[jeffbee]

Thinking of a real estate transaction as an exchange of physical things is already a mistake. Most people expect to take possession of a structure in most deals, but it is sort of beside the point. What you're trading is a legal filing where you go to the county recorder (most states) and just claim to own something. What are you really buying? The promise from the other guy that they won't claim to own it in the future. But, under our deeply stupid title system, there really isn't a guarantee that the seller "owns" it in the first place. All kinds of people could have claims on it.

In a legal system this vague, smart contracts simply do not have a niche.

[photonthug]

> In a legal system this vague, smart contracts simply do not have a niche.

This is an interesting point. The way I think about this is, if we can ignore for a second the bitcoin-related baggage of smart-contracts as a concept, then there's still a lot of overlap with related concepts like open government and automated legal reasoning. So I'm curious if you think of those things as also intractable. Also, blockchain isn't some magic wand that replaces the need for other datastructures. Why should partial or even doubtful ownership be impossible to model and do secure/verifiable/conditional compute on?

[notacoward]

> All kinds of people could have claims on it.

That is not necessarily true. Often, one or more of the closing documents addresses this very issue, attesting that there are no such known claims and/or assigning any unknown ones to you as the new owner. Liability is part of ownership, after all, and all ownership is "just a legal filing" unless it's backed by force. While it's true that a real estate transaction is not the same as a transfer of a physical thing, dismissing such transactions as fictional is a bit sophist.