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Comment by d0gbread | Hacker News Reader

Can you explain why proof of ownership has anything to do with enforcement of that proof? We don't call the county recorder for trespassing.

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Because existence of a trusted authority means that there's no need to shoulder the immense costs of full decentralization. The fact that you can call someone is the relevant point, not the details of who you call. Blockchain only makes sense to use if two parties (1) do not trust each other, (2) do not have some mutually trusted authority, and (3) have no set of N partially trusted authorities whose shared authority they would each trust. In any other circumstances, there exists a more efficient method to establish consensus.

In the case of calling the police, it establishes that there exists a trusted authority, breaking condition (2).

You need the centralisation for enforcement. And the centralised entity trusts other branches of itself, not the blockchain. The police and courts do call the county recorder if they need to establish whose ownership they're enforcing. If that centralised entity is corrupt enough to surreptitiously mutate records, immutable records that you've made arent much help

At best, the blockchain is superfluous, at worst misleading, since whilst the tangible benefits of ownership rests with what the county recorder says, you can sell notional claims to ownership of the property on blockchains to other people, potentially multiple other people all thinking their token on their blockchain is canonical. The priority of the enforcing agency is a much bigger issue for real world property rights than the mutation of records

>If that centralised entity is corrupt enough to surreptitiously mutate records, immutable records that you've made arent much help

This seems like the opposite of true to me; if they intend to mutate the records doesn't it become extremely helpful that the records are immutable? What am I missing?

How many land registries are currently on a public blockchain? Why would a corrupt one that wishes to mutate records be the first to switch?

And why would a non-corrupt one which trusts itself and its future self want to switch?

I think the argument would be that formerly corrupt enforcement entities, or entities with no track record, would use a blockchain as proof of their commitment to impartial enforcement going forward. "We know you don't trust us, but here is a public record that you know we didn't manipulate, so if we are going to steal your land we have to do it openly."

That said, the same thing can be accomplished by outsourcing the public ledger to a third party with a reputation for trustworthiness. The same way that countries that cannot make a credible commitment to not devalue their money will often peg their currency to the dollar or the euro.

A blockchain might go part of the way to solving that problem, but as you say there are other solutions (any public database can be monitored for record changes if that trumps privacy concerns, and non-blockchain databases can be append only) and transfers of property ownership aren't necessarily consensual and compensated just because immutable public records are made of them. And if it's landowners rather than an untrustworthy oracle updating the database with records of land transactions you create a new class of problem (if you lose a private key is that land yours in perpetuity? Or is it someone else's in perpetuity if they steal your private key or exploit a bug in a related smart contract and won't give it back?)

Which is where trusted counterparties like the one you suggested are a much better bet than an untrustworthy party enforcing and administering a record and its exception handling, even if that record itself is immutable.

"The blockchain says you own this? Tough titties, we don't care, we're selling it anyway. You're going to stop us? You and what army?"

Because the concept of "ownership" doesn't really mean anything unless it can be enforced. What's the point of owning a house if you can't live in it because someone else is squatting in it?

Since there doesn't seem to be a way to decentralize the enforcement of real property ownership (as enforcement could involve violence, which the state has a monopoly on given our current social contracts), we're stuck with centralization in at least one component of the "ownership-enforcement" pair...

So then what's the point of decentralization at all?

> Since there doesn't seem to be a way to decentralize the enforcement of real property ownership

Private security firms exist. One theory for a way forward (not advocating): https://mises.org/library/private-production-defense

Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Nozick addresses some of the holes in this text, but there are options.

These theories ineveitably boil down to "the group with the ability to maintain a monopoly on the use of violence wins", and then argues that group should be selected on the basis of payment rather than voting.

Yep, Nozick's conclusion is that the competition of different security providers would ultimately culminate in a monopoly taking hold and functioning as a minimal state. SEE: minarchy

That sounds like a horrible "might makes right" scenario. If everybody just hires their own goons then the actual enforcement lies in who has more guns/people to enforce whatever they want, not in magical internet points.

Eh, I see your point, but theorists of polycentric law seem to think that it's possible that most firm versus firm violence would be mitigated via reparatory payments and agreements. They'd be businesses after all.

FWIW, my impression is that enforcement per se doesn't matter, but it does matter what source of truth the enforcement authority looks at.

Somebody puts an entry on the blockchain that says they own my house. OK so what? Nobody cares. They can't get that enforced. If you want to make the sale "real" to the authorities, you have to enter it into the land registry - but now you have a coordination problem. Do we put it into the blockchain first (and hence you pay first) and then the land registry? Or vice versa? Either one requires trust. Hm, maybe we better involve a trusted third party like an escrow company... oh wait we just reinvented the existing system.

All of this is not dissimilar to people selling NFTs of someone else's art. And you'll see the same problems if/when they try to violate copyright on that basis.

If you could convince the relevant authorities that the blockchain was the system-of-record then you'd have something useful. But with all the problems of losing ownership, hacking, inability to recover defrauded assets, etc, what are the odds of that happening?

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