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Not only will they save money on record keeping, it’s a way to create sunken treasure chests. When people die, digital files can easily be removed without trace. I expect this move will allow the government to purge lost records of dead people who never alerted their next-of-kin.

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>digital files can easily be removed

Keeping only a single copy seems insane to me, any number of things could go wrong and destroy all that's stored there[1]. Digital copies wouldn't so bad if there were redundant backups (tape[2], film[3], etc.).

[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nypd-warehouse-fire-evi...

[2]: https://www.ibm.com/tape-storage

[3]: https://archiveprogram.github.com/

"Did anyone try to restore the backup recently?"

"..."

> Keeping only a single copy seems insane to me, any number of things could go wrong and destroy all that's stored there[1]. Digital copies wouldn't so bad if there were redundant backups (tape, film[2], etc.).

I don't know about the UK, but according to an old episode of Dallas that I watched recently, in the US there are usually three official copies of a will kept: one in a government records office, one at the office of the lawyer who drafted it, and one with the individual.

It sounds like this proposal is for wills >25 years old, so the biggest impact would be on historical-research use cases.

That might be how it works in TV but that's not how it works in real life.

Pretty much all that needs to happen in the US is somebody shows up with a document signed by a few people (dead guy and some notaries). Whether that document was stored under the fridge or a law office -- nobody cares.

Wouldn't that make forging wills pretty easy and low risk?

If you're holding the original it would be easy; ex. Carol Baskin [1]. I think it's only low-risk if there would be very few heirs as otherwise you run the risk of other people knowing the contents of the original will.

Not a lawyer, but uh talk to people before you make a will to see if there's certain possessions that they want. Maybe you have a signed baseball that your brother was in attendance at and he'd want it when you die. It'd certainly look weird if a bunch of people you knew showed up at probate court saying you said you'd give them X item and the (forged) will only showed everything going to the housekeeper.

There's a bunch of old celebrities coming up; you could try forging their wills and see how it goes ;)

[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=tiger%20king%20forged%20will...

You could hand out signed records that contain a hash of the previous record, similar to a blockchain.

The government can have the burden of proof to show that the chain is complete if ordered so by a court.

I'm fairly blockchain-ignorant despite having read up on it quite a bit, but THIS sort of task seems to me a pretty good use of blockchain. It wouldn't need to necessarily run in an entirely de-centralised set up, but how that would work (eg. sharing amongst a limited number of trustable centralised parties), I don't know.

I did mull over something similar for voting a few years back, scrawling sides of A2-paper with notes and diagrams on the subject, but I'll be damned if I can make head or tail of whatever I wrote back then. I was a bit drunk at the time.

Right - you don't need a wasteful proof-of-work blockchain for this. The mechanism used for Certificate Transparency would work great here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency

Same for "real estate on the blockchain" - when people argue for that, the bit they are usually arguing for is a trail of historical records that can't be corrupted. Certificate Transparency solves that really well.

How? It’s not designed for consensus.

You don't need consensus for this, unless I've missed something.

We are talking about a mechanism to prove that no-one has tampered with the documents.

This is one of those cases where terminology matters.

A blockchain is just a content-addressed linked list (that is: the "pointer" to the next node is actually hash of the contents of the next node, then you have a big hashmap of hash -> node contents). A merkle tree is the same thing in tree form. Git uses the directed acyclic graph version of the same thing. This approach is perfect for this use case. The decentralized Nakamoto consensus proof of work stuff is unnecessary here.

> digital files can easily be removed without trace

As opposed to paper.

Paper is much harder to secretly vanish (A) at scale and/or (B) remotely.

I always thought it was cool how some Ghost in The Shell movie/anime stuff involved storing very sensitive secrets as barcodes on paper, to be kept physically-secure before being read by cybernetic eyes.

There's also some line from one of the The Expanse books (Abbadon's Gate) which I can't easily call up here. The protagonist is inside an alien space-station following an AI's instructions to try to save the day, and he's curious why the AI doesn't just do it. The AI tells him that for the builders of that place, having physical existence was a kind of authority all on its own.

fire is pretty effective at that.

don't even have to torch the entire document, just enough to make it inadmissible for legal purposes.

People are remarkably more hesitant to destroy physical records than digital ones, in my experience. Also, you have to go to a place and find the thing to destroy it - with digital records, you can press a button from across the world.

how do dead people alert their next of kin?

being serious: most wills are not sourced from the probate registry and are only sent there to obtain probate

With automation. I have my Google account transfer to my wife after _n_ months of inactivity, for example.

That’s not a thing most people have set up (even if they should).

In the US, this could be done by monitoring the social security death master file published on a cadence. Currently advocating for a citizen friendly system to notify chosen parties at death event. Financial institutions consume this SSA data to freeze accounts, for example.

https://www.ssa.gov/dataexchange/request_dmf.html

This is more or less a solved problem. Tamper-resistant/tamper-evident datastructures like blockchains and merkle trees make it fairly hard to make things vanish without a trace. You dont need all of the Nakamoto consensus machinery of crypto currencies, you just need your central authority to publish the latest hash on a ~daily basis.

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