We as a society have entrusted upon the court system to sort out ownership of properties, so yes, the court can declare ownership. The court issuing a transaction is just like the court issuing a paper declaring a judgement.
The consent of everyone on the blockchain only applies to the integrity of the transaction, i.e. yes, this transaction is issued from this particular wallet. That's it. No more. No less.
Everyone on the blockchain consents that the transaction is indeed from the court's wallet, not from some random guy off the street. The court's wallet is a well known one and carries some authority. Once the question of ownership is contested again, everyone can trace it back to the court's issuing of the transaction.
So you're saying that in this distributed ledger where we proof-of-stake and proof-of-work and proof-of-doge everything, there are some agents which are more special than other and we should trust them?
Look it’s easy to nay-say. There must be something that connects the ledger to the real world and that something is going to have to be able to modify the ledger when the real world doesn’t match.
Blockchains aren’t magic and can’t just query the state of the world without the help of people in meatspace.
This is not a fixable problem. It’s just a question of who the somebody is. It’s why I think blockchain for IRL goods is pointless because whatever entity you have to trust to enforce the database constraints could just run the database without a blockchain.
The wallets are the issuers of the transactions into the blockchain. The wallets can be used as the identification and representation of the real world entities.
It's just like the court's stamp on a piece of paper carrying more weight than your and my stamps on a piece of paper.
And each transaction gets to burn the equivalent of 10 gallons of gasoline instead of an atomic logged database transaction (which could even be published and cryptographically signed cheaply).
It will certainly be better with Proof of Stake & sharding, but I was curious how bad it is today, so I looked it up. One ETH transaction consumes 86.94 kWh of energy. Wikipedia says gasoline has 8.83 kWh/l energy content, so it looks like about 10L of gasoline per transaction (not 10gal). Still, there are about 3.8L/gal, so if you factor in that heat engines are about 25% efficient, then you are right. What a crazy world we live in.
If you use a smart contract and encode only certain actions what a court can do, under what circumstances it would work maybe. However, the smart contracts would grow into highly complex source code propably...
They'd have the consent of everyone to do it. The network controls the applicable laws, the court could be something defined by those laws with the authority to do this.
It could be something where like:
Any party in the chain of transaction (so anyone who used to own something) can use their key to initiate a "claim of wrongdoing".
When doing so, the network could assign say 5 jury from a pool, and grant them the power to vote on "remediation".
Now if the network started to feel like this became a means for abuse and loopholes, it could choose to modify the laws of the network to something else.
Basically, at the end of the day, it works very similarly to a democratic society. But things are run and managed on the blockchain network instead of pen/paper and various other systems.
Isn't the "vote on remediation" basically a trial?
Isn't the jury you mentioned basically just a jury?
"modify the laws of the network" is basically an election.
It sounds like everything would be the same as it is now except in the case where everyone is honest and agree on the transaction which is a case that is somewhat simple in today's system.
Why involve a blockchain in this at all? I'm all for efficiency in our systems and a lot of those systems would be better if more digitized but I don't get why people seem to think a blockchain magically solves some part of this.
I also want to give you another example. We know lots of people cheat taxes. Most of the time, they do so by hiding their money. If all money was a cryptocurrency, you could encode in the transaction rules that automatically on any transaction 10% is moved to the IRS wallet. Or you could have it that automatically at the tax due date, everyone's income for the year is talkies up and money from their wallet is transfered to the IRS. If you don't have enough money, an automatic dept could apply to you where 5% of all future income goes to payback what you owe. Etc.
That's the fancy automated stuff. At a minimum, it means there's be a truthful trusted ledger of how much money everyone made and that would make it very very hard for someone to cheat and hide their money.
So that's another example of how the tech could limit fraud in our system. It be the same system, but harder to cheat at, possibly easier to automate and scale.
But that's not about representing physical objects on a blockchain, which is what the article (and at least in my mind the discussion) is about.
Keeping digital objects (like bitcoin) on a digital system is of course easier than keeping physical objects on a digital system but it also brings a whole load of it's own complexity.
I also keep getting back to what does the blockchain actually give you here? Even in this example you need someone or something to have privileged access to the chain to handle things like bankruptcy, inheritance, seizure and so on. Your pitch is for applying programmable logic to money. That'd be great, but also extremely complex and I just don't get why the blockchain is needed.
> Most of the time, they do so by hiding their money.
They hide their money, in legal way. Specifically by misclassification. For example, you claim that a residence is your primary residence for tax purposes, but don't live in it. Or they claim a tax deduction on an art piece that was overvalued.
