California announces DMV-run blockchain through partnership with Tezos
fortune.com
fortune.com
> “The DMV’s perception of lagging behind should definitely change,” Gupta told Fortune in an exclusive interview.
Yeah, jumping on the NFT bandwagon now totally conflicts with a perception of lagging behind. :eyeroll:
Now we can go from “All my apes are gone” to "all my cars are gone”.
1. Its complicated enough to hide large costs and perhaps budget overruns
2. It uses a bunch of technology hype lingo, like 'blockchain' and 'NFT', to let the political DMV leadership market to the people that they are embracing the future
3. Its underlying mechanism is at best useless, so there will be no pressure on the contractor to deliver anything of value
What a win!
So question: Will you be able to atomically exchange your California-registered car title for Ether?
What happens if the on-chain car ownership is different than the traditional notion of car ownership? If I lose my private key, do I still have ownership of the car? If I get hacked, and the hacker steals the private key to my car NFT, so the blockchain now says the car belongs to the hacker -- what happens?
If "code = law" and what happens on the blockchain is the source of truth, don't these kinds of situations cause massive problems?
If you have someone who has the ability to override what the blockchain says and say "Based on a police report of theft we are reassigning car #12345 from address 0x6666 to address 0x9abc," why would anyone want to pay hard Ether for an NFT that could be taken away from them at any time?
If they're putting everyone's records on a blockchain, how are they going to handle the massive user education problems (and even tech access problems) of not everyone understanding what private keys are and how to keep them safe?
I guess the devil is in the implementation details. Still an interesting idea, though.
The point of blockchain is to establish trust via technology when the participants are not trustworthy. Is DMV not trustworthy? If so why? I have a driver's license, and it never occurred to me not to trust DMV, and I never heard anyone else being worried about that either.
Devils advocate, because increasing isolation of the necessarily public information a governmental service manages from the government organization servicing it is a good thing.
The role of title transfers could itself be argued to be a form of governmental overreach. For the mere act of interpersonal buying and selling, why ought there be a database managing that?
If we agreed such a database must exist (and horses and carriages seem to have done fine without one), wouldn’t it be preferable for individuals to be able to directly interface with that system interpersonally, rather than through a governmental intermediary?
If we agree there must be a governmental intermediary, wouldn’t we prefer such an intermediary to solely pay for and maintain dumb infrastructure they are not expected to waste taxpayer time and money manipulating, rather than giving them control over the underlying transactions and wasting a great deal of both?
So the gov’t can make money. When you sale the car the new owner must pay tax.
In this sense, I'm a bit skeptical of the value add of California's implementation, despite "put car titles on the blockchain" being something for which I've advocated for years now. This would've made more sense as a multi-state partnership.
> The advantages start popping up when multiple DMVs are using the same ledger; they don't have to trust each other, yet can still read and write records.
What do you mean different DMVs don’t have to trust each other? If California DMV can’t trust data written by Nevada DMV, what’s the point of writing it in the first place?
> The end game would be for state DMVs, international DMVs, and even private entities to be able to share information on a vehicle and its history - think CarFax, but much broader in scope and without some corporation acting as a middleman.
Okay, but who is responsible for verifying all of the data coming in from random 3rd parties? If you wanna get a good deal on a used car being sold, just submit a fake entry about it having been totaled in an accident. Instant discount!
And not to mention all of the PII that’s core to DMV’s operations that can’t be public, so it can’t be on a public blockchain anyway.
The former is what a (public) distributed ledger solves; a central authority is problematic even in interstate contexts, let alone international. Blockchains don't directly solve the latter, but do provide tools for tackling it - namely, by making the submitted data trivial to audit. Using your example:
> If you wanna get a good deal on a used car being sold, just submit a fake entry about it having been totaled in an accident. Instant discount!
