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Comment by kirbypineapple | Hacker News Reader

I would argue there's value beyond distributed trust: smart contracts (though you could argue that this is merely an application built upon the concept of distributed trust), the tokenization of physical assets (think real estate, oil and gas exploration/drilling/royalties, etc.), and more generally the ability for money to become a "product". These are all domains that blockchain is enabling, though it remains to be seen whether these problems/opportunities are solved via blockchain or not.

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Again, what problems are being solved?

Real estate, oil and gas exploration/drilling/royalties are all things that have existed without problem for many decades. Saying "real estate, but with blockchain" doesn't actually say what problem you're solving.

I think I'd have to argue that real estate has existed for much, much longer than a few decades :D

I'm a pretty big sceptic on all of this crypto BS, but the ownership of real estate assets seems like a pretty archaic system of not easily inspected pieces of paper. Having a public, provable system for recording this information (and possibly other related info, e.g. liens) seems like it would be of some use. The system we have works, but it could work better.

I thought real estate was already in the public domain.

> the ownership of real estate assets seems like a pretty archaic system of not easily inspected pieces of paper. Having a public, provable system for recording this information (and possibly other related info, e.g. liens) seems like it would be of some use. The system we have works, but it could work better.

This already exists in many states. It's a political problem (whether or not to use of tax money to pay for the digitization of old records), not a technical one: https://www.uslandrecords.com/uslr/UslrApp/index.jsp

Related information, like liens, is available via those public records as well.

From what I've heard from insiders at the BigCos who are buying many of these 'blockchain solutions', the main advantage of blockchain is that it is a sexy buzzword which convinces management to pay for BigCo to update/solve some unglamorous problem they weren't willing to throw money at beforehand.

'I presided over the digitization of all old records' isn't something an MBA type necessarily wants on their CV, so they won't push for it no matter the value to the company.

However 'I lead a team implementing a solution to digitize and store records on the blockchain' is how the MBA type gets a promotion/new job offer and how the technical guys can get the budget to do important stuff that was otherwise too unglamorous to be prioritized...

I'm not in the states, I'm in Australia. The records here exist but AFAIK cost money to retrieve and are scattered, generally you end up paying a moderate amount (say $1k - $2k) for a conveyancer to look up all the relevant records before purchasing and spot any problems for you.

Arguably you'd want the conveyancer anyway to go through the legal concerns, and clearly "blockchain" solutions are not the only possible solutions - simply digitising them and making them available and sensibly organised would be fine.

THIS PROBLEM DOES NOT NEED BLOCKCHAIN TO BE SOLVED

Sure, and I'm not saying that it does, but it may also be one possible solution. Not necessarily the best but probably better than what we currently have.

> Real estate, oil and gas exploration/drilling/royalties are all things that have existed without problem for many decades.

Really? I find that unbelievable. Ever try to procure data on real estate? It's almost impossible unless you're willing to cough up large sums of money. Seems to me that an open platform of real estate data would attract innovation and create value. Maybe something blockchain can solve?

> These are all domains that blockchain is enabling

It is reasonable to be sceptical when someone proposes a new domain that doesn’t solve any problems.

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