The issue isn't that the IRS can't collect money, the issue is that the tax code is complicated and cannot be automated. It requires interpretation, which is what lawyers do for a living.
For the average low-income person, the IRS could automatically do their taxes, but they don't. Not for lack of technical ability, but because of lobbying, which I'm not sure how blockchain would address.
Without a blockchain, couldn't this be done simply by empowering the IRS to do it (e.g. by requiring banks to give oracle access to bank accounts or requiring all employers to list complete transaction outflows?)
Like, you solved an incomplete information problem by saying suppose the state had complete information. If you're willing to do that, we wouldn't have a problem blockchain or no blockchain.
Well, it depends, I think people are privacy conscious, maybe you don't want people to know what you spend money on or how you make it.
A cryptocurrency could technically keep things anonymous, while still taking the appropriate tax money from the wallet and transactions.
But yes, this is similar to Uber and Google Search, and any other software technology, it doesn't allow doing things we couldn't before, it just enables doing them in possibly new ways, that might be more convenient, efficient, trustworthy, cheaper, etc.
How exactly, well this is what people are trying to crack. Similar to how everyone wish they had put the iPhone together first, companies and people are trying to figure out what is the right combination of features and use case for a blockchain based offering to go big and drastically change the way something is done today.
Now, are we better off for using cars? Are we better off for using telephones? Are we better off for using the internet? You can argue most technologies just changed things from how they used to be done to just being done differently and that it didn't really make anyone one of us more fulfilled and happy in our life. So you could say the same for blockchain, but I don't think that matters to a startup, you just want to disrupt and capture a new or existing market.
The blockchain is just technology. It makes all this more convenient, and possibly scale better.
But what people really argue for is that it makes the system much less prone to corruption and manipulation, because the system of tracking is much more resilient to being tempered with.
For example, right now Joe Shmoe could fabricate a fake paper deed showing that his great grandma owned the Mona Lisa, and it is thus his. And then sue the French government saying they need to either buy it off him or return it to him. Now you'd need forensic experts and all to try and check the authenticity of that deed and all that.
Now this is a bit of a stupid example obviously. What if the deed was real? Would the government still say well oh crap here you go? I guess that will depend on the French government and their laws.
But say the laws of France were such that yes, it should indeed therefore be returned to Joe.
Well with blockchain, the idea is that this wouldn't happen. First the "deed" would have never been lost, the ledger tells you who owns what, there'd be no confusion. Second, Joe (if he was lying), wouldn't be able to create a "fake" entry in the ledger as easily as maybe he can fabricate a deed. Now that's up for debate, but in theory a decentralized ledger need you to temper with all the nodes, so it's possibly much more difficult to scam with.
And back to the example in the article, the Mona Lisa would be transfered from the government to Joe, there'd be a record of this. Now the question is no longer, is this record valid? We know this happened, the question becomes was this transaction initiated fradulently? Obviously the computer doesn't know why the transaction came to be, just that it for sure did, not tempered with, no fake claims, this did happen and we know exactly from where and to where, and exactly what was it that was transacted.
Now you need people to investigate and asses if the transaction was fraudulent. Until there's a way for machines to with 100% accuracy read intent, this has to be handled by people. But in theory, a decentralized blockchain might make that process easier and more resilient to scams.
- Ahmed is registered as the rightful owner of Kolula Pushta Road, 25, Kabul.
- A month later Mohammad appears and is also registered as the rightful owner of that same place.
- Half a year later Zahra, who has never even lived in Afghanistan, wins a court battle and is registered as the rightful owner of that same place.
Questions:
- Who is the rightful owner?
- How does blockchain help here?
To skip long discussions, all of the below are possible, and are not solved in any way, shape, or form by blockchain.
- Ahmed is the rightful owner. Mohammad bribes local council which enters him as the rightful owner. Zahra is Ahmed's daughter, and has the money to chalenge this at court.
- Both Ahmed and Mohammad bribed the local council to become the owners. Zahra inherited this place from a relative and had to win a court battle to prove that she is the rightful owner.
- All of them bribed local councils and courts.
- All of them are rightful owners, they sold or gifted the property to the next person. However, at one point local authorities intervened and didn't allow Mohammed to transfer the property to Zahra, and she had to go to court.
As an illustrative example of the issues with the land registry in the region, a friend of mine wanted to settle some land he'd inherited in his village. He had the deed to several parcels of land owned by the family (registered in his deceased father's name, as the head of the family) in his possession, but it turned out an uncle who lived in the village had 'sold' possession of some parcels of land to somebody else. It took several trips (and bribes) to the district office to even be able to view the land records for the land - which had indeed been modified. Sure, with a legal battle he could have gotten it back, but it would take decades.
