The fact that I have not met a single knowledgable person who managed to convince me that NFTs are a good technology that solves problems that need solving in elegant ways doesn't speak about me, it speaks about the topic at hand.
To me NFTs look like this: Somebody was like "how can we make money off the internet if people just can copy everything? We need to limit the supply somehow!" and then they tried to market it to artists "you will earn money this way". I don't even agree that copyability of data is a problem, and the argument of "we can make money by owning and not putting in a lot of work" attracts exactly the kind of bad actor you talked about.
Any technology doesn't live in isolation from society, especially not something like NFTs that makes the extraordinary claim to introduce something as fundamental as ownership within a system that has been built on free copying of data. That means bad actors need to be factored in, especially if you're marketing the thing in the style of a get rich quick scheme.
Maybe you can explain why this is something we want and why this is the technology that solves it?
Some benefits of NFTs in the property deed example would be:
- The elimination of the need for municipalities to maintain proprietary databases to hold property deeds
- 24/7 globally accessible property information. (No downtime)
- Standardized and globally interoperable property records across municipalities and potentially countries
- Easy to prove and verify ownership of properties, which could be used to grant access to third party services for homeowners. (e.g. HELOCs)
- Dapps could allow property owners to post the NFT deed as collateral and automate the loan application process to reduce processing costs.>Dapps could allow property owners to post the NFT deed as collateral and automate the loan application process to reduce processing costs. Do you not see how this is a bad idea? What value is the NFT deed? The house has the value - what's the NFT worth? If you have the NFT deed, are you the house owner? Bruh.
What value is the property deed? The house has the value - what's the property deed worth? If you have the property deed, are you the house owner?
That's a great question.
Riddle me this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564
Your question was, quote, "If you have the property deed, are you the house owner?"
I gave you an example of a property deed, and issues that could arise around that property deed. Now, how exactly will blockchain help in the cases I described?
It's not. NFTs are non-enforceable.
> Public blockchains can help expose manipulations of property records
No they can't. I literally provided you with examples.
They are as non-enforceable as property deeds. (i.e. property deed enforce-ability relies on the government too)
> No they can't. I literally provided you with examples.
They absolutely can. If someone modifies the NFT on the blockchain you will see exactly when and by whom it was modified. This could be provided as evidence in court.
Translation: government enforces property deeds. They are enfoceable.
NFTs are not
> If someone modifies the NFT on the blockchain
The question isn't about modifying the NFT is it. Go and re-read the cases I provided.
Edit: What amazes me about all the cryptobros is their inability to look beyond the simplest of the most simplest of the most trivial of cases. Probably because of their childlike belief in the magic of blockchain.
How did property deeds come into existence? Was there a time before property deeds? The point is technology evolves and blockchains offer an alternative to record keeping that is an improvement over existing systems. If governments adopt them for tracking property ownership, then they will be just as enforceable as property deeds.
> The question isn't about modifying the NFT is it. Go and re-read the cases I provided.
The point is the on-chain historical record of transactions can be provided as evidence to a court. A blockchain will not prevent corruption and bribery from arising, but it does represent an unalterable record of transactions. Ultimately courts are the enforceability layer of the government, but that does not make blockchains useless for the purposes of property record keeping.
> Edit: What amazes me about all the cryptobros is their inability to look beyond the simplest of the most simplest of the most trivial of cases. Probably because of their childlike belief in the magic of blockchain.
This seems like your inner bias coming out. There is certainly no shortage of grift in the crypto space. Nevertheless, the technology is real and there are people with PhDs in CompSci and vast amounts of distributed network experience working in the space. I'd invite you to try and look at the technology objectively, because there are some really exciting and cool things happening in the space.
You've yet to show it's an improvement.
> Ultimately courts are the enforceability layer of the government, but that does not make blockchains useless for the purposes of property record keeping.
Of course it does. For example, immutability of the record makes everything but the most trivial of cases very complex or impossible:
- every single case in the linked comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564 is made worse by the blockchain
- death, incapacitation, loss of access to wallet/private keys and many more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27217681
> This seems like your inner bias coming out.
