Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mondoveneziano 1833 days ago
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.

1 comments

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.

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