How might the blockchain help here? Prevent modification of the land records without the express wishes of the deed holder. Court cases involving land are severely backlogged in India, on the scale of decades.
I also agree that the blockchain would also create additional problems & burdens.
> but it turned out an uncle who lived in the village had 'sold' possession of some parcels of land to somebody else
How is this a) different from my examples and b) can be solved by blockchain?
Blockchain automagically makes selling of something impossible?
> How might the blockchain help here? Prevent modification of the land records without the express wishes of the deed holder.
You don't need "modification". All you need is the next entry: "the rightful owner of X is now Y". How is blockchain going to prevent anyone from doing this?
> Blockchain automagically makes selling of something impossible?
This issue here wasn't about selling something - unfortunately in India when it comes to land, possession is nine tenths of the law. It doesn't matter if you're the true legal owner if somebody else claims physical possession and has a vaguely genuine looking piece of paper. Proving or disproving the veracity of that piece of paper takes many many years, and in this aspect India is different from many other places in the world.
> How is this a) different from my examples
It's not very different from your example, though my anecdote is meant to demonstrate some of the real life issues meant to be addressed. I'm not convinced that a blockchain is the correct solution, but I can understand the motivation.
> You don't need "modification". All you need is the next entry: "the rightful owner of X is now Y". How is blockchain going to prevent anyone from doing this?
Unless I'm misunderstanding how blockchains work, how can that next entry be created without being signed by my private key (and my consent)? I have no idea if any concrete suggestions have been made around the architecture of land record blockchains, but it could presumably be something like a multisignature wallet: each transaction has to necessarily be signed by the seller, buyer, & government authority.
Of course, like I stated in my original comment, I'm not convinced that blockchain is the correct solution here, or how certain issues could be realistically resolved.
One of my own personal misgivings around the blockchain for government services is the management of private keys. However, I don't see this as a conversation killer, and is something that could probably be resolved. Issues around concepts like Power of Attorney, co-ownership, & time limited ownership can be resolved by something like Multisignature wallets. Court orders changing ownership without the owner's consent could also be resolved the same way: the Sessions Court is a non-required signatory on all multisignature land registry wallets, with the District Magistrate & Sessions Judge keys sufficient to sign transactions.
> It even breaks for my example of "Ahmet illegaly obtained ownership in the very beginning".
I don't think any sort of land registry record reform can hope to resolve issues like this. This problem isn't resolved by digitizing records to a regular database either.
In India, the sort of issues my family & others have faced around land ownership claims is that the original records are largely on paper, nearly impossible to verify with the district administration, and all most people have is a faded paper receipt decades old. This is the weak point exploited by bad actors. I'll offer a personal anecdote this time. Some years ago we tried to transfer the ownership of our home to the name of our mother (it was registered in the name of my late father). The only paperwork we had received decades ago was a paper receipt. We hired a lawyer, appeared before the District Magistrate, gave affidavits, and the process chugged along for years. When it came time to verify the details of the registration, the relevant pages from the registry were 'missing'. The fact that we had paperwork proving ownership meant nothing since the master records were unavailable. We filed another petition which took even more years, till our lawyer suggested that a bribe in the right hands in the district records office might surface the original missing pages. Sure enough, a few months later the missing pages were "rediscovered". Then there were inspection agents who came to remind us that everybody along the greasy pole had to be sufficiently lubricated. The entire process took 10 years, a great deal of anguish for my elderly mother, and quite some money. This was in a large city, and the situation is worse in more rural areas.
Does a blockchain based land registry resolve every single one of these concerns? No, but neither would a database. A database would resolve many, but not all of the problems I faced. Similarly, a blockchain might resolve different issues, and likely raise new concerns. From my perspective, given how bad actors at the district administration operate, I'd be wary of a database they had control over. Sure, there are probably ways to address those concerns, but I can also see why people see the blockchain as a possible solution.
The problem with blockchain is that it's just a distributed append-only log. There's really nothing else inherent in it. There are very few, if any, applications for it.
However, too many conversations around it attribute magical properties to it. And any solutions built on top of it can, and have been, built more efficiently using almost literally anything else. Well, paper records are less efficient :)
And as far as trusting databases goes, in the end you need government to accept whatever records there are. And nothing can help there. And even in blockchain world hard forks and re-writing of history happen even without any governments.
Maybe I'm confused here, but the blockchain basically will say:
Kolula Pushta Road 25 Kabul is owned by Ahmed with Public Key XYZ.
