If all these rich guys and crypto-evangelists really want cryptocurrencies to succeed, they need to make it easy to acquire and pay with a cryptocurrency. Unfortunately, this will never happen.
I was tired of the hype around crypto virtually from day one.
Long before a coin was worth even a penny there was a huge amount of hype around them from the true believers. I thought it sounded like a joke and super sketchy and didn't mine any.
I thought of actually mining some when a coin was finally worth a dollar, just in case.. but never got around to it.
When I heard a coin was worth $300 I thought it was ridiculous... but the hype kept going.
Then they were worth $3,000 and ordinary people started talking to me about them, there were a ton of articles about bitcoin and other coins in the mainstream news. I thought surely now peak hype had finally been achieved.
Then banks started to notice and make their own coins.
Then it went to $30,000 per coin... WTF?
Yeah, I missed out... big time. I don't know how much higher the price of bitcoin can go, but I do know that each time I thought it couldn't go much higher it did... a lot.
I'm still sick of the hype around crypto, and avoid any articles about it like the plague... but bitcoin doesn't even need hype at this point, as its meteoric rise in value sells itself.
I don't see any reason why a chain would help here too much, fixing the government should be much more effective in long run.
It is very common for government's to tax exchanges of money/property/goods. We see this in the sales tax, estate tax, transfer tax, cash app transfers, monetary gifts above $15k, income taxes, etc.
If someone hacks your account and initiates the transfer, or you get scammed by someone, or you accidently transfer your title to the wrong account, or someone forces you at gunpoint to make the transfer... the courts can deal with and reverse these things. What your options are with a blockchain?
Or they address it in a blindingly stupid way: How do we deal with records that are incorrect, incomplete, or stale? Blockchain maximalists: treat it as authoritative forever without a mechanism for correction!
You write to the blockchain that there are 2 ice cubes on your desk. The ice cubes melt and evaporate, as ice cubes do. The blockchain says there are 2 ice cubes on your desk, so that must be truth forever and ever!
FTFY
Or, in other words: you're confusing the map for the territory, therefore everyone else must also be confusing the map for the territory.
The only thing you lose that way is plausible deniability. It becomes impossible to erase from history the fact that a record was incorrect at some previous point in time.
I don't care about the naivety of the proponents and detractors of crypto; but I do worry about their utter lack of imagination.
No, there's more going on there than just how to use an append-only database.
To append corrections in most cases you need a process to append that correction that's mostly implemented off chain and involves some kind of authority with the ability to override mistakes, and that directly contradicts the ideological assumptions that are baked into most blockchains and are constantly chanted by blockchain enthusiasts.
So either you have a blockchain where corrections are impossible in many necessary circumstances or you have a blockchain that doesn't bring any new valuable capabilities to the table.
> The only thing you lose that way is plausible deniability. It becomes impossible to erase from history the fact that a record was incorrect at some previous point in time.
And that doesn't solving any problem people actually have (e.g. the we don't have problems county recorder forging records to steal people's homes).
Which can itself be implemented on-chain, using atomic primitives, and become subject to the same transparency and correctness guarantees.
>some kind of authority
Which is a performance hack for cases where formal correctness is too expensive, such as paper-based bureaucracies, or impossible a priori, such as totalitarian dictatures.
>we don't have problems county recorder forging records to steal people's homes
You don't. Well, lucky you.
>any problem people actually have
What about wealth inequality?
Not that long ago, in a time when people were supposed to be Too Civilized To Be Doing That Sort Of Thing Any More, my family's property happened to be forcibly nationalized by a totalitarian invasion. Have you lived through the arduous and fraud-ridden process of restitution of nationalized property half a century afterwards, after most records were destroyed? Your people probably weren't out on the streets, starving, when the banks screwed up, either... except maybe for that 2008 thing where some jerks offloaded to some other jerks some formally incorrect financial instruments that also happened to contain 10 million people's houses in them?
