This is my question as well. Blockchain is perfect for a digital currency, yes. But where else in the real world is it even applicable?
It's not perfect for that either. There have already been cases where tokens were stolen and blockchains were forked to recover them. The very last thing I want for my money is for errors and/or malicious acts to be permanent and uncorrectable.
EDIT: it also protects you in cases where someone holds a gun to your head and forces you to make a transaction.
Best takedown of cryptocurrencies that I've seen. Explains, as succinctly as possible, the fatal flaw in the idea. I'm gonna steal this line for the future.
> and guess what, someone can hold a gun to your head and take it.
Those are contradictory statements. The government can absolutely reverse a criminal taking your money by arresting them and returning the stolen cash.
It is important to note that "they" is usually the company that charged the card, not the bank or merchant processor. It is very similar to receiving a refund.
No. The only case when someone ever threatened to hold gun to my head and demanded money was taxation. With cryptocurrency it's possible to avoid that, because they don't know how much money you have. And even when they do know, it's much harder for them to take it, they need to know password.
Tax evasion is a crime and you should go to jail (you are exploiting the benefits you have received from society). But big companies find tax loopholes all the time and they go to white-collar prisons or get away with it anyways.
No reason why this can't be implemented on top of a cryptocurrency for anyone who wants it.
Just like banks were able to add that feature on top of gold and cash.
E.g., courts can transfer ownership of your car from you to someone else for a variety of reasons, without your consent. How does this work in a blockchain world?
Your answer might be that the State (or the judicial system, I suppose) should have some special private key that lets them sign transactions transferring anything to anyone, even if the previous owner doesn't consent.
If so, why is that better than just having a plain old centrally controlled, publicly accessible database that the State signs with their private key? What does blockchain technology give you over that?
blockchain are immutable and public. therefore the government can’t be corrupt and steal/funnel people’s property like they do in the real world now. we can all scrutinize the transactions.
How does that work in a blockchain world? If I stole the car's digital title (via hacking, coercion, etc.) and after getting caught, I refuse to cough up my private key... I can effectively prevent any transaction returning the car to its rightful owner. At that point either the ledger is broken and useless OR you need a judge to be able to force a hard fork, and system is no longer decentralized.
Your second paragraph about having an immutable public record to prevent corruption seems like it could be solved more simply by just having the government continually publish a record of transactions, which anyone can archive or mirror to verify the government never tries to secretly rewrite the past. I.e., a public git repo could solve that, no?
Currently, if you want to buy or sell real-estate, you have to record that transaction on a central government database. These "databases" used to be paper documents, but are now slowly moving to electronic systems. But they are still centrally controlled, and often even new systems are horribly out-of-date and require specialized real-estate companies to record transactions and pull transaction history, with hefty service fees, often several thousand dollars per sale.
If this real-estate system was based on the blockcahin, it could remove the government as a central source of trust and title companies that specialize in interacting with it would face far more competition. In theory, it could reduce transaction costs to buy and sell real-estate. Admittedly, this may solve some problems but create others, but the benefit is quite clear.
You need to connect that transaction to a contract and the contract in turn needs to be verified by some third-party and some process. In a develop country, that process is going to be tied to government.
That said, you should take a look at the current system. In many counties, it's still a large ledger of transactions in pencil and paper. In "modernized" counties, but with with extremely restricted access, made intentionally hard-to-access to keep title insurance companies in business.
Title insurance companies charge thousands of dollars on every sale to insure legal claims to property. Any trustworthy publicly accessible database, crypto-based or not, would be a huge improvement over the current system.