Not sure why the municipality would want that. Also would create a slew of issues around what happens if you lose the private key to your house, or worse, it gets stolen.
Haha. Sorry that I laugh, but using blockchain for land ownership is not about backing bitcoins with square meters, but about the tamper-proof, immutable, public and resilient aspects of the data you can store in the bitcoin blockchain.
The only private key that would be involved in this process would come from the government, which could just sign messages with some standard (encrypted) format that just maps addresses to individuals/entities. This way even notaries will become one day obsolete (or they will simply be there to make sure the blockchain entry happens and the transfer of the assets as well, in an atomic way; and the assets don't even need to be crypto in this case).
What’s the concern? That the government makes you not the owner of your house anymore? And if your government does that, what’s the difference between fighting for a government that respects the rule of law versus fighting for a government that puts house deeds on bitcoin?
Thanks!
Think of this more like converting your home into a museum for future generations.
But to implement this properly, the real estate title should and would not serve the same purpose a bitcoin 'title' does via it's private key.
In case of bitcoin, a private key is literally the ownership of the bitcoins. In case of real tangible assets, the private key would serve as a pretty solid proof of ownership (but not THE ownership itself).
So, in case of a dispute over the ownership of a real estate property, you can point out that you had the ownership of the property via the blockchain.
In case of a theft of the keys, you must provide supplementary documentation regarding the prior ownership of the stolen keys. A pretty neat solution for the blockchain identity is being described by Vinay Gupta[1].
A simplified version is, imagine if the private key using which you purchased the house is stolen from you, then in front of the arbitrator, you present receipt from Amazon, where you used your private key to pay for goods which were delivered to you in your name, an affidavit from your bank which shows that you did business with them (using your real identity) and connected with your private key.
All these 'documentation' (which Vinay Gupta describes as 'insurance') is very hard for the thief to produce.
The same is not the case with bitcoin theft, where loss of private keys means loss of control of the assets (and not merely a 'dispute'). I hope that helps to explain it.
1. https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/a-blockchain-s...
The two could be if not the same then at least intertwined even for tangible assets. One could imagine a safety deposit box for example, with an electronic lock that would open not with a combination but a signature from the key that currently controls it on the blockchain.
That would be a nifty hack (and also a good plot for a movie where the hero manages to transfer ownership just in time for the bad guys to reach it).
If they can't alter the blockchain, then ownership state on the blockchain will diverge from reality over time.