[mondoveneziano]

Let's ignore space, where currently the highly elevated risk is well known to the few participants. If we could undo car and plane crashes, we would do it. We cannot, and my question is whether we want to force the same property on accidents that we currently can safely undo.

Another example: Let's assume ownership of a house is defined by a blockchain. Through a mistake, ownership of your house has been transferred to someone else, or lost to an address with no existing private key. Alternatively, you were in the process of buying a house when the same happened.

Would you be happy with the outcome of this simple mistake being irreversible?

If not, and if you think litigation should retransfer ownership to you, what is the value of an immutable ledger, if the house went to a malicious party who does not intend to perform the transfer on said ledger, or to an address without private key, making transfer not possible in the first place?

[xur17]

> Another example: Let's assume ownership of a house is defined by a blockchain. Through a mistake, ownership of your house has been transferred to someone else, or lost to an address with no existing private key. Alternatively, you were in the process of buying a house when the same happened.

I've thought about this a lot, and I think the solution is to use something similar to "social recovery wallets" [0], but with a dao (group of people) as the recovery mechanism. Basically, assume that the blockchain has the correct owner, and require very strong proof to overturn. This has the advantage of making 99.9% of transfers very cheap, rather than 100% of transfers expensive as is now.

RealT is a company that sells "tokenized" real estate, and they do something like this. They assume the ownership on the blockchain is correct, but you can contact them, and they can overturn ownership if you prove that it was stolen or transferred erroneously. I'd personally take this one step further and have a group of people in the community that oversee the process (basically a court, but a lot more efficient and transparent).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27477940

[mondoveneziano]

If the company in your example can be contacted to overturn ownership, essentially degenerating the immutability and irreversibility of the ledger to levels comparable of existing solutions, then what is the actual advantage of this not only inefficient, but inefficient by design method of bookkeeping?

I find it hard to reconcile "99.9% of transfers very cheap" with the property that at least proof-of-work and proof-of-space actively rely on literally counteracting any effort at becoming more efficient.

"Classical" distributed ledgers in databases are not already more efficient by several orders of magnitude, they are made more efficient through advancements of technology, and those efficiency gains are actively sought out by participants, given that they usually directly translate into profit through reduction of overhead.

[xur17]

> If the company in your example can be contacted to overturn ownership, essentially degenerating the immutability and irreversibility of the ledger to levels comparable of existing solutions, then what is the actual advantage of this not only inefficient, but inefficient by design method of bookkeeping?

Currently when you buy a house, you have to go through a decent amount of effort both in time and money to essentially determine "who owns this house, and are there any liens on it". By using tokenized ownership, you can get rid of this part. Yes, it's not ideal that someone can override the ownership, but it's setup in a way that requires extensive effort and documentation to do.

Ideally the party that could overturn ownership wouldn't be a company, but instead would be an elected, large group of people that determined this. And maybe there could be a way to opt out or select an alternate override?

The point is that this system can be a ton more efficient, enable additional abilities (fractional ownership, instant, extremely low fee loans, etc), all things that the existing system does not allow. Yes, allowing ownership overriding isn't ideal, but I don't think allowing a group to override ownership in a transparent way completely negates all benefits of a system like this.

> I find it hard to reconcile "99.9% of transfers very cheap" with the property that at least proof-of-work and proof-of-space actively rely on literally counteracting any effort at becoming more efficient.

Ethereum will be moving to proof of stake in a year or 2 (> $10B are locked up until this occurs, so I am very confident it will happen).

[mondoveneziano]

These are all plausible arguments for associating real estate ownership with a database. What are the arguments for this database being maintained by a blockchain?

If you do not trust the authorities of the locality, e.g. the courts, to properly assign ownership and, more importantly, to defend your claim of ownership through further legal action, then how do you trust the blockchain implementation with its share of elected people and override mechanisms to do the same?

> Yes, it's not ideal that someone can override the ownership [...] Yes, allowing ownership overriding isn't ideal, but I don't think allowing a group to override ownership in a transparent way completely negates all benefits [...]

The assertion already is that mutability and reversibility are necessary and desired properties under the assumption that mistakes and mis-assessments happen, whether through human error or technological failure. The question is, what benefit does a blockchain bring over a regular database under this requirement?

> Ethereum will be moving to proof of stake in a year or 2 (> $10B are locked up until this occurs, so I am very confident it will happen).

I know proof-of-work down to the very detail, I have not yet looked at proof-of-stake. If proof-of-stake exists, and does not share the same problem of massive inefficiency (directly or indirectly), then I still think that a classical database solves these problems more easily, but I cease to care what solutions stakeholders choose. Proof-of-work, on the other hand, makes me and everyone else an unwilling participant in this scheme through unnecessary, and growing, consumption of energy and resources.

[xur17]

I think we're both in agreement that a blockchain is just a glorified database. That said, there are advantages to a blockchain over a database:

With a database, you can only do what the county auditor (or equivalent) lets you do / what their ui lets you do. With a blockchain, you can build things on top of it, fractionalized ownership, simple transfers, etc. It's basically a permissionless database that anyone can build on top of vs a database shoved in a closet at the county auditors that you can only use via their api and ui.

[sudosysgen]

You're still limited by what the country will allow you to get enforced legally. So there is not really any advantage.

[bl557]

Good points, and in response I would say that not everything needs to happen directly on chain. Just as an example there can be some company that develops an interface between the blockchain and the user that audits their code, insures themselves in the case of software bugs, and provides users with the ability to eject their assets from the platform. Maybe there are regulations that protect consumers against these problems. Crypto/blockchain UX is not even in the "command line" phase yet, we're still writing punch cards and feeding them into computers in my opinion :)

[_hyn3]

Excellent points. Many real-world problems that people are seeking to solve with a blockchain are often not good fits for the unique attributes that a blockchain has. Many of these problems are best suited to continued centralized administration, or targeted improvements without changing the entire governance model.