Setting aside the immediate footgun here (since you've nerfed whatever resale value you'd hope to get out of it), your single datapoint is less believable than the concurrent agreement of:
- A police department noting "a vehicle with this VIN was involved in an accident"
- An insurance company noting "we paid out an insurance claim for a vehicle with this VIN"
- A towing company noting "we towed a vehicle with this VIN to a repair shop"
- A repair shop noting "we serviced a vehicle with this VIN"
In short: there are a lot more opportunities for verifying information when it's on a public ledger than there are when it's stuck in centralized databases.
> And not to mention all of the PII that’s core to DMV’s operations that can’t be public, so it can’t be on a public blockchain anyway.
Nobody said literally everything the DMV does should be on a blockchain.
In this context of "CarFax but better", very little (if any) of that PII needs to be present in the ledger - and certainly not in plaintext. The core datum here is the VIN, and that's already far from private.
A well-administered non-tamperable database of garbage data is still quite useless.
With an unpermissioned public blockchain you can make up your own police department, insurance, towing company and repair shops. Make some wash entries to make them look legitimate and you’re back to square one of having to confirm everything off-chain to figure out what’s real.
Or drown a real report in a sea of fakes if you’re trying to offload a lemon, since there’s not much you can do about spam.
Not to mention the fundamental problems around private key management.
But if there is a motivation inherent to the value of the data itself, for example in the case where a common ground needs to be constructed from a number of otherwise-unaffiliated private or semi-public parcels of terrain, and the usefulness all of the parcels increases through the construction and maintenance of this common ground, then no simple financial motivation is necessary for all of the participants to agree that none of the participants should be the sole or majority custodian of this common ground.
In this case a blockchain can actually make some sense, although it's arguable that it is still a needlessly wasteful way to achieve this goal since blockchain security is derived from triggering a competitive resource arms race between all members, which collectively makes tampering by a non-member impractically expensive to attempt and highly likely to destroy the whatever value or purpose the outsider wishes to usurp even if they succeed.
That said, the fact that this record is being established as an asset on top of a garden variety pyramid scheme lottery token blockchain, tezos, rather than on a club blockchain whose tokens have no presence on any exchange, undermines even this hypothetical and charitable interpretation of this project.
[0] disclosure: "assigned" and "value" in this space mean very different things to a blockchain believer and a skeptic. My username would have the word Block prepended to it if HN allowed a few more characters. So this opinion is coming from someone decidedly on the skeptic side of this issue.
They can and they have bungled non-trivial subsets of the data and records they are entrusted with in the past. Having a public non-DMV source of truth would really help the consumer from getting the shaft in these cases. Of course, doing that in a useful way would likely violate people's privacy to the extent it becomes a non-starter.
That said, I think this is gonna wind up being a lateral move. Best, best, best case "blockchain" was just the magic marketing word they had to use in order to finally get management buy-in to shit-can some problem vendor or team responsible for the systems "blockchain" is gonna replace.
You lost me at "public". What do you mean by it? I don't want the information on my driver's license to be public.
On new IT initiatives? California DMV? The one that in the laat twenty-five years has launched, spent tens of millions on, and then abandoned as hopelessly flawed an effort to replace/update its core systems. Twice?
For land it makes sense, but cars? why?
In Europe we don’t have titles for cars like in the US. You don’t have to perform a weird ritual of signing over the title to sell a car, you don’t need a written contract at all.
As long as you have a central authority, you don’t need the blockchain. You do need robust identity verification and controls systems (IAM and audit logs), but the title and liens can still be records in a database. Want to look up if a title is legit? Offer a public page that accepts a VIN and spits out title details, no different than public real estate property records.
Solution looking for a problem. This is someone’s pet project. Someone commits fraud? You have an audit log and verbose identity and transaction documentation when you need to go to court or reverse transactions.
Which means 19 states have their own databases, and exchanging data between them entails 19! (at minimum) separate ad-hoc connections doing a bunch of ETL work to massage between subtly-different database implementations.
> As long as you have a central authority
And who is that central authority? Nevada is not a central authority over Wyoming.
