Hacker News Reader

Comment by School-Cotton | Hacker News Reader

In the real world, ownership is more complicated than that, which is why the law is interpreted by judges and not computers.

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?

View on HN

Agree there is much hype over blockchain, but there is some advantage in the context you raised.

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 But they are still centrally controlled, and often even new systems are horribly out-of-date and require specialized real-estate companies to record transactions and pull transaction history, with hefty service fees, often several thousand dollars per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.

Just a transaction record from one account to another of $2M isn't proof that ownership of that property was transferred.

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.

"Proof" is a legal definition, and legal definitions are defined by the government. Accordingly, I entirely agree that any real property transaction must be tied in some way to the 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.

why should the state have any claim to my property? that’s your best argument. regardless, i’ll answer your question.

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.

That sounds like you're arguing against the idea of the government having a judicial system... If I steal someone's car, and the police catch me and have proof it's stolen, the justice system can take the car away from me and return it to its rightful owner.

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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com