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Comment by dbcurtis | Hacker News Reader

I think you have it exactly backwards. The blockchain ledger applies to anything you want to trade/communicate with traceability. Some people trade bitcoin that way, and that was a good demonstration vehicle. But blockchain can be applied to anything, not just crypto-currencies. Why not chain-of-title for real estate? Now there is the poster child for a highly manual system based on shuffling and signing very large stacks of paper.

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Bitcoin is a bearer asset. If you have the private keys, you can spend the Bitcoin. Blockchain based digital assets require a middleman to confer ownership of a physical asset based on what's on the blockchain. This creates all sorts of problems. What if a physical asset is registered on two blockchains? How do you deal with all the regulatory and compliance issues related to the transfer of that asset? What if your transfer ownership of an asset is valid on the blockchain, but illegal in your jurisdiction?

You can't just blockchain all the things and expect all the costs that are part of the current system to disappear.

What is the incentive to mine the real estate blockchain? Does it pay out a free house every 10 minutes?

Probably transaction fees? There's no reason a blockchain must be self-funded through proof-of-work mining.

To my understanding, the expected future state of Bitcoin is that the role currently filled by miners will be replaced by transaction processors who take a fee to do the work.

It's not about the mining!!!! Block chain is about having an immutable, non-repudiatable transaction record.

Block chain is a wheel.... guess what, wheels have uses far beyond the Pharaoh's war chariots. Like, you know, bicycles and automobiles. Stop conflating block chain and crypto-currency.

It is about the mining though. The mining is what makes the blockchain immutable. How do you propose making it immutable without that feature?

There are two ways to secure a ledger. Mining, and accountable BFT like Tendermint.

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