The federal government could be that authority, but that just kicks the can down the road; the US (despite its best efforts) is not a central authority over Canada or Mexico or wherever else. Do we have the UN establish a global DMV?
A distributed ledger sidesteps all this. Wyoming and Sweden don't have to trust each other and/or some third party when they can just post their records to the same chain.
Also, the big appeal of Tezos was the PoS, but now that Ethereum has switched to that, I don't see what edge Tezos has.
> Tezos is still cheaper, faster, and much less barrier to entry if you want to stake your coins
Yeah but those advantages only come from Tezos being used less, right? If not, how did they manage to design something strictly better than Ethereum?
Isn't this an oxymoron? I could see the point of the DMVs using a blockchain, but that of course depends on details that I don't expect them to handle properly.
Also what happens if someone decides to do a 50% attack? All the registrations get erased?
> Also what happens if someone decides to do a 50% attack? All the registrations get erased?
I'm not sure exactly what a 51% stake gets to do to contracts. Probably you could show verification of a transferred title then undo that transfer, but not erase titles created before the attack or force new transfers. Anyway, if someone managed to pull that off (which is a big if), Tezos would be sufficiently broken that the DMV/Tezos would have to snapshot the blockchain before the attack and take things back to centralization. There'd be a big disruption, and whatever happened after the attack would be undone.
There is nothing that a block chain does that has any value over a database of you are assuming trusted participants.
The only thing block chains do is - questionably - resolve that problem. Now let’s go and look at a dmv example: do we believe that the dmv is going to allow anyone to write whatever they want in this nonsense?
Let’s look at other constraints: vehicles can and are seized - when that happens the car owner has no say in the ownership, and so this idiotic application of blockchain nonsense can’t do the other thing it’s ostensibly good “the owner of the real thing controls the blockchain representation of that thing”.
Similarly, mistakes are common in the real world, and a typo in the dmv can’t make a car permanently ownerless, so reversing changes has to be supported, so there goes “immutable” (which is always a nonsense goal).
Seriously, the sooner these blockchain grifters are gone the better.
The only thing blockchain has enabled consistently is crime: fraud, grifting, and ransomware. Certainly the latter is arguably the only example of something that is impossible without blockchain, so I guess blockchains did do at least one thing new.
You're describing a proof-of-work setup. Tezos is proof-of-stake, which tends to be cheaper than PoW. To put numbers on it, a Tezos TZIP-12 (NFT) transfer lately costs $0.02. Minting costs like $0.10. Ethereum on PoW was like $5 IIRC, idk what it is now. Yes, more expensive than a regular DB in any case, that's what I said before.
> There is nothing that a block chain does that has any value over a database of you are assuming trusted participants.
There are side benefits that have more to do with standardization and transparency. You get a small server/DB that everyone can see and verifiably tell what it's doing, and it's distributed, and it's already running. If you haven't used Ethereum or Tezos, it's worth playing around with. Yes someone could implement that without blockchain, and maybe someone has a proof of concept, but nothing like that has become mainstream like the blockchains have. And the DMV isn't going to do it.
So you're right, they don't need a blockchain for this because the DMV is a centralized point of trust in the end (though they're probably sorta federated on the inside). I don't imagine people will be trading titles like NFTs and the DMV will just honor whatever the contract says. I can still imagine this being an viable path forward for them for the other reasons, or just a big gimmick, depending on what they do.
> Similarly, mistakes are common in the real world, and a typo in the dmv can’t make a car permanently ownerless, so reversing changes has to be supported, so there goes “immutable” (which is always a nonsense goal).
Contract datastores are always mutable in terms of what the last block says. The immutability of blockchains refers to past blocks. If the DMV put titles in a contract, the authorized editors (might just be several DMV offices) would be able to update it, with the edit history publicly visible.
Any ledger-ized industry where you'd like to reduce the total amount of fraud taking place.
And then I read the comments saying "centralized db rulez"
link in the article BWG-Final-Report-2020-July.pdf