I'm really glad that you like the world that you live in. It was made so nice for you because some centuries ago some people rolled in and stole a whole bleedin' continent. The rest of us are left to make do with the scraps of that and we could sure use a fairer distribution of those. Beats eating the rich, any day
> Which is a performance hack for cases where formal correctness is too expensive, such as paper-based bureaucracies, or impossible a priori, such as totalitarian dictatures.
No, it's a solution things like "I sent my money to the wrong guy" and "this transaction was technically correct but the result of fraud by one party."
>> we don't have problems county recorder forging records to steal people's homes
> You don't. Well, lucky you.
If you have a problem with that, then do share the details.
> Not that long ago ... my family's property happened to be forcibly nationalized by a totalitarian invasion. Have you lived through the arduous and fraud-ridden process of restitution of nationalized property half a century afterwards, after most records were destroyed?
Assuming your story is true, how is that much of a selling point for blockchain-all-the-things? It's pretty speculative and unlikely that a blockchain would even help at all in that scenario (e.g. the invaders are likely to care as little about a blockchain as they did the the paper records, digital records are fragile when unmaintained, the invaders may not ever be driven out, and if they are there may not be a restitution process). In the unlikely event that they do help, I'd likely only benefit distant descendants that may never have even met their wronged ancestor.
> I'm really glad that you like the world that you live in.
I never said that. What I will say is I'm pretty sure blockchains fail at being a solution to most if not all the problems they purport to solve.
These things happen. I'll tell you this much - debit card got skimmed last year on a trip to Western Europe, nobody gave me my money back either. I guess the current model of resolving them is perceived as working convincingly enough for the general public to overlook its externalities (which reach as far as police brutality, economic disempowerment, and mass media-driven global cognitive collapse, and yes, I'm blaming the entrenched financial system for that.)
>If you have a problem with that, then do share the details.
It's a matter of threat model, and of affordances. There are failed states in the world today where it is commonplace to bribe officials to commit fraud, including stealing people's homes. For those people it makes a lot of sense to keep their assets away from the state-favored banking system - at least liquid ones because that's what's technologically available to them today.
>Assuming your story is true
Even if it wasn't. (It is.)
>the invaders are likely to care as little about a blockchain as they did the the paper records, digital records are fragile when unmaintained
Geographical decentralization and distribution of responsibility among multiple independent interested parties solves that
>the invaders may not ever be driven out, and if they are there may not be a restitution process). In the unlikely event that they do help, I'd likely only benefit distant descendants that may never have even met their wronged ancestor.
That's a matter of offline consensus. Blockchain can enable oppressed communities to maintain internal organization, and increase the overall independence of their members.
>blockchains fail at being a solution to most if not all the problems they purport to solve.
That much is true, and while the dominant discourse is that of crypto bros are hyped about on gains and driving lambos on the moon, everyone will keep overlooking the capabilities of distributed consensus tech in favor of the novelty value of magic internet money, smart people who know what to do with the stuff will do other things, and the whole thing will collapse on itself. Just one self-fulfilling prophecy among so many...
This really gets to the "there is no advantage to having this data on the blockchain since it doesn't solve any of the problems that currently come up with titles, creates new problems, and complicates existing solutions."
* What happens when someone dies without a will passing the title?
The process for handling this in today's legal framework exists... but when trying to put this in a blockchain framework either gives additional permissions to someone or results in reinventing more problems than the existing system has.
A smart contract would do nothing to protect you from open liens, property line misrepresentation, multiple registrants, etc etc.
But I hear you saying, “well it would if the plumber used the chain to place the lien.” okay fine, but nothing above is solved more efficiently with the chain than it would be by adding to the existing system.
And, for context, the average Ethereum gas fee right now is $48. So you're nearing the upper bound of the usual range for every transaction (right now--it's been higher, and probably will be again!) unless now we're going to play "well actually, this happens on the TitleCoin chain, which boy howdy I hope anyone actually pays attention to and not the TitleCoin Cash chain and not the TitleCoin Classic chain".
I feel like blockchain promotion is primarily based in an anti-regulation belief system, one that doesn't actually work very well for people in real life.