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Comment by Pet_Ant | Hacker News Reader

> Nearly 14 years in, where exactly is this “ton of real world utility”?

I don't think cryptocurrency has much value, but I think block chain has lots of potential for trading things that have unique ids and are owned by many people. I paid $1500 for research on a title claim and my lawyer came back with "It's looks solid, but I'd get the title insurance just in case". If property deeds were on the block chain then it'd be trivial.

Car deeds, property deeds, stocks, concert tickets, air line tickets, hotel reservations, all these would benefit from being frictionlessly traded on a block chain. That said, to be useful the entities have to be tangible and the owners don't really benefit (though hotels would benefit from the speculation since it'd even out their cash flow) or the owner is the government.

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The problem is that "simply put it on the blockchain" also means "change the laws around edge cases in nontrivial ways".

For example consider title on property. Just putting it on the blockchain would run into trouble when you try to implement squatters rights https://propertyclub.nyc/article/squatters-rights-in-califor..., or the government takes the title back with eminent domain https://ij.org/issues/private-property/eminent-domain/califo..., or you fail to pay taxes https://www.sco.ca.gov/ardtax_public_auction.html, or the bank forecloses https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/california-foreclosu....

Additionally what happens when the keys and person separate? Some scammer gets your key off of your computer and sells the title to themselves? Or someone loses the computer on which they had their title, and now can't sell because they can prove that they are them?

The real world is messy. And for most of the messy cases that the world has to deal with, the blockchain makes things worse. Not better.

Like too many people, you have confused "blockchain" with "digital signature", which doesn't require a blockchain, and typically already is used to verify things.

If you need to trust a central authority to hold up their end of the bargain, for example trusting a Hotel to actually provide the room, then a decentralised system adds absolutely no benefit over the hotel simply digitally signing a ticket themselves.

The hotel must be trusted to actually provide the room, so why not trust the hotel to also store the booking information?

That’s the thing. Cryptocurrency and blockchains (at least thr way the Bitcoin protocol works) provides for an “easy” way to verify transactions in a low trust or even no trust environment. However most if not all transactions you engage in need some level of trust. You want to trust that the hotel has a room, the car is not a lemon, a house is not condemned. Putting these transactions onto the blockchain adds nothing to the trustworthiness of these situations and whether you get what they say you are buying and since a lot of advocates push “code is law” the finality of the blockchain will mean you have no recourse. You bought the nft of a house. The house being in ruins is not their problem. The blockchain is the sole source of truth, not reality.

Society should probably be a high trust environment and if it isn’t we should work to fix that.

> The hotel must be trusted to actually provide the room, so why not trust the hotel to also store the booking information?

Because the hotel then has to swap the reservation whenever it's traded. Let's say I want to book a hotel in the future for downtown Chicago Cubs making it to the World Series. As the season progresses it's a future whose value goes up and down depending on how they are playing. If the hotel is in the loop they could play shenanigans and charge you a fee every time you reschedule. The idea of the blockchain is that it's out of their hands.

The owner of the room at the time of the booking shows up with the private key, and swaps it for the room key.

If you involve the hotel enshittification will ensue to make sure they grind out every last cent.

Also, being on a blockchain allows for trades such as swapping rooms across chains, trading rooms for cars, etc. The blockchain unifies ownership and rights as tradeable like money did for barter. There is a common unifying method of exchange.

IMHO, this is a perfect little example of why so much blockchain/crypto/NFT stuff is silly.

a) Everything you mentioned here can already be done with just a database. Trading a hotel room, rescheduling, swapping across chains, etc.

b) The hotel has no incentive to allow any of this

If the hotel ultimately owns the room then I'm pretty sure they would simply have software to look at exchanges on the chain and could charge you if you've swapped it. They could also simply not honor your booking. I think this is the point regarding "the real world" vs the idea of "digital ownership". You can have a token that says you get to stay a week in a given room and I (as the hotel) can say "no, this token is no longer valid within our system and the room has been rebooked". Crypto/blockchain can't enforce anything in the real world. The hotel though, backed by real-world laws, can say "there is an additional fee for swapping the reservation and you're outside of the refund period.". If you attempt to stay, you'll be arrested. So you see there's no actual power behind a digital representation of ownership unless governments (which crypto doesn't want involved) grant them.

