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Comment by eouw0o83hf | Hacker News Reader

Real estate, particularly with regards to ownership and property title.

Ownership of a property is a difficult concept to prove, and there is an enormous industry of title insurance which exists to dig through the records and insure a purchase against unknown claims against the property.

A public ledger would make property title/ownership simple and knowable.

Overall I think blockchain technology is incredibly over-hyped, but does have some suitable applications, particularly where public records are involved.

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> A public ledger would make property title/ownership simple and knowable.

Only if all the property records are already in the ledger, right? If I buy a house via blockchain, someone can still come along and say their great-aunt should have inherited it 80 years ago, before blockchain records existed. So you still need title companies.

For sure - and digitizing that data would take a very long time so it wouldn't be a drop-in replacement for title.

It wouldn't be easy, but it is a good use for the tool.

Why is this better than the government keeping records, and having court remediation and error correction, rather than “oh my computer got hacked and now my house belongs to someone else”?

Company ownership information seems like much the same thing, and is a solved problem in all countries (that want to have solved it).

If the government's records were up-to-date and perfect, the title industry wouldn't really exist. Having publicly-accessible digital records would make the concept of property ownership simple and deterministic to figure out.

And "my computer got hacked" is kind of a blanket argument against using technology in general - by that same argument you should probably never use digital banking/investment or anything online to manage your life, and nothing should ever be digitized.

> If the government's records were up-to-date and perfect, the title industry wouldn't really exist

Why would a blockchain magically fix this?

> "my computer got hacked" is kind of a blanket argument against using technology in general

Many (most?) financial actions you can take with a computer can be rolled back if shown to be fraudulent, because the asset isn't stored on the computer itself. This is specifically not true of crypto assets.

I've heard this argument, and I don't see how it works. It relies on trusting the information put onto a blockchain.

It most definitely does require a base trust - however that's not an argument against the solution, just a challenge to implementation.

We implicitly trust a tremendous amount of digitized information because we trust its sources - for instance, digital banking works because we trust banks to only log verified transactions to our account. Sourcing that information is absolutely very difficult, but it doesn't mean it can't or shouldn't be done.

Requiring trust is absolutely an argument against the solution. Once you're willing to trust someone, you may as well use a database and a contract.

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