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Isn’t the big issue that all of this can be recorded in a government database instead of a blockchain. And a government judge is the one who at the end of the day decides all these title issues. Being that the government still has the monopoly on violence and the blockchain doesn’t have a single soldier it’s the government that ends up enforcing the title.
And the people trying to enforce their title sort of prefer the titles recorded with the person with the monopoly of violence.
Title for blockchain has been around for 7-10 years.
Honestly the only blockchain thing I believe has some potential is ad attribution that Antonio Garcia’s doing but maybe I just don’t know the intricacies of that industry.
Russia proves the problem with blockchain for a lot of contracts. You want the enforcer of a contract to have a violent force. The Minsk Agreement on a smart contract doesn’t stop Russia from invading.
Yeah, that's part of it, but it wasn't the particular point I was trying to make. The bigger point I am trying to make is that land titles aren't simple A --> B transactions; they're really complicated. Various interests in a piece of property can be divided and subdivided and sold and reconstituted with the parent tract and each one of these interests would need a separate NFT created for it and yeah, maybe you could theoretically do this but at best you'd just end up with a more complicated version of the existing system. And then you add the complicating factor that a lot of things that affect title aren't filed with the recorder, but with the civil court, or with the probate court, or the tax assessor, and now you essentially have to put every shred of paper in the county government on the blockchain somehow in order to make sure everything is covered.
And even then you still wouldn't eliminate the need for title insurance, because title insurance largely protects against issues that occur outside the existing system. You can implement as many recording requirements as you want, but there will always be title issue which, by their very nature can't be determined simply by looking at records. I would add that blockchain for contracts may be a thing but deeds aren't contracts and title insurance isn't insurance against someone not following through on their end of the deal. Honestly, I'm not entirely sure what your getting at here or what your understanding of the current recording system here in the US is, so I apologize if I'm misunderstanding you, but I'd be happy to answer any questions you may have.
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This is part of it: existing proof of work is absurdly inefficient compared to a trusted database. Even proof-of-stake is still much more complex if a trusted party exists.
But I'd also point out that blockchain-related attempts to create their own governance have been doomed to slowly recreate much of the existing governance stack. There are already instances of "code is law" being worked around because software developers can find the same sort of loopholes that lawyers are famous for. I'm not going to say it's completely insurmountable, but it seems quite likely that these sorts of issues will continue, requiring the creation of a legal apparatus that looks a lot like a centralized court.
Many of the interesting use cases for "blockchain" (much of the traceability) really depend on Merkle trees that are ubiquitous in cryptocurrencies. Merkle trees are really useful, but don't strictly require the expensive distributed proofs in many interesting cases.
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