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Comment by yojo | Hacker News Reader

Back to the point of this article: if someone steals my private key, do they now own my house?

What about liens? Will I as the owner agree to let an unpaid contractor put a lien against my title? Or can they somehow do it without my consent? If so, how do you stop bad actors from putting liens on everything?

The court is the authority on this. Title companies provide the valuable service of ensuring the state of the world matches what the seller claims.

We don’t need blockchain for this, a regular DB is sufficient.

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> Back to the point of this article: if someone steals my private key, do they now own my house?

> We don’t need blockchain for this, a regular DB is sufficient.

If someone makes you sign over your car title to them under duress, do they then own your car? In most jurisdictions (let's use the USA for now), of course not. Assuming you have reasonable access to fair treatment by the legal system, that transfer would not be considered valid, and in fact the whole act would likely be a very serious crime. This is true regardless of how the ownership is officially represented: whether a blockchain, or a government database, or a pink slip with names written on it, etc.

If the block chain is not the source of truth, and an external body can enforce changes on it, how is it in any way better than a database under control of the state?

Sufficiently powerful external bodies can always use force to do things regardless of what any particular database says. This isn't a problem with any particular type of database.

Exactly, so what is gained by switching to blockchain if it can't solve this issue?

It's absurd to expect any software change to somehow physically prevent people from taking your things. This "vulnerability" isn't worth talking about when evaluating software.

So the eternal question remains, what problem is blockchain solving here?

...Lack of blockchain adoption?

It is almost impossible for someone to physically steal my house. Certainly improbable. And it would be easy to recover with the help of the police.

It is by comparison easy for someone to steal crypto keys, or for them to be lost.

If we add a solution that allows us to fix the stolen or lost keys issue, then we eliminate the primary values of the block chain, decentralized trust and immutability.

So now we’re using a really complex database (potentially with POW energy use) for something that seems equally well solved by simpler tech.

So why would we want to use the block chain for this?

Right, so just use a normal database then. Shard and/or replicate it if you must. It's orders of magnitude more energy efficient, easier to mutate, maintain, and upgrade, and seems to solve the problem at least as adequately.

The point of blockchain isn't that the government can't steal your house; the (well, a) point of blockchain is that the government can't pretend you never owned your house in the first place. It establishes reliable records; that doesn't magically give it the ability to enforce those records.

Enforcement and source of truth are separate entities/problems.

The blockchain can be the source of truth, but that truth might not be enforced.

The difference between it, and a centrally controlled entity is the truth cannot be altered (at least in an easy way) on a blockchain.

First of all, blockchain isn't the only technology that prevents alteration. any regular database can be run in append-only mode and can be published.

The only difference between blockchain and any other database in append-only mode is that there is no access controls or identity verification on the blockchain, so fraud is way easier (and that's why over $1 billion in crypto is stolen every year)

"no access controls" -- trustless.

Pretty big difference.

Exactly, which is why an immutable record isn't as great as it sounds for these purposes. If everything is moved to the blockchain but that blockchain requires the exact same government override access to handle common problems, what's the point?

In a hypothetical blockchain ownership society, we'd probably end up paying extra insurance on our ownership as well as extra fees to a 3rd party to retain custody of our ownership tokens.

Insurance scams would be a laugh too.

"All my assets got transferred to a random address! You should probably reimburse me because I was clearly hacked."

If it's officially represented by a blockchain, there's no power on earth capable of fixing it. Even if the government came and threw them in jail and confiscated their accounts, you couldn't get legal title to your car back.

Unless you include a backdoor in the blockchain, but that would make the whole thing moot. You could issue a new title and mark the old one as legally invalid, but again, that leaves you open to all the problems that the blockchain was supposed to solve.

There can be mechanisims for recovery. Social recovery wallets, multi-sign wallets, DAOs all can be part of the solution to loss of keys.

The question really is: is this all necessary? And are inefficencies/issues/costs with current centralized gov systems worth replacing?

There are undoubtedly technical solutions for resyncing the block chain to reality. But once you need them, you’re effectively saying the block chain is not the source of truth, and it’s governed by the same inefficient system that managed titles before.

At this point it is effectively a complicated solution to a simple problem - record all bits about property ownership in a publicly available place. It is unclear to me what properties the block chain has that makes it superior to a database with backups.

So I would argue that it’s not necessary and makes a complicated system more complicated, not less so.

What would really help is digitization of the records, which is a political and bureaucratic problem more than a technical one. There are undoubtedly better/worse implementations, but a block chain solution feels like it’s probably on the “worse” end of the spectrum.

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