> Crypto/blockchain can't enforce anything in the real world.

Exactly! At some point a real person has to choose to honor your hotel room NFT or not, just as easily as they could choose to honor your driver's license or not. There's no advantage to mucking up the entire system with crypto and blockchain.

You're literally suggesting turning hotel stays into speculative financial assets. This is, fundamentally, a really dumb idea. Whilst hotels do price sometimes unfairly, your suggestion where a selection of speculative traders engage in (at best) zero sum - and it doesn't even benefit the hotel providing the service. Just faceless traders.

> it doesn't even benefit the hotel providing the service.

It does. Unused bookings are pure profit for them. It also means that they get the cash now. It means they don't have the uncertainties of unusually low or high demand so it smoothes out their finances.

* To be clear, for this to make any sense, the booking has to be prepaid, or at least a significant portion of it. Maybe just minus a room cleaning fee etc that is due on check-in.

> Unused bookings are pure profit for them

They want to be fully booked, because not only does it avoid the appearance and vibe of being a "ghost town", they also make a lot of money on things like the hotel bar, minibars, laundry services, etc.

If a room stays un-used, the marginal cost to the hotel does not actually decrease much, especially not in the short term.

They still pay the same to their laundry contract, they still pay the same rent, they still pay for the front of house staff and the chefs to be there, and they still pay to heat / AC most of the hotel.

They might save very marginally on some room AC not being on as much, and eventually if the reduced bookings was noticeable might negotiate a smaller laundry contract, reduce head count, but at that point you just look like a failing hotel.

I'm confident if you looked at the accounts, it's more profitable for a guest to turn up than not, even if the guest still paid for the booking.

> If property deeds were on the block chain then it'd be trivial.

True, but then a ton of other things would be much, much more difficult.

Like, what happens if Joe has the deed to a home, but then Joe dies, and nobody has the key to his wallet?

If you have some kind of way, on the blockchain, to solve this problem, and reassign the property without Joe’s private key, then what you have is a situation where human decisions take priority over cryptographic guarantees. You can’t have it both ways—either the human decisions are trusted over the cryptographic guarantees, or vice versa.

This is essentially just a reinvention of centralized real property registration systems, where the current owner of a particular piece of property must be registered either at some government office (in a registration system) or on the blockchain (hypothetically). One of the reasons you want title insurance is because some deed (a piece of paper) may be defective for various reasons, and having a centralized registry (either at a government office, or on a blockchain) makes this problem much less likely. I don’t see what advantage blockchain has here.

> If you have some kind of way, on the blockchain, to solve this problem, and reassign the property without Joe’s private key, then what you have is a situation where human decisions take priority over cryptographic guarantees.

I have thought about this and it's solveable. Physical goods have to have some sort of "sanctioned violence" to enforce, so there is always a government. They have a public key that is known and publish updates. So if something gets legally confiscated, there is a message published by the government that amends the chain. "The owner of X is now Y".

> I don’t see what advantage blockchain has here.

Because it unifies ownership under a central mechanism and you don't need to wait in line at a government office. You have an API and a log. It doesn't really need to be distributed just public I guess, but having the ability to have a private copy for reference would be a benefit.

I still don’t see how blockchain is a part of this. You can have an API and a log anyway, if you want one.

If property deeds were on the block chain then it'd be trivial.

This is a gross misunderstanding of what property deeds record or how they are recorded. Property deeds record the real property owned, using geographical features and descriptors. It's irrelevant whether deeds are stored on paper or in a blockchain, because the method of storage doesn't do anything about the features/descriptors changing.

For example, if a river widens, or a tree is cut down, or plots shift because of an earthquake or ground settling, or if someone oversteps the boundaries of a plot...these are all situations covered by property insurance. The point is to make the homeowner whole for those situations where the deed as recorded (however it is recorded) no longer matches reality due to changes in the world.

If you put the property deed and your best attempt at its history in a public database, such as a blockchain, then all you've got is your best attempt at the property deed's history. You're still going to want to buy title insurance.

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