For it to be transfered to someone else, you need the private key that can pass validation for public key XYZ. Local officials do not have this private key, only Ahmed does, stored in his personal wallet. Local officials could try to temper with their node of the blockchain ledger, but other nodes would catch it and penalize them.
If you need to deal with an edge case, say someone claims Ahmed is dead and they are his heir. Local officials can initiate a transfer where the ledger says "conditional Amhed is dead and thus key XYZ is missing, transferring to his heir Mohammad with key HJL. This could be something that other nodes accept as a transaction. There could be many things here built into the system. You could have the nodes notify some associated email with the current owner Amhed and grant them like 60 days to cancel the transaction. Or you could let Ahmed show back at any time in the future and reclaim the possession, etc.
These are the kind of things that a decentralized trusted network running a blockchain could in theory be designed to manage.
If you narrow "blockchain" simply to mean a signed ledger of transaction that maintain history then no, it's not really that much better, since it's still centrally managed and operated. It's only once you distributed things and let the network define rules of operations that it can become beneficial in my opinion.
Edit: Now that said, even if it was centralized, in theory, the ledger could only be tempered with by people with access to the code of ledger database or its servers. Sometimes you might be able to trust those more so than say any clerk or local official which can only use the software, because they might be better paid or there are less of them and hard to contact and thus bribe. So even in that case, it might be a little better, maybe the local official can enter the transfer in the ledger, but et least if Ahmed goes to court after there is proof that local official X did a transfer on day Y and that Ahmed was the prior owner. Or you could still enforce the need for Ahmed's private key, etc. So there would be more trail or recourse for Ahmed in theory. Then without a blockchain, there'd be no trail, or no need for a key, or it might be possible for users to modify the whole history, etc.
> This could be something... There could be many things... You could have the nodes... you could let... could in theory be designed
See how many hypotheticals and "could be"s you're piling on top of blockchain just to make it barely handle the simplest of cases?
Moreover, none of these require a blockchain, and can be implemented better, and more efficiently with literally anything else.
Even more moreover, your entire premise of "nothing can be done without Ahmed's private key" immediately breaks for any of these:
- death, or other incapacitation. Even loss of access to the wallet
- power of attorney
- co-ownership
- time-limited ownership
- court orders requiring change of ownership
> It's only once you distributed things and let the network define rules of operations that it can become beneficial in my opinion.
So far, the "benefit" is: let's have blockchain for the sake of the magical words, and build a tower of babel on top of it to barely manage even the simplest of cases.
It just depends if you need a higher level of trust or not.
You can implement all that on a central network, or a single machine. But if you have it running over a decentralized network there's more certainty that validation rules and data won't be tempered with.
I'm not arguing to build everything with blockchain. I know very much how business can be swayed by buzzwords, but those also shouldn't take away or detract from the potential of a technology.
In this case, the ideal network in my opinion would be that you've got some global blockchain network that can record arbitrary data and run contracts attached to the data where it could scale and not be power hungry.
If we had that, then you could start to record things like land ownership, and attach contracts to them that dictates the rules for transfer of ownership, time-limited ownership, death, loss of key, etc.
Unlike a paper contract signed in handwriting, this contract is signed with people's private keys, and the rules aren't enforced manually but automatically. And you can trust in the data and the enforcement of the rules because you can have trust in the network to do so.
> It just depends if you need a higher level of trust or not.
I need trust. And blockchain doesn't provide it.
> It just depends if you need a higher level of trust or not.
And yet, all you can come up with is "a bit of a stupid example obviously". The moment I propose to you actual real-world problems, your entire argument breaks down into piles of "could be"s and lots and lots of words how blockchain magically solves everything.
> you've got some global blockchain network that can record arbitrary data and run contracts attached to the data
Why?
> then you could start to record things like land ownership
- Ahmed pays local authority to record him as an owner. Where's your solution for that?
- Ahmed is an atual rightful owner, but then Mohammed pays local authority to register him as the rightful owner instead. Where's your solution for that?
> this contract is signed with people's private keys
- Mohammad is now registered as the owner. 5 years later, after a prolonged court battle, Zahra proves that the original record is incorrect, and the court rules that the property is now Zahra's. Mohammad doesn't give up his private keys. Where's your solution for that?
> dictates the rules for transfer of ownership, time-limited ownership, death, loss of key, etc.
Ah, yes. Instead of contracts written in plain language, we now have a complex programmable system written in an esotheric language that requires programmatic access and integration to dozens, if not hundreds of other such systems. And all these contracts are guaranteed to be correct, foolproof, without omissions, and to 100% correctly represent the interests of the parties that sign the contract. Because blockchain.
