this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
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Which means that sovereign states would have to agree to no longer be the authority of who owned property, instead they'd just have to hand over all that authority to some distributed database. What's in it for them? What's in it for the people?
If the authority on who owns a home is a blockchain, then what happens if someone shows up at the police station, bruised and bleeding, and claims that they were tortured until they agreed to sign over the deed to their house. In the real world, the police (or at least the courts) would have authority over that deal, and if their investigation proved that someone was in fact tortured, it would mean it's not a legitimate sale, and the ownership reverts to the original person. But, if "blockchain", the police and courts have no authority. What's on the blockchain is law.
Well, just because a company holds the ledger of who owns what doesn't make it impossible to police, governments order companies to do stuff all the time, that wouldn't stop, but it would make it more difficult to police.
Ok, so who's the government going to order to change the blockchain?
You seem to misstakenly believe that I support this, I don't, I just argued against a dumb reason as to why it wouldn't work.
And what's your argument?
I recomment that you read my earlier comment to read my argument.
You claim that "governments order companies to do stuff all the time", but how does that apply to an entry in the blockchain, which we've agreed is the authority on who owns property. The hint is: a company couldn't change an entry in the blockchain, even if the government ordered them to do it.
Why would they change an entry on the blockchain?
To make the dumb idea of tracking peoperties on the blockchain there needs to be admin tools to restore the NFT to the proper owner.
If the NFT gets transfered to someone else illegally, there needs to be tools to add another entry to the chain with a note saying that the NFT was stolen, and this new change restores the ownership to the lawful owner.
The whole point of the blockchain technologies is that they're (supposedly) immune to state interference. What's on the blockchain is the "truth". The state wouldn't have any power to restore the proper owner of the NFT / house because they chose to trust blockchain instead of having control over the database.
If states can "restore ownership to the lawful owner", they can also seize people's cryptocurrencies.
That's why no state would ever have house registries on a blockchain that they didn't control. And if they did control it, there's no point in using a blockchain when they could just use a traditional database.
Which is exactly what I have been trying to say