[roenxi]

The US approach is probably better. People have a very strong urge to centralise all power and knowledge in one centralised body but that is bad strategy. (1) Powerful centralised bodies usually end in disaster. If they get strong enough, they revert to groupthink and start breaking things. (2) Governments don't have enough bandwidth to deal with all this stuff. If the government is handling 10 critical services badly, voters can only reliably vote on 1 per election and it is a struggle to work out what the priority is. And (3) the office doesn't force reality to be simple, it just bulldozers over inherent complexity in the real world.

Pushing as much of the process as possible into the courts and private sphere is better strategy than having a blessed database. It gives people more opportunities to sort things out quickly and in parallel with other issues.

[robocat]

The proper US answer shouldn't be federal centralisation, but centralsation per state. That should avoid to worst centralisation issues and have clear benefits. And it clearly works in other countries that are smaller or bigger than individual states: it works in New Zealand (similar to Oregon) and Australia (about 30 million people, though I don't know if their registry is federally centralised) for example.

[tichiian]

Land registry in Germany is per city/town/municipality. Since land doesn't really move, it is always registered in the municipality where it is located. All titles, mortgages, owners and weirdnesses (local shepherd having the right to graze his sheep on your land) are registered locally. Downside is that e.g. taking a mortgage on your house incurs the additional cost of recording the mortgage in the land registry and removing the record after the mortgage is paid.