> Unlike a paper contract signed in handwriting, this contract is signed with people's private keys and the rules aren't enforced manually but automatically.
Ah, yes. When a person dies, they automatically register their death from beyond the grave. Or when a person sells property, this is automatically entered into the system through the celestial sphere. Court orders are automatically applied to ownership simply because blockchain.
> And you can trust in the data and the enforcement of the rules because you can have trust in the network to do so.
Ah yes. The rules are enforced because some numbers in a highy ineffecient, slow distributed append-only log say something.
> The blockchain is just technology. It makes all this more convenient, and possibly scale better.
That’s an odd way to say “less convenient and slower”. Everything you described could be done faster, better, cheaper and in a distributed fashion using PKI – the important part is that a legal authority signed a particular document. The blockchain features aimed at working in environments where people don’t know or trust each other aren’t useful when the whole point is having a trusted third party verify claims.
You'd want a database that is pretty difficult to temper with or hack. This includes from external or internal bad actors.
If the government had a database used to identify all ownership of things, but it was possible for internal bad actors to change the data in it, or for external bad actors to do the same, that would be a problem.
With a decentralized database, this becomes a lot more difficult to temper with, so the data in the database is much more trustworthy. You can't just bribe your way to its DBA, so there's benefit to it.
Again, the benefit is not that the system is impossible to exploit in some way, the main benefit is that these actions are all recorded transparently, so you can have a complete picture of what exactly happened. That seems better than a database which at a fundamental level cannot have immutable guarantees.
In at least many places in the US land ownership is transparent. If you know a parcel of land you can search the county records office's website and find out who owns it.
It doesn't take a blockchain to make a dataset public.
You can have the advantages of a publicly verifiable blockchain without the hassle of distributed consensus if you have a trusted entity that can perform consensus. QLDB is a corporate owned example, no reason the government can't do the same thing.
> Or whoever that declares what keys are "special" and granted the special permissions.
Yes, that be the "network". Which is a quorum of all nodes running the code base. In most cryptocurrencies, everyone who has a computer can become a "node".
So, in an ideal scenario, each person has a computer running a node of the network. Thus "whoever declares" would be a vote amongst everyone. They vote by choosing what version of the code to run. The code tells you what "keys" are special.
That's the idea behind decentralization. There's no longer just one person that chooses, instead its got to be a multitude of people all agreeing.
The nice thing here too is that you could see the court's key owner was bribed in the ledger itself.
So nodes elect other nodes to have power to decide the rules for the shared community. Those nodes will probably need additional nodes to handle the computation needed so they will elect certain other nodes to act on their behalf.
Now replace nodes with people.
Does this not sound exactly like modern democracies but expressed in terms that are tech friendly? What is the actual difference? What is it solving?
It's like snail mail Vs email. Same thing, but yet not the same, one allows you to run things using computers, the other doesn't.
Most of software is simply finding ways to model real life processes with computers so you can manage those with computers instead of whatever non-computer based approach was there before.
The hope is that computers can make managing those processes more efficient and potentially allow for more optimizations.
One such thing is scarcity, that has always been hard to model in a computer when things can be freely copied. Another challenge was double spend, making sure that something is transfered without copying or duplication, it's a challenge to model things with computers that needs this property. Another challenge is trust in a system involving parties that don't trust each other. All these have always been difficult to model, now we have a technology that could model these, so the question is are there use cases that being able to do this now opens up to digitize and by doing so can it reduce the cost to manage the process and increase its scale and efficiency, lowers its defects, etc.
They do for some things. In many places whenever you transfer ownership of real estate, you submit a piece of paper that says "I am transferring ownership of X to Y" to a clerk/recorder/registrar. People can then go and search their database of transactions to verify that yes, someone did grant you ownership of X previously, and that that someone granted ownership beforehand, etc. (this research is usually done by a title company, who then provides insurance on their claim).
On a more serious note. Public ledger is better than a private database because it's public, open to inspection and verification by all. It's especially important for government and court to open their records.
A database can be public. Data in it can be signed. Keys for signing can be stored securely on hardware (for example many ID cards are smartcard capable, which would fit well for interacting with the legal/government systems). None of this is unique to a blockchain and has been around since way before blockchains.
I think the whole point of it being central is that it's not verified by everyone. "Everyone" doesn't have the force of law without getting into politics, but that "central" body does.
It doesn't make a difference if 51% of my neighbors think the house belongs to me, it matters who is going to get removed for trespassing. That's the problem people have with blockchain, it doesn't matter what the blockchain says, because the blockchain can't enforce anything. If the blockchