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Comment by rdl | Hacker News Reader

There are two main systems of managing real property -- the decentralized common law system, and the land registry system. I think for each just regular signatures work -- the hard part is associating a key to each property owner, but a central timestamping service helps there.

Most of the automated systems for land title seem to be the civil law approach, and for that a central registrar doesn't really map well to the blockchain. There's also no real anonymity -- at best, pseudonymity for keys, but the hard part is binding keys to legal owners.

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On one hand, I am glad that the transfer of property is not always 100% absolute.

Can you imagine what might happen if the land of the U.S. federal reserve building was somehow transferred to a random individual?

I used to get "free money" in my bank account all the time. Some banker would make an error, depositing a check from a member of a separate branch into my account with the same account number. The mistake was usually noticed during an audit and the money would magically be removed from my account.

Reversible transactions do have their place, I suppose.

I think with real property (and probably with "major" capital goods), enforcement and registry are pretty intimately collected. If there's a specific organization I'd call to get a non-owner removed from my property, I'd probably just let that organization maintain a database of the property, especially if it's using some cryptographic technique to prevent forgery (through time, if nothing else), and some replication strategy.

Where it gets really interesting is with things like cars (and eventually cellphones and other similarly priced goods); putting effectively activation locks and DRM into the equipment. IFF you could trust the whole system, it would make theft much less of a concern, which is great.

There's nothing technical impeding having a database linking each phone to a UID-individual that could be disabled for carriers worldwide through some DRM scheme (iirc, law enforcement demanded it several times). What's lacking is will/coordination from carriers and device makers. They don't see it as a competitive advantage, apparently.

It could make phone theft a lot harder depending on the hardness of the DRM.

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