California DMV puts 42M car titles on blockchain to fight fraud | Hacker News Reader

California DMV puts 42M car titles on blockchain to fight fraud

reuters.com

44 pointsjc_81159 comments

A question I have is, is this a real implementation of blockchain? Or a marketing implementation.

If it’s real, and someone somehow steals someone else’s title (eg elderly scam or something of the sort) - does this mean there’s no recourse? Or is the state a centralized power that can re-assign titles at will? In that case, would a strongly managed traditional database have worked?

Genuinely trying to understand what blockchain brings to to the table here when taking into account real world issues and mistakes.

I sincerely hope this is just marketing, because none of the actual properties of blockchain make any sense whatsoever for this type of application.

Blockchain is decentralized. Why would you want that property for vehicle ownership that's specific to one department of a particular U.S. state? Having servers around the world sounds like a security risk, not an actual benefit to Californians.

Blockchain transactions are permanent. How is that helpful if a title is stolen, or transferred fraudulently, or illegally? What if a transaction contains sensitive or private information, or inappropriate language?

also there are legal ways to force somebody to give up a title without their consent. Lawsuits, divorce and so on.

That’s why blockchain is dumb. It doesn’t replace the law. It’s performance art business logic that still has to adhere to the law.

Blockchains don’t have to be decentralized and you can undo a transaction by making a new transaction that reverses the changes.

What's the point than?

Auditable history.

You don't need blockchain for that, you can just use git.

Git is a blockchain

No; it's a hash tree.

Blockchain is also a hash tree, but not all hash trees are blockchain. They've been around since the 70s.

They’re functionally equivalent these days. Blockchain has become marketing speak mostly.

But if you squint a little. The history of a git branch sure looks a lot like a blockchain (or vice versa). You have a ledger of records (commits), that are append only, and each commit contains a merkle or hash tree (git tree object)

So yeah git is basically a blockchain.

I have to squint pretty hard to convince myself. Git itself really only covers the auditing part, which any static service will do by virtue of storing data. Git repos aren't decentralized, they rely entirely on external software like GPG and SSH to enforce identity and have no native consensus mechanism. They also don't protect from erasing transactional history which is kinda seen as the cardinal sin of ledger-based economics.

If you wanted to be reductive you could try to argue that all linked lists or hashmaps are a blockchain once compiled. I think that's silly, bordering on revisionism. Git wasn't programmed as a Blockchain, and Blockchains weren't intended to resemble Git.

> Git repos aren’t decentralized

Sure they are. Git is one of the pioneering “distributed” version control systems. Every clone of a git repo is a complete copy. Sounds pretty decentralized to me.

Git’s native consensus mechanism is to defer to humans and record their decisions as merge commits.

I agree git natively doesn’t protect against erasing history. Although rebase is discouraged and any one node can’t forcibly erase history from every other node.

> Every clone of a git repo is a complete copy. Sounds pretty decentralized to me.

Every clone of a DNS lookup table is a complete copy too. That doesn't change the fact that DNS is one of the least decentralized technologies being developed and propagated today.

That’s more a question of how you hold it.

You can keep your own local DNS list or run one for you and your friends (OpenNIC)

But for DNS it’s typically most convenience if everyone agrees on who google.com is.

lol

Databases do that just fine.

Without decentralization, doesn't that mean you don't even need a 51% attack... the central authority can just rewrite the ledger history at will, the same as any database or git history?

It’s a government agency, I don’t think they’re doing this with the intent of giving up that authority.

So what does the blockchain actually accomplish...?

Nothing. As is tradition.

Just a different way of having an auditable and verifiable transaction history. Maybe it’s easier to share the blockchain than it would be to share copies of the database? They could be leveraging the existing tools for copying and verifying it, perhaps one of the requirements is that end users or dealers need to have access to a local copy that they can use to check the ownership history of a vehicle before a purchase? Everyone loves to hate on anything blockchain but it’s a useful data structure.

I don't think this really makes sense...? A blockchain is awesome for decentralized verification of a shared ledger, but without that, it's no different than a line by line history of writes in a text file.

If a dealer has a local copy of the ledger but isn't really part of the blockchain consensus, it's no different than having a read only history in any other structure.