No. This is the result of many, many such discussions where crypto absolutists fail to imagine any but the most trivial of cases (and even those work only barely, with a bunch of constraints and reliance on existing centralised mechanisms). And for anything outside of those trivial examples they invent more and more bizarre constructs that make the whole thing collapse under its own weight.
> I'd invite you to try and look at the technology objectively,
I have
> because there are some really exciting and cool things happening in the space.
We've heard this magic mantra being repeated ad nauseam for the past 10 years. There's still nothing exciting or cool coming out of this cesspool.
Ransomware or other attacks are always going to be a risk, and the more municipalities that use a single system, the bigger a target it becomes, so smaller but properly secured and backed up systems have advantages.
Cryptographic signatures paired with identity information makes all transactions easily verifiable for tax collection purposes. There are purposes such as proving ownership of a record anytime someone needs to that would be convenient if the records are accessible 24/7.
> Ransomware or other attacks are always going to be a risk, and the more municipalities that use a single system, the bigger a target it becomes, so smaller but properly secured and backed up systems have advantages.
If the past is any indication, local governments and small businesses have had a heck of time securing their IT systems. I would much prefer a hardened blockchain system to secure my property ownership record, than the current situation.
I don’t think they even care who pays the tax as long as it gets paid. They aren’t going to not take your money if they can’t verify you’re the legal owner.
> I would much prefer a hardened blockchain system to secure my property ownership record, than the current situation.
The current system isn’t even digital. There’s some sort of master book or something that records every title transaction since there’s been a legal claim on the property. I’m pretty sure the one for my house is archived with the title insurance company, probably something I should know.
When you ask a question like that I can't help but asking back: How would you design any system that has "literally 0 downtime" and why do you think it is only possible to achive it using a blockchain?
As for the second part: proving some digital data is originating from someone is what we have been doing using cryptographic signatures for quite a while now. How to do so in a stable fashion that resists changes to the original data e.g. editing, cropping, color-manipulation, pitch shifting, etc is the challenge. This is called fingerprinting.
To proove ownership of a material you just need a list of fingerprints and a reference to the entity that owns the rights. How to do reliable databases is a problem that we sort of know how to deal with in 2023.
The question is, why would you need a blockchain for that problem? The hard part is not trusting the entity that stores the data, the hard part is trusting the data that is entered into that database. And for this kind of problem the best construction we have found so far is dedicating some institution to that purpose and have copyright-holders proove their ownership of their data to that institution. But if you have an institution that you already need to trust with data entry you can also trust them with data storage or not?
Not sure how a blockchain helps when some guy claims the song I have written on another blockchain. In the end it will be governments who will have to recognize my ownership so I can sue and by that point you can safe yourself the trouble of using a blockchain in the first place.
Blockchains are great for proving ownership because you can provide a signature for verification and then that can be cross-referenced to see if that same signature also owns the on-chain data.
There is no getting around the fact that the government chooses the system of record and property owners have to abide that choice. If the government though chose to use a blockchain as the system of record (for all the benefits I listed previously), then you don't need to worry about other blockchains, because that's not the one the government cares about.
Its value is that it is proof of ownership certified by whichever county officer has the job to do these things.
> The house has the value - what's the property deed worth?
Literally nothing since anyone can show up at the county office and get a copy. They don’t even ask for ID because it’s a public record.
> If you have the property deed, are you the house owner?
No, the property deed is an official record of the property owner.
With the deed you can prove you own the property but even that isn’t ironclad which is the whole reason there’s a title insurance industry. Which, and I’ll give you this one, could be the only valid reason for “blockchain” in this whole argument but would require having every historic property transaction already on chain or you’d just be where we are today.
Oh, the real hard problems are creating the standardised representation of a property deed and getting everyone to use it. Something not at all addressed by use of blockchain!
>Cryptographically prove ownership of a property literally no one is asking for this except the sellers of cryptographic proof.
> Oh, the real hard problems are creating the standardised representation of a property deed and getting everyone to use it. Something not at all addressed by use of blockchain!
And Oracle databases addressed this? Standardizing property deeds is more of an application level concern not core blockchain infra.
>Cryptographically prove ownership of a property literally no one is asking for this except the sellers of cryptographic proof.
A good UI/UX would make this a push button capability from a wallet. No need for the general public to understand the technology powering push button verification. :)
You claimed it as a benefit! There's no reason that NFTs for property deeds would: Be standardised, or be on the same chain. That's more an application level concern, so please take that point back.
>Just because you host on AWS doesn't mean you get 0 downtime.
You get as near to 0 downtime as anyone needs for transacting property.
Also, still no one is asking for cryptographic proof of property ownership, even if you make it a single button push. No one needs it now, what does it add? Why is what we have now in need of cryptographic verification? Crypto boosters want it because they're selling it, directly or indirectly. You have not answered this question.
There's different standard levels right? I'm talking about when you build a property deed NFT you'd have to adhere to the on-chain standard for how NFTs are created on that particular blockchain. Then once those NFTs existed other people could integrate them. If you want the property deeds to have a set of standard specifications of how they deal with particular situations that might arise through inheritance, multiple parties, lost keys, etc. then that would be an application level specification.
> Also, still no one is asking for cryptographic proof of property ownership, even if you make it a single button push. No one needs it now, what does it add? Why is what we have now in need of cryptographic verification? Crypto boosters want it because they're selling it, directly or indirectly. You have not answered this question.
I'm asking for it and I'm sure others would like to have it to. :) Having cryptographic verification provides an ability to quickly prove ownership from an application and then that verification could unlock certain home owner benefits (e.g. HELOCs)
Why would you want to make house deeds easy to hack?
>There's different standard levels right? I'm talking about when you build a property deed NFT you'd have to adhere to the on-chain standard for how NFTs are created on that particular blockchain.
Okay, why bother with that particular blockchain standard then, and not the hypothetical FOSS software for hosting a property deed database? Because then you have the same benefits, but also don't need the blockchain?
It helps facilitate more automated approval b/c if you were to complete an application with your wallet then the system could check for the presence of the NFT to indicate ownership.
> How does cryptography proof that you own it?
The presence of the NFT in your wallet.
> Because you know a private key attached to a wallet address with the NFT in it?
Yes
> Okay, and how does that NFT relate to actually owning something?
If the government decides to use a blockchain as its system of record for property deeds, then the NFTs on that blockchain would be just as legitimate as paper property deeds. The NFTs hold the hash of any off-chain data whose validity could be verified.
> What if you get hacked, does the hacker now own it?
Perhaps in a poor implementation. I would expect clawbacks to be implemented for property deed NFTs.
> And if the hacker takes out the line of credit, fail to pay, does the defi protocol they borrowed from now own your house?
Hopefully that user is using a hardware wallet and again clawbacks are implemented, so that doesn't happen. If it did, then you'd probably seek resolution through the courts as needed.
> Why would you want to make house deeds easy to hack?
It's very hard to steal NFTs from a hardware wallet with clawback support. Good luck!
> Okay, why bother with that particular blockchain standard then, and not the hypothetical FOSS software for hosting a property deed database? Because then you have the same benefits, but also don't need the blockchain?
Because a FOSS property deed database could be censored and cannot be independently verified outside of the governing body easily. I would expect the uptime to be slower. It would also become a central point of failure for all property deeds and would need to protect against DDoS attacks.
Does this exist? What would it look like? Can you force a wallet to release an NFT? Or is it just governmental - centralized! - approved reminting of an NFT?
Also your security model is "I hope users use a hardware wallet" - not a great track record of this! Even among professional cryptocurrency developers!
>Because a FOSS property deed database could be censored and cannot be independently verified outside of the governing body easily. I would expect the uptime to be slower. It would also become a central point of failure for all property deeds This is the state of play today and it's... fine? Like I know many, many, many people buying houses and the hard part is not the record keeping of the deeds. That wouldn't even make a top 10 problem. And I know several people who've remortgaged or taken out credit against their house. They managed! Generally, taking out a big loan doesn't need to be fast - you don't do it that often.
Not exactly crying out for this solution, is it?
So, in summary, this use case isn't a high priority for nearly anyone (HELOCs already exist and can be accessed, and in any case, who needs them to be much faster? how often do they take out credit against their house?) and requires either centralized authority OR a future improvement to a blockchain (clawback!) and still requires the courts to looks at analog paper deeds (otherwise, how could seek resolution through the courts) in any case.
Now some potential scenarios:
1. A sells deed to B. So now they do in on chain and NFT is sold from wallet X to Y. All of that is registered in the CDB and confirmed with paper documents, contracts and stuff. Maaaybe that can work, but as we see NFTs are useless fifth leg in a horse here.
2. Inheritance. Deed is inherited by law by person C (with or wihtout wallet Z), but chain doesn't know about it and thinks wallet X still owns NFT. CDB has actual data and overrides "wallet X" line, so that chain now useless and outdated.
3. Law enforces deed transfer from A to B. Again, NFT is not sold and chain is not updated.
The list of situations can go on and on.
And last note - these so called "dapps", which are neither smart nor contracts, are the most stupidly delusional thing you can introduce into a valuable commodities market. Only people not familiar with the scale and rate of exploits caused by usage of these dumb and badly designed programs can suggest it. Or the one profiteering from this. Phishing is over the top and even experienced users at r/CC are regularly losing everything due to a single click mistakes. This is not how housing market worked and will work. Not how any market works actually.
It amazes me how people say this with straight face. "Just store all the data off-chain!". Then the chain isn't needed.
What jump? You literally said that all the data is stored somewhere else.
> stores and establishes cryptographic proof of ownership.
It stores some unenforceable token that is only valid as long as those who actually enforce ownership agree that it proves anything.
So:
- all data is stored elsewhere, on centralised servers
- proof of ownership is enforced by centralised entities (governments, courts, police, etc.)
Great application of blockchains.
No, I didn't. The NFT would be stored on chain and inside the NFT would be hash of the data that is stored off chain. Anyone can then source the off chain data from any location and then compute the hash of that data and compare it with what is stored on chain.
> It stores some unenforceable token that is only valid as long as those who actually enforce ownership agree that it proves anything.
This is no different than any other system. What makes that Oracle database that your property assessor uses to store your parcel information in enforceable? Oh yeah, the government.
> No, I didn't... NFT would be hash of the data that is stored off chain.
Yes. You literally said all the data would be stored somewhere else.
> This is no different than any other system.
If this is no different than any other system, then it has no benefits of any other system.
> What makes that Oracle database that your property assessor uses to store your parcel information in enforceable? Oh yeah, the government.
Indeed, the government.
Who makes your fantasy tokens referring to physical objects enforceable? Oh right. No one.
Meta data (ownership data) is stored on-chain. (supplemental data is stored off-chain) So again, no I did not say that all data is stored somewhere else. The meta data that is stored on-chain serves an important role.
> If this is no different than any other system, then it has no benefits of any other system.
We are talking about the enforceability. Governments can choose to embrace a blockchain as their system of record. If they do, then NFT deeds are as enforceable as traditional property deeds.
> Who makes your fantasy tokens referring to physical objects enforceable? Oh right. No one.
The government would in this particular case. Maybe in other cases it would be a company and in still other cases it could be an on-chain contract.
So actual data that proves that this physical person is the owner of this physical asset.
> It could be stored in a, b, c
> then an application can pull the data from wherever it is stored
Ah yes. Because when it's stored in a non-centralised database of "local computer at owner's residence" or "hosted server controlled by the owner" that data is easily accessible and retrievable.
Who is this "you" who is going to do that?
Remember we were talking about property deeds? Their availability is of great concern.
Before you answer that, go back over all your comments here and in other threads, collect all the limitations you've run into, all the workarounds you proposed, all the additional external systems you need to run just the most trivial of scenarios, and riddle me this: why would anyone want this?
That's just centralised in a different form. Or more precisely - not decentralised.
Sure, some app can interact with centralised DB holding all actual information like deeds or music or whatever. Why do you need NFTs for that? Centralised BD must me utilised to track ownership of actual data or items by real people and it won't work any other way due to the IP rights and complex ownership agreements. NFTs are useless and impotent for this task.
How many copies of the data in different locations do you need to be considered decentralized? In fact, I'd argue you just care about having enough copies of the off-chain data that you feel well insulated from data loss, so I'm not sure that the off-chain data needs to actually be decentralized. The goal is to have the ownership proof (on-chain NFT) be as decentralized and easily auditable as possible.
> Sure, some app can interact with centralised DB holding all actual information like deeds or music or whatever. Why do you need NFTs for that? Centralised BD must me utilised to track ownership of actual data or items by real people and it won't work any other way due to the IP rights and complex ownership agreements. NFTs are useless and impotent for this task.
I feel like many of these conversations in this thread are focused on the current state of blockchain adoption today. I don't know of any government today that has adopted a blockchain to track property records at scale, but I do think that will probably come eventually. As soon as that happens, then you can have rules and regulations drafted around all these tertiary concerns including IP rights and complex ownership rights, potentially some of those codified in on-chain contracts, but some would remain as processes for the government or the courts. Putting property deeds in an NFT on a blockchain does not solve all problems that arise with property ownership, but it could improve the record keeping process in some areas.
For it to "come eventually" you need to answer all these questions that you ignore or swat aside as irrelevant, or easily solvable by magic.
> As soon as that happens, then you can have rules and regulations drafted around all these tertiary concerns including IP rights and complex ownership rights
No. These things have to be solved first. because complex ownership rights exist today, and not in some fantastical future after blockchain has been implemented at scale.
> potentially some of those codified in on-chain contracts
"On-chain contracts" of course make zero sense even for the most trivial of cases. Much less the complex ones.
Because what you propose is replicating human-readable texts with programs in esoteric programming languages that get routinely "hacked" because even multiple audits cannot find vulnerabilities in them. And for what?
> Putting property deeds in an NFT on a blockchain does not solve all problems that arise with property ownership, but it could improve the record keeping process in some areas.
It "may improve record keeping" but produce an insane amount of complexity, inane and insane workarounds, friction and problems everywhere else. So, will not be implemented until those issues are solved.
> In fact, I'd argue you just care about having enough copies of the off-chain data that you feel well insulated from data loss, so I'm not sure that the off-chain data needs to actually be decentralized.
Remember how it all started? "The [government] staff still does what they do today, but they no longer need to maintain their own database and IT application."
And now they need to maintain "enough copies of the off-chain data" anyway and deal with blockchain.
IP rights aren't just for property deeds, they are relevant for every single digital or physical creation made by humans. So let's take a picture as an example:
There are NFTs and associated CDBs which supposedly allow trading pictures TODAY. No need to wait for any government or laws or technical advances. Supposedly NFTs allow me to buy and sell pictures in a decentralised way right here and now. The problem is that they can't do it. There is technically nothing inside NFT which can deal with IP rights for the pictures. You can't transfer IP rights completely, you can't do it partially, you can't do it with multiple peers, and of course you can't do any combination of the above. So current NFT platforms either ignore it or do it old fashioned way with centralised accounts, Terms of Service and other centralised stuff tracked on the platform and not on chain.
No need to wait for some far future and government adoption, NFTs has already failed at the much more simpler task and have no paths forward from this failure.
This is splitting hairs. Actual data that is actually relevant to the property, is stored somewhere else. Which is ironic because elsewhere you stated: "but they no longer need to maintain their own database and IT application."
Oh look. They have to maintain their own database for the actual data
> The government would in this particular case.
Not in this particular case. But in all cases.
> Maybe in other cases it would be a company
So. You need central entities to verify and enforce rights to physical objects. You need central entities to store the actual data pertaining to objects and people.
So the point of blockchain in all this is...?
Public permissionless blockchains help in easing the verifiability of ownership records, transfer of ownership records, and auditability of transactions. In the digital goods you don't necessarily have to rely on a single third party like a government. Checkout Chia offer files (https://chialisp.com/offers/) for an example of this. You can post these offer files on Twitter, forums, text messages, emails, etc.
To add it you need to show it produces more value than the problems it causes.
> It doesn't replace existing relational databases, nosql databases, object storage, etc.
Hm. Strange. In a comment elsewhere you literally claimed this, emphasis mine: "The staff still does what they do today, but they no longer need to maintain their own database and IT application."
> Also, just because some data is stored off-chain does not mean you need to run your own infra.
And the people will run the infra for you out of the goodness of their hearts? And of course the data that you store "somewhere elsewhere who knows where" will of course be easily available and accessible in perpetuity because blockchain, right?
Why is it that most NFTs in the world are now pointing to non-existent files?
> Public permissionless blockchains help in easing the verifiability of ownership records, transfer of ownership records, and auditability of transactions.
They don't. Moreover, they only work for the most trivial of cases, and make actual real-world scenarios hard or impossible. I've provide several of those, and you answer? "No one is claiming blockchain is helping in that situation and that's okay!"
> In the digital goods
We're not talking about digital goods.
I think it's fairly easy to understand (but you clearly hate the technology for some reason). The proof of ownership would be in the blockchain. NFT X represents X property, the address owning that NFT would technically own that NFT.
Also NFTs may also have descriptive data on them, so technically you could have a description marking that NFT as X property.
It's very much feasable, but from what I'm reading from you, you just hate the technology for the sake of it. Reminds me of Apple haters.
On top of that you need many more documents actually linking the actual physical person with that wallet. And additional documents dealing the actual property.
And of course "oh it's just simple record pointing to an address" is exactly why I keep saying that crypto proponents have this childlike inability to imagine anything beyond the most trivial of use cases.
Examples where "the address owning that NFT would technically own that NFT" falls apart and "useless discussion" is the one I'm having, not crypto-absolutists with their trivial cases and increasingly complex workarounds:
- ownership disputes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564
- ownership transfer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27217681
> you just hate the technology for the sake of it.
As wrote elsewhere: I've had this or similar conversation many, many times. Crypto proponents can only come up with the most trivial examples, and for anything more complex they rely on magic and increasingly complex and arcane constructions that fall under their own weight.
Edit:
Just in this discussion: we "don't need a centralised database", but we need a centralised database, or an external party to store our data that also needs to be available and accessible by anyone, but also reliable, maybe federated, or a local server, and it's also standardised, but maybe third parties will make it standard for governments, or maybe someone will provide infra to store data, or maybe it will be hash of data that may or may not be standardised, or...
And with all that it still doesn't solve or help any of the complex issues that arise from property ownership.
This would also make very easy to prove ownership. You have access to the address that owns said property, it's yours. It's as simple as that.
The database you'd need locally would be pretty much to store useful information and to track data on the blockchain.
I don't see any country using this anytime soon, or at all, but it is possible.
PS: I do understand you hate NFTs representing pictures of monkeys being worth millions of $, I also find it stupid, that doesn't give me the right to hate the entire technology that makes it possible.
No, it shows that I define people talking about this tech by how much of reality they ignore.
> This would also make very easy to prove ownership. You have access to the address that owns said property, it's yours. It's as simple as that.
Who is this "you"? And who do you prove this ownership to? How all the other use cases like death and loss of access to the address are resolved? How are court orders are resolved? And so on, I've provided links where I listed various use cases in similar discussions.
See? Your "easy" ignores so many complexities.
> The database you'd need locally would be pretty much to store useful information and to track data on the blockchain.
So, you need to store useful information somewhere anyway. What exactly is the value of blockchain in this case?
> that doesn't give me the right to hate the entire technology that makes it possible.
Your emotional outbursts don't affect me. It's not hate when every single thing that you say is possible is only possible for the most trivial cases, makes other cases hard or impossible, requires complex workaround for complex issues, and in general doesn't improve an iota over existing situation.
Ok, but what's the benefit of doing that?
But if the entity that is charged with keeping track of who owns what needs to keep a central database anyway, what value does keeping the ownership records elsewhere bring? I see doing that as accomplishing nothing but increasing the number of things that can go wrong.
When it comes to things like real estate, the "proof of ownership" is completely without meaning unless you also have the extra data beyond that. Things like where the land is, what the boundaries of the property are, etc.
If the off-chain data is "incorrect", what are you going to do? Can anybody mint those NFTs? What's the point then? The government is the only one who can kick you out of that house irl.
The minting process could be managed by the government or some entity using an on-chain contract or it could just be a manual process that the government does in conjunction with banks. The enforcement of the ownership records would still be held with the government. The point of having property records as NFT on-chain data is it enables easy to verify ownership of property records, transparency/auditability of property records, and easy transfers of property records to new owners.
Correct, which means that there has to be an ultimate source of truth that everyone agrees on that is independent of the blockchain. Which means there has to be an authoritative central agency of some sort to handle that. Which means that the blockchain has not, in fact, accomplished the stated goal.
So those don't look like things that NFTs make better in this space.
Let's suppose that the off-chain data is a PDF containing all the information for the property deed. If the hash values don't match then it means the PDF should be disregarded. If the off-chain data was kept in multiple locations, then one could potentially still retrieve a good copy of the PDF whose hash matches and then can be trusted.
Now, just because a blockchain can be used as the system of record for property deeds does not mean one wouldn't need to still have laws and other organizations enforcing that system of record. The blockchain is just a tool that makes some aspects of the record keeping easier and opens up some interesting possibilities as I've outlined in other comments of this thread.
> If you could do that, then you could be breaking into all sorts of systems.
Absolutely. And this is one of the methods that is used to do just that. I'm not talking about a theoretical security issue here, this is a weakness that has been leveraged in the real world for a long time.
> Cryptographic one-way hash functions are actually the preferred way to secure passwords.
Yes, but they're also not considered bulletproof. They're a bit of a compromise effort. That's why the leaking of password files is considered a security problem even when the passwords are salted hashes.
And, like with password hashes, it's not actually necessary to break the hash in order to alter the hashed record while maintaining the same hash. There are mathematical shortcuts to doing this, but you can even just brute force it if you have enough computing power or time.
Oh really? Care to share some examples of SHA-256 and SHA-3 collisions?
That said, there are readily available tools that use things like rainbow tables to "crack" SHA-256 salted password hashes. By "crack", I mean to come up with a password that hashes to the same value.
These tools are in successful use every day.
Cracking SHA-256 with rainbow tables is a fundamentally different exercise as you are relying on someone having selected a weak password that you can then generate a hash for. The weakness is not in SHA-256, but in the weak user selected password.
That's fine, I don't expect you to believe me without evidence. But I have seen this happen more than once in my work.
> you are relying on someone having selected a weak password
Stated another way, you are relying on having some idea of what the original data looked like, so you can reduce the search space. Absolutely correct.
However, if you're hashing public records like real estate, where you literally have the clear text, that's a much simpler problem than cracking passwords. All you need to do is alter the document in the way that you want, then find what other changes are needed to create a collision with the original hash. This is not very computationally intensive compared to password cracking.
Add in that the amount of money on the line with real estate can be high enough that it would make it worth throwing serious resources at it -- more than the average password cracker could even begin to summon -- and my confidence in the security of the hashes is greatly reduced.
Here's an interesting general overview of the problem: https://medium.com/asecuritysite-when-bob-met-alice/can-i-cr...
Of course it doesn't eliminate the need. Who's going to enter those records and enforce them?
> Standardized and globally interoperable property records across municipalities and potentially countries
Just because it's on blockchain doesn't mean it's standardised, or interoperable.
> Easy to prove and verify ownership of properties, which could be used to grant access to third party services for homeowners.
Yup. Until a corrupt government official puts his friend as the owner of your house and evicts you. Look, the proof is in the blockchain, and it's irrefutable, and cannot be amended.
> Dapps could allow property owners to post the NFT deed as collateral and automate the loan application process to reduce processing costs.
This is just a string off made-up terms that make no sense
The staff still does what they do today, but they no longer need to maintain their own database and IT application.
> Just because it's on blockchain doesn't mean it's standardised, or interoperable.
Once it is on a blockchain it is conforming to a published standard for NFTs for that particular blockchain and others can interact with it and build additional systems that interoperate more easily.
> Yup. Until a corrupt government official puts his friend as the owner of your house and evicts you. Look, the proof is in the blockchain, and it's irrefutable, and cannot be amended.
Because corrupt government officials have never doctored official records that weren't on the blockchain?
> This is just a string off made-up terms that make no sense
No, it's not. A Dapp stands for a "decentralized application" and posting property deeds as collateral is a real thing. Further, being able to do that digitally will likely lower processing costs.
That's a very minor thing to maintain as compared to the multiple issues that blockchains bring into the mix.
And of course they will need to maintain an IT application: they will need secure wallet implementations, data entry applications to interact with blockchains, security audits for the shitty programs people keep calling "smart contracts" etc.
> Once it is on a blockchain it is conforming to a published standard for NFTs
Ah yes. It automagically conforms to some standard. Just because it's on blockchain.
> Because corrupt government officials have never doctored official records that weren't on the blockchain?
And how is blockchain helping you in this case? Or in the cases I linked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564 and that you even failed to understand.
Most likely a third party company will provide a standardized overlay that government's can tweak to suit their needs, but the bulk of the important data is now stored securely on chain. This should help reduce the security footprint and FTE overhead for governments.
> Ah yes. It automagically conforms to some standard. Just because it's on blockchain.
No magic involved. If you want your NFT to work say on the Chia Blockchain, then you need to conform to this standard -> https://www.chia.net/2022/06/29/1-4-0-introducing-the-chia-n...
> And how is blockchain helping you in this case? Or in the cases I linked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564 and that you even failed to understand.
I've already explained this in another comment. No one is claiming blockchain is helping in that situation and that's okay! :)
So, we're squarely in the realm of magic and wishful thinking.
Some third party (who?) will provide some standardised way (which standards?) that governments will tweak (what? if tweaked, it's no longer standard).
> but the bulk of the important data is now stored securely on chain.
Of course not. Storing anything in bulk on-chain is prohibitively expensive. All you're proposing to store is a hash of off-chain data
> No magic involved. If you want your NFT to work say on the Chia Blockchain, then you need to conform to this standard
Why would government want a) NFT to b) work on Chia?
On top of that, you are literally saying: "You will just need to store a hash of the off-chain data on chain". What's the standard for that hash?
> I've already explained this in another comment.
You haven't
> No one is claiming blockchain is helping in that situation and that's okay! :)
No, it's not okay. You keep saying that blockchain is some solution for something, but every single case runs into "no, you don't use blockchain for that".
A blockchain solves the specific problem of how to track ownership of some piece of data in a decentralized fashion where multiple parties do not trust each other.
This, however is not the hard problem when we talk about ownership databases. The hard problem is ensuring the data entered into that database represents actual real world ownership and having the database universally recognized by everybody as a representation of ownership.
What purpose does a database like that serve, when the actual place where the rubber of ownership hits the road is somwhere else?
Agreed. The parties that are interacting must agree on which blockchain to interact on first. More likely an industry, trade association, or government would say this chain is going to be the system of record of where transactions take place and then individuals and businesses are forced to abide by that. Then once that is decided, any transfer of ownership on that chain would expect to be honored by the transferring party. If not, then consequences would be enforced by the governing industry, trade association, government. etc.
> A blockchain solves the specific problem of how to track ownership of some piece of data in a decentralized fashion where multiple parties do not trust each other.
> This, however is not the hard problem when we talk about ownership databases. The hard problem is ensuring the data entered into that database represents actual real world ownership and having the database universally recognized by everybody as a representation of ownership.
> What purpose does a database like that serve, when the actual place where the rubber of ownership hits the road is somwhere else?
Yes, there is sort of a bootstrapping problem around how do you get people onboarded onto a particular blockchain. For that I think you need some novel use case(s). For Bitcoin it was being the first alternative monetary system. For Ethereum it was the ability to create on-chain programs. Zcash it was private transactions. etc. Once people are onboarded though, then you can use that system to agree on where ownership entry and change of ownership transactions take place. Then you can use the publicly auditable history to prove ownership. For a physical good, then that becomes evidence that can be presented to a third party presiding entity who settles disputes.
Yeah, but would I like to do that? All these blockchains are literally some shady guy that tells me "trust me and my tech to manage that ownership for you". What is in it for me?
It doesn’t say anything about the correct answer to the question and all about your analysis process. Keep looking, good luck!
For example:
> The fact that I have not met a single knowledgable person who managed to convince me that eating poop is a good idea that solves problems that need solving in elegant ways doesn't speak about me, it speaks about the topic at hand.
Do we conclude that eating poop is a great idea, and that more looking is what's needed? Or can we conclude that there's probably a reason folks struggle to justify the concept?
It doesn't necessarily say something about the correct answer to the question. That however doesn't automatically mean it never says something about the correct answer to the question.
I decided in this case, that it does.
We can do an experiment here - you can describe what you think is an NFT and I can reply why is that technically impossible (because we have heard this broken record for a thousand times already) :)