost anything else is better served by a traditional database or append-only log. Certificate Transparency provides a good example of a more efficient way to do things when you're willing to at least partially trust certain authorities.
JohnFen 4y ago
I don't understand. Given that titles and such are necessarily centralized databases, what's the value of using blockchain and NFTs for this? The things that the article mentions don't seem to really provide value, as they can all be done just as easily with the existing systems.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  four years of committee meetings can't be wrong ! https://www.govops.ca.gov/what-we-do/blockchain-working-group/ https://www.govops.ca.gov/what-we-do/blockchain-working-grou... ps- everyone involved in the planning is on salary with healthcare
  - lern_too_spel 4y ago
    The bill that created this committee passed unopposed. https://legiscan.com/CA/bill/AB2658/2017 https://legiscan.com/CA/bill/AB2658/2017 Talk to your assemblyperson.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > I don’t understand. Given that titles and such are necessarily centralized databases, what’s the value of using blockchain and NFTs for this? My guess is some executive at DMV had a resume-padding idea for migration into the private sector, and didn’t factor in how long government projects are vs. the speed at which the hype cycle turns meant that by the time this “accomplishment” was on their resume, having been involved in any kind of NFT effort would no longer be a selling point.
- f00man2 4y ago
  Databases can be altered, blockchains can't.
  - AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
    Is that a feature, or a bug? When someone finds a bug in the smart contract which allows me to transfer the car title to you, or the DMV loses their keys, or $whatever happens and suddenly some 13-year-old elbonian hacker owns every car in California I think "restore from yesterday's backup" is a better solution than rewriting the immutable blockchain. And, anyway, blockchains can be altered, you just need a majority to agree. Look at eth.
link_108 4y ago
Tracking physical assets with NFTs will not end well, no way (that I have seen) to ensure the ownership is in sync. I've attempted to find out more in the past, see this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29271460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29271460, but the answers were not confidence inspiring and missed the point. There are services that claim to do this, however there is no guarantee that the person selling an asset needs to mention there's an NFT associated with the ownership of it.
- owenmarshall 4y ago
  It's entirely motivated thinking. For a real asset to be backed by an NFT it seems your options are either to maintain physical control over the asset, or to use legal maneuvering on other claims of title to make the NFT hold value. So a painting or gold bar goes in a vault and only changes hand after the NFT is sold, and land sales become contingent on NFT transfers - and I suspect a ton of people would be incredibly surprised to hear that even contractual clauses with indefinite survival periods very rarely last forever, instead surviving only for a defined statutory period! So under option one the NFT means the real item is worthless (and potentially not ever yours) because it is never in your actual possession, under option two it is subordinated to existing law. A lawyer friend once jokingly said anyone drawing a contract should replace any mention of "NFT" with "magic bean" and see if the fundamentals still held: if they did, you don't need a blockchain; if they don't, the contract is already deficient.
low_tech_love 4y ago
None of this makes any sense to me (seriously). A private instance of a blockchain? How’s that any different than a private server? Who’ll have access to this? Who’ll do the mining (or equivalent)? And why? Edit: Let me just add that I know very little to nothing about blockchains.
- f00man2 4y ago
  A private blockchain still is distributed across many servers. Key difference is an immutable record of what happened.
  - low_tech_love 4y ago
    How is that immutable if all the nodes connected to the blockchain are governed by the same entity? If you mean transparent, then ok, I can see it. However, my question then is, do we have an actual problem with transparency in car registry?
  - AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
    Regular databases can be distributed across many servers. If the blockchain is private, the DMV would have unilateral control to just roll things back if they desired. All of the public mirrors would notice that but they'd have no say in it. If the public nodes did have access the DMV wouldn't be able to control the chain (and wouldn't be able to revert mass errors/failures) and they won't let things out of their control. This is absolutely just buzzword soup.
kylehotchkiss 4y ago
Meanwhile, other states get the cool wallet.app based drivers license and the state where apple is headquartered might never see them.
westurner 4y ago
Can this also be solved with W3C Verified Claims and ~ https://blockcerts.org/ https://blockcerts.org/ (and an append-only, multiply distributed/synchronized/replicated/redundantly-backed-up permissioned database/Blockchain)? And then, again, what is the TPS of the DB? How many read and write Transactions Per Second do the candidate datastores support with or without strong Consistency, Availability, and/or Partition Tolerance? And then what about cryptographic Data Integrity assurances. FWIU, issuing shares on a Blockchain is challenging due to lost keys / shared cryptographic keys and reissuance?
- nrclark 4y ago
  "Possible" and "beneficial" are separate questions entirely. The whole point of government is to be a central authority. That's the DMV's entire job: to be a central authority for driver's licenses and vehicle titles. Their database isn't open for everybody to modify, and it also shouldn't be. It also shouldn't be open for everybody to read, because we have a right to privacy. What benefit does the DMV get from hosting its records on a blockchain? And what happens if that blockchain stops attracting miners? Does the DMV have to mine it? Does the price of mining rigs start to affect how much it costs to register your car? What happens if they get hit by a 51% attack? Your average Californian is definitely not a crypto user, and doesn't have a digital wallet. One in twenty don't even speak English. What happens when somebody loses their private key? If you have to keep those keys in a conventional database, then a blockchain makes zero sense except as a money-waster. There is nothing wrong with them just running a regular database, with normal SRE stuff like backups and replication. The California DMV has a lot of problems. But "how do we store records?" isn't one of them.
  - westurner 4y ago
    It takes patience to keep politely explaining the inadequacies of "5 people and the manager and the owner share the sole root backup credentials - which aren't cryptographic keys, so there is no way to tell whether data has been rewritten without the correct key - and tape backup responsibilities; and we have no way to verify the online database against the tape backups [so, can we write it off now]" Notes on centralized databases with Merkel hashes : https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/ https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/ Ctrl-F "trillian", "iavl" If you've ever set up SQL replication before, you wouldn't be claiming it's adequate. Are RDS and CloudSQL good enough? What does Accumulo do differently?