It doesn't matter what format you store it in, it's more a question of who can rewrite history. If the central authority can do so at will and nobody can disagree with them, it nullifies the benefits of using a blockchain.

The dealer can say "it doesn't match our records", sure, but they can say that no matter if a blockchain or a bunch of CSVs are used. If the DMV then says sorry, our records are the only authoritative ones, please overwrite yours... then we're right back where we started.

I don't think people hate blockchains as a data structure, but as misapplied snake oil that doesn't solve the underlying problems. This doesn't create a real audit trail as much as the illusion of one. A proper audit trail would require the authoritative history to reside elsewhere, in some independent third party that the DMV cannot unilaterally overwrite.

Obviously, the features that combat fraud are public attention and immutable history. The most important feature is the history of transactions, which won't be able to be modified by state employees, even once mistakes are amended.

I'm disappointed that people who should be able to see through the hype, into the actual tech, are falling for the anti-hype in the same reflexive, unthinking manner as those falling for the actual hype.

Decision makers are more likely to fall for the marketing fluff of the consulting companies pushing this stuff over their own employees telling them they don't need it.

Having worked for an election services company, it truly irked me every time "blockchain" was mentioned to solve X problems. Unless you're in an untrusted, adversarial context with multiple parties, blockchain gets you nothing over just regular data signing with public-private keys/certs, but the added problems of latency and compute costs.

This is true of most regulatory situations. Blockchain could be something the banks and federal reserve could use for exchanges instead of the existing networks, but that's a very different use case.

Electronic voting is an untrusted, adversarial context. It seems you are part of the problem there, not the solution.

Indeed, they are some of the least secure systems out there, black boxes where votes go to die. One was run by someone who was proudly fundraising for Bush and later accused of insider trading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premier_Election_Solutions?wpr...

The industry was trying very hard to monopolize before antitrust stopped them. The whole entire industry is a threat to democracy and should be made illegal and replaced with auditable paper trails. Or yes, even a blockchain would be safer, but that wouldn't be anonymous.

I'm not talking about casting ballot votes... I'm talking about transmission of voter data from the EMS to the printers.

Another part, do you REALLY expect the govt to give up control over the servers in the case of voting? If a single organization controls the servers, all access to the servers and all of the entries without public access, it doesn't bring anything adventageous.

So it's a "real" blockchain aka Merkle chain aka immutable log. That would be quite nice, actually, although the privacy aspect is an open question.

Because "blockchain" is more than crypto. It's about an immutable, verifiable transaction history.

you only need that if you have multiple adversarial parties that all want to commit to a shared immutable history.

This is a use case with a single source of truth (the DMV). So again, why do we need a blockchain?

To make sure the DMV does not alter their own records? They are the ultimate authority on the topic.

Insider threat?

Have they considered that this might increase fraud and not decrease fraud? Having your vehicle title digitally stored in a blockchain wallet on your phone seems like an invitation to fraud and scammers compared to the current vehicle title experience, where most title’s are held directly and managed by creditors, ie Bank’s with high credit ratings and extensive audits and high internal control procedures.

My interpretation is that a blockchain based title system is better for the state to collect sales taxes as the title chain is more auditable and obvious, but that this will offer little to no benefit to the consumer.

Not your keys, not your car.

I too yearn for a return to bearer instruments outside of the train robberies of Red Dead.

I’d assume they are centrally managing all changes made to the blockchain, basically just using it as a database, so they should be able to implement whatever security measures they want before a transaction is approved.

I wonder about fraud too.

What does the "claim your title" process mean?

I'm sure 99% of people will not "claim" their title.

Can you just walk up to a car, take a snapshot of the VIN on the windshield and the license plate and claim someone's title? If you need the name, lots of people have that information available on or in their car.

(also if blockchain uses lots of energy will this make vehicles even more carbon negative?)

I'm pretty dubious about this reporting.

> the agency and its technology partners exclusively told Reuters

No quote from the agency, the reporter's based in Bangalore, and the only corroboration I can find of any such project is breathless PR pieces that, again, don't cite the agency at all.

I think it's probably real. Deloitte won this contract years ago and they have a blockchain division, California also has a blockchain working group within govt which among other things had suggested putting car and house titles in the blockchain as early as in 2020.

I shudder to think how much all this is going to cost the CA taxpayer... apparently the Deloitte contract was $46m.

