Except real estate. Someone can already come with a made up deed and say they own your house. Blockchain would make this much more secure than it is today.
Simply having a fraudulent piece of paper saying "Deed" doesn't go very far beyond getting you a free trip to jail.
Further I don't see how a blockchain would help at all. So if I can acquire someone's keys I can transfer their property to myself and I'm thereby the full and legal, irrefutable owner? It has all of the same problems mentioned about the Mona Lisa.
The blockchain and crypto currencies in general both seem to be solutions looking for a problem.
In theory, because title registers are public (at least in the US) and run by a the local government, you could have higher trust in a title (and therefore lower title insurance premiums) if you could query the current holder from the appropriate government.
That said, I'm not sure why blockchain makes more sense for this use case than, say, a read-only API at land-register.<city/county>.<state>.gov.
Actual cases of someone defrauding someone of property is astonishingly rare.
That's exactly what MERS did. It tossed people out of their homes on the basis of a row in their privately run database.
It took a supreme court ruling to overturn this. Lower courts (e.g. the supreme court of michigan) LET them foreclose. The row in the privately run database reigned supreme.
>Further I don't see how a blockchain would help at all.
MERS was created to circumvent this whole legal system around property transfer because the system might be trustworthy, but is archaic, slow and frustrating.
A nationwide adopted blockchain system that didn't require private ownership by a party like MERS whom you clearly can't trust or an archaic, slow and frustrating paperwork system serves everybody's interests (except the people who used MERS to, y'know, steal people's homes).
However a cursory examination is that MERS wasn't title registration at all. It was a registration of mortgage holders, where mortgages would be "assigned" to MERS. And the dispute wasn't over the accuracy of the rows in that database (which would be trivial to legally dispute and correct), but a technicality of whether MERS could be the one to foreclose -- itself a whole legal process, only at the very end impacting the title -- versus the one who assigned the mortgage. The net effect is identical, and I'm not sure if the difference between ABC Credit foreclosing on a defaulted mortgage versus MERS foreclosing means "stealing" someone's home.
"But... your honor, that's preposterous! The Californian Blockchain Deed Corporation was hacked last summer, and we all know their private key was stolen! I'm a simple man, I don't even know what's a 'private key,' how could the system do this to me?"
"(clears throat) You Honor, my client, Ms. White, has already sold her house - as we all know the transaction is irreversible. If Mr. Anderson doesn't cooperate, Ms. White will be homeless in two weeks. We respectively request the court to proceed with the decision."
Not a single blockchain in sight, and has been working fine for decades.
I'm struggling to think of one aspect of real estate records that is improved by blockchain that couldn't be improved equivalently by other technology (and in some jurisdictions, has). Any central registry addresses the problem you point out, especially with a court system backing it to resolve issues that run deeper.
No one is going to do shit for someone walking in with a piece of paper with "I own this house" written on it.
Or, let me clarify, you aren't going to get far, because sooner or later, those papers will be checked against the records kept by the government.
And with the rise of casual to state enforced surveillance in public and private spaces I can imagine near absolute resource tracking "cradle to cradle" via RFID, GPS, wi-fi, surveillance video, and block chain.
This works because blockchains are too expensive and inconvenient to use. Instead people use exchanges, which provide none of the guarantees.
And that’s a basic rule of finance (and fraud): security measures will be bypassed because trusting people is always cheaper and easier, until it fails.
I read a fantastic book about this recently:
Lying For Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World
https://www.amazon.com/Lying-Money-Legendary-Frauds-Workings...
If the county has a mechanism to fix that anyway, how is that blockchain any better than a county-run, publicly readable database?
It’s not like you want to sell high value properties 1000 times a second.
Put another way, the banking system handles orders of magnitude more traffic with far fewer resources than a blockchain. There’s no reason to think people are suddenly going to start making real estate transactions at a significantly greater volume than credit card transactions.
Ownership of gold in a vault would be a good one to critique, although I suppose you'd have to find some way to pay for the transactions.
If gold fails this test, then I can't see any point in using a blockchain for any store of value but simply as an in-and-out mechanism for transmitting money.
Property records are public in most jurisdictions.
My old boss also would buy property through LLCs, so if I looked up his address he would not be associated with it. I was not able to link him to the company because the LLC didn't actually transact any business aside from holding this property. But maybe I just don't know where to look.