Go ahead. Put your house deed on the blockchain. Lose your key? Lose the ability to sell your house forever. Got hacked or phished and hacker transferred your deed? Get evicted the next day.
We have better systems in place for house deeds.
House deeds won't be simple NFTs, there will have to be other parties that can move the deed to handle things like foreclosures and eminent domain. So if your hardware wallet burns down in the neighborhood wildfire you just get the county clerk to move it for you, much like if the physical deed burned in the same fire.
And title fraud is already a thing without DLTs, just listen to all the identity theft surveillance pitches.
So why the heck would you bother putting your house on a blockchain if you still need the county clerk and other entities?
Why use the blockchain at all then?
I don’t have a stake in the game either way (learned my lesson after gox), but being able to hoard your own digital gold all by yourself is genuinely new, and is at least one valuable use case. We’ll see if there are more, but it seems too early to tell.
Immutable decentralized ledgers are not useful for legal constructs like ownership, since in the current (and foreseeable) legal construct of property ownership is held by centralized records for which the state is the arbiter. This arbitration happens through either registries (for example, automobile, real estate, business ownership, etc), or through the courts. In order for blockchain technology to replace this legal construct in a meaningful way, there would need to a mechanism for a central authority to provide clear arbitration and resolution.
If the state can't meaningfully and authoritatively reassign those ownership rights through a legal process, then blockchain is simply a non-authoritative ledger, at which point it's existence is marginally useful since it is expensive, technically challenging to operate, and fraught with risk due to potential abuse cases from implementation errors.
This is one simple example, and doesn't dig into the fact that implementing laws as code is also problematic in countries where those laws can be rewritten by elected officials and courts.
Blockchain and bitcoin might become more useful in the future, but so far almost all blockchain uses that have gained traction have done so by grifters and the remora like folks who have attached to the bellies of the blockchain industry to enrich themselves while throwing around terms like legacy finance until their employers implode.
Investing in the ecosystem makes sense from a theoretical point of view. Personally I wouldn’t, but that’s due to personal preference rather than some fundamental disagreement with the tech vs society. Condemning others for investing at all always struck me as odd.
I’d say the impact of http on the world was pretty damn life changing by 2005. Linux? Fourteen years after it was released it had entirely disrupted not just the commercial Unix world but was on its way to becoming the most widely deployed operating system on the planet.
Bitcoin? Eh. I suppose ransomware authors would still be using green dot to try and collect their take if it hadn’t shown up. YouTube creators would have a harder time financing their passion without the sweet cash infusion from random vc backed crypto currency exchanges. Many quadrillion hashes would have sadly been skipped in the small chance they would have resulted in the correct number of leading zeroes.
It is clear at this point there is a multi-billion dollar market for cryptocurrencies that isn't going away (I choose my words carefully, I don't like the long term prospects of any particular token). Wild success and a use case has been demonstrated already, even if a lot of people don't like the idea that burning energy is its own reward. The world has changed substantially because of it.
I agree, the world has changed substantially because of cryptocurrencies. The amount of breathless hype has reached critical levels. As for use case, well, I hear that ransomware is now a multi billion dollar industry. Congratulations?
Fast forward to today, cryptocurrencies are just a twist on the existing financial system, which already has plenty of options for store of value, electronic trading, other things we have today in our networked world. You can argue how much of an improvement it brings (I think not much), but it is 100% not the killer value store that precious metals used to be in their heyday (when they had no alternatives).