As a technologist I am appalled at the cost, as a consultant I'm jealous!

If it's real, my suspicion is someone stood up a private blockchain that functions as a copy/replication of the real DMV database that'll still be consulted for anything meaningful and called it a day.

They're using AVAX so it's probably a custom Avalanche L1 – that's the whole point of Avalanche, they get to benefit from the public validators on the AVAX network but they can fully manage validator membership in their private L1

The people involved in this are fairly legit so I doubt they're going to do it just for show. Now the question is: did it need a blockchain solution? probably not

Ah yes Deloitte. Always there to sell the latest hype technology.

Such articles shilling blockchain had disappeared for some time. It seems they are back. Yet another in a series of good old IT project that doesn't actually need "blockchain" but uses the term to make headlines. Here in India I use an app provided by RTO (India's equivalent of DMV) where I can see my car's registration details, insurance, PUC (Pollution Certificate) and even my driving licenses details. There's another app that shows my traffic rules violation tickets and I can even pay the fines online if there are any. None of it requires "blockchain". This project is most probably using the good old SQL database at the backend to store actual data and there's an app front end. Even if uses a blockchain - it's a private blockchain and offers zero benefits over a regular database.

So no different than a database. Why did this need to be a blockchain. The information comes from a centralized database anyways

Yeah and 42M records is not prohibitively large.

it's miniscule. every resident could own 10, or 100 vehicles and sqlite would still handle it just fine.

If you want a slower, expensive database, than blockchain might be for you!

California DMV is notoriously bad even outside of California. This could either lessen the pain a bit, or cause immense human suffering.

>The project, in collaboration with tech company Oxhead Alpha on Ava Labs' Avalanche blockchain, will allow California's more than 39 million residents to claim their vehicle titles through a mobile app, the first such move in the United States.

I'm not sure I'd download a car. It seems like you're relying on the app to verify you, which is fine, but I don't see how any of this works more than a normal database. Why even write an article on technology if you don't have any information or technical expertise?

every time i move, they continue sending all my DMV related mail to my old address. it's a massive failure for something so ... boring.

They don’t use address service to update your address when your mail is forwarded to the new address?

Blockchain only makes sense for Decentralized uses. DMV records, by their very nature, are the epitome of a centralized authority of knowledge. This is a waste of time, money and CO2.

When I sell my car to you, I sign the back of my title and hand it to you with the keys. When I borrow money to buy a car, that's between me and the bank, also not the DMV. Those are the real epitomes, epitomes of decentralization.

"Some look at was is and say 'NIH' (or an equivalent bureaucracy, the DMV). Others look at what could be and 'tap yes to complete transfer'." -- Not Quite JFK

Not sure how it works in the US, but in India when sell a car, we have to get the registration transferred to the new owner. Till the new owner doesn't get the car transferred to their name, the old owner is legally responsible for anything that happens due to the car.

Also when we borrow money to buy the car, the hypothecation is recorded on car's registration certificate and ownership records. When the loan is repaid, we have to get it removed by submitting closure documents to authorities.

So like a property transaction, change of title also needs to be recorded in official records.

I’m pretty skeptical about this one. Why hasn’t the California DMV published a press release about it?

I look forward to the day when losing my phone also means losing provable ownership of my car!

Are there no taxes or fees associated with title transfers in California?

those are currently collected at the time of registration (the license plates, which don't transfer with the title). With this technology, collection could start when the change appears on the block chain.

As a drooling crypto bro, a single organization creating a blockchain by itself for itself doesn't actually accomplish anything. Blockchains enable decentralized trust. And, there's nothing decentralized if a single org controls everything on the chain.

Corporate/Government attribution chains can make sense. But, only for rare circumstances because the primary requirement is relinquishment of control on the part of the Corpo or Govt. Truly rare indeed...

So, if a group of organizations want to make attestments, and if they all want to be able to recognize those attestments, but they do not want any one of them to be in control of the records, then it can make sense.

So, the articles example of digital car titles could possibly make sense if multiple states get on board. And, maaaaybe it would make sense for car dealerships to be able to participate directly. Preferably with some sort of on-chain collateral as a fraud deterrent. But, even this would need to be fleshed out a lot before I'd get excited about it.

Getting multiple states onboard requires at least one state to begin the process.

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