[adrianratnapala]

This is an interesting point, until now I thought blockchains were only useful for decentralisers, which in turn were only useful for people who wanted something like censorship resistance.

But here is a different use-case -- keep records well. Traditional systems are actually pretty bad because of the incentives. My bank statements for example are often very confusing, and online data only goes back 18 months, because the bank has little incentive to do better.

And that is in a relatively benign market. Title deeds, and the kind of loan documentation you are talking about create positive incentives for abuse.

[gbhn]

While some important records are public, many are not. It isn't obvious that all debtors want the details of their debt made world-readable, for instance.

[DennisP]

Right, which is why in the article I linked, I describe a system that stores only the hash of the debtor's personal data on chain. A lender with the preimage can still use that to prove its case.

For stronger privacy we'd need ring signatures or zksnarks, so a person can't be identified by the flow of payments, but those technologies exist on various blockchains already.

[tehlike]

you can use zeroknowledge proofs for things you don't want to reveal. it's called zk-snarks