26 points by mmoustafa 4y ago

NFT seems to be an idea ("hopes to create") by the chief digital officer. "The DMV worked with Oxhead Alpha and Tezos to create a private instance of the Tezos blockchain, which would increase security compared to relying on a public blockchain." My understanding is they have a blockchain completely run by the California DMV. In the future maybe multiple states, consumer facing applications, NFTs. It's not clear if the blockchain is in active use or used as source-of-truth of title ownership yet.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> “The DMV worked with Oxhead Alpha and Tezos to create a private instance of the Tezos blockchain […]” Given the amount of money California spends with AWS, and the fact that “private blockchain” is literally a turn-key AWS offering…why?

nrclark 4y ago

No, they won't. This will turn out like every other attempt to create "NFTs for X" or "Y but on the blockchain". Oxhead Alpha will milk the DMV until the project's funding runs out, and then it will be quietly killed. I wouldn't be surprised if the DMV's chief digital officer gets a kickback, or if they have a bunch of crypto holdings in that particular blockchain.

exabrial 4y ago
Probably an investor. That's usually how these things work. Just ask Pelosi's husband.

mrandish 4y ago

As a California resident for the past several decades, I would much prefer the DMV focus on addressing the far more fundamental issues in basic service fulfillment first.

CacheRules 4y ago

No one needed a reason to hate the DMV more.

Veliladon 4y ago

I know NFT disgust should be an automatic reflex but chains of title are probably one of the few areas where a publicly accessible, append only, blockchain ledger is a clear win for everyone involved.

owenmarshall 4y ago
Why? The entire purpose for a title is that you went to a large central entity with guns - the state - who will enforce your claim to property, with those guns if needed. There are precisely zero competitors who can issue an alternate title. The state definitely uses those guns to ensure that, because not doing so is an existential threat. There is one issuer, trusted universally. That problem is solved by a centrally maintained database, not a blockchain.
- Veliladon 4y ago
  There's not one issuer. In the US there are 51 issuers of car titles alone (50 states + DC) not counting the territories. Plus while the title is signed but not registered with the new owner it's a bearer instrument. People wash titles by taking them out of state because there's no effective way of binding both title histories together.
  - owenmarshall 4y ago
    > there's no effective way of binding both title histories together. The DOJ and the NMVTIS would beg to differ. https://vehiclehistory.bja.ojp.gov/nmvtis_states https://vehiclehistory.bja.ojp.gov/nmvtis_states
  - joecool1029 4y ago
    There is a national system for reporting title information that every state except Hawaii participates in: https://vehiclehistory.bja.ojp.gov/nmvtis_states https://vehiclehistory.bja.ojp.gov/nmvtis_states
  - wolrah 4y ago
    Again though what benefits are offered by adding the complexity of a blockchain compared to simply having a shared central database? Either way to be effective you have to get all the parties involved to agree on using one system, that's the actually hard part, the technical side is trivial by comparison. The only situations where blockchains really make sense are when you have multiple parties involved who don't trust each other AND are unwilling to agree to trust a third party. Digital currency is basically it. Almost anything else is better served by a traditional database or append-only log. Certificate Transparency provides a good example of a more efficient way to do things when you're willing to at least partially trust certain authorities.

JohnFen 4y ago

I don't understand. Given that titles and such are necessarily centralized databases, what's the value of using blockchain and NFTs for this? The things that the article mentions don't seem to really provide value, as they can all be done just as easily with the existing systems.

mistrial9 4y ago
four years of committee meetings can't be wrong ! https://www.govops.ca.gov/what-we-do/blockchain-working-group/ https://www.govops.ca.gov/what-we-do/blockchain-working-grou... ps- everyone involved in the planning is on salary with healthcare
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  The bill that created this committee passed unopposed. https://legiscan.com/CA/bill/AB2658/2017 https://legiscan.com/CA/bill/AB2658/2017 Talk to your assemblyperson.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> I don’t understand. Given that titles and such are necessarily centralized databases, what’s the value of using blockchain and NFTs for this? My guess is some executive at DMV had a resume-padding idea for migration into the private sector, and didn’t factor in how long government projects are vs. the speed at which the hype cycle turns meant that by the time this “accomplishment” was on their resume, having been involved in any kind of NFT effort would no longer be a selling point.
f00man2 4y ago
Databases can be altered, blockchains can't.
- AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
  Is that a feature, or a bug? When someone finds a bug in the smart contract which allows me to transfer the car title to you, or the DMV loses their keys, or $whatever happens and suddenly some 13-year-old elbonian hacker owns every car in California I think "restore from yesterday's backup" is a better solution than rewriting the immutable blockchain. And, anyway, blockchains can be altered, you just need a majority to agree. Look at eth.

link_108 4y ago

Tracking physical assets with NFTs will not end well, no way (that I have seen) to ensure the ownership is in sync. I've attempted to find out more in the past, see this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29271460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29271460, but the answers were not confidence inspiring and missed the point. There are services that claim to do this, however there is no guarantee that the person selling an asset needs to mention there's an NFT associated with the ownership of it.

owenmarshall 4y ago
It's entirely motivated thinking. For a real asset to be backed by an NFT it seems your options are either to maintain physical control over the asset, or to use legal maneuvering on other claims of title to make the NFT hold value. So a painting or gold bar goes in a vault and only changes hand after the NFT is sold, and land sales become contingent on NFT transfers - and I suspect a ton of people would be incredibly surprised to hear that even contractual clauses with indefinite survival periods very rarely last forever, instead surviving only for a defined statutory period! So under option one the NFT means the real item is worthless (and potentially not ever yours) because it is never in your actual possession, under option two it is subordinated to existing law. A lawyer friend once jokingly said anyone drawing a contract should replace any mention of "NFT" with "magic bean" and see if the fundamentals still held: if they did, you don't need a blockchain; if they don't, the contract is already deficient.

low_tech_love 4y ago

None of this makes any sense to me (seriously). A private instance of a blockchain? How’s that any different than a private server? Who’ll have access to this? Who’ll do the mining (or equivalent)? And why? Edit: Let me just add that I know very little to nothing about blockchains.

f00man2 4y ago
A private blockchain still is distributed across many servers. Key difference is an immutable record of what happened.
- low_tech_love 4y ago
  How is that immutable if all the nodes connected to the blockchain are governed by the same entity? If you mean transparent, then ok, I can see it. However, my question then is, do we have an actual problem with transparency in car registry?
- AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
  Regular databases can be distributed across many servers. If the blockchain is private, the DMV would have unilateral control to just roll things back if they desired. All of the public mirrors would notice that but they'd have no say in it. If the public nodes did have access the DMV wouldn't be able to control the chain (and wouldn't be able to revert mass errors/failures) and they won't let things out of their control. This is absolutely just buzzword soup.

kylehotchkiss 4y ago

Meanwhile, other states get the cool wallet.app based drivers license and the state where apple is headquartered might never see them.

westurner 4y ago

Can this also be solved with W3C Verified Claims and ~ https://blockcerts.org/ https://blockcerts.org/ (and an append-only, multiply distributed/synchronized/replicated/redundantly-backed-up permissioned database/Blockchain)? And then, again, what is the TPS of the DB? How many read and write Transactions Per Second do the candidate datastores support with or without strong Consistency, Availability, and/or Partition Tolerance? And then what about cryptographic Data Integrity assurances. FWIU, issuing shares on a Blockchain is challenging due to lost keys / shared cryptographic keys and reissuance?

nrclark 4y ago
"Possible" and "beneficial" are separate questions entirely. The whole point of government is to be a central authority. That's the DMV's entire job: to be a central authority for driver's licenses and vehicle titles. Their database isn't open for everybody to modify, and it also shouldn't be. It also shouldn't be open for everybody to read, because we have a right to privacy. What benefit does the DMV get from hosting its records on a blockchain? And what happens if that blockchain stops attracting miners? Does the DMV have to mine it? Does the price of mining rigs start to affect how much it costs to register your car? What happens if they get hit by a 51% attack? Your average Californian is definitely not a crypto user, and doesn't have a digital wallet. One in twenty don't even speak English. What happens when somebody loses their private key? If you have to keep those keys in a conventional database, then a blockchain makes zero sense except as a money-waster. There is nothing wrong with them just running a regular database, with normal SRE stuff like backups and replication. The California DMV has a lot of problems. But "how do we store records?" isn't one of them.
- westurner 4y ago
  It takes patience to keep politely explaining the inadequacies of "5 people and the manager and the owner share the sole root backup credentials - which aren't cryptographic keys, so there is no way to tell whether data has been rewritten without the correct key - and tape backup responsibilities; and we have no way to verify the online database against the tape backups [so, can we write it off now]" Notes on centralized databases with Merkel hashes : https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/ https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/ Ctrl-F "trillian", "iavl" If you've ever set up SQL replication before, you wouldn't be claiming it's adequate. Are RDS and CloudSQL good enough? What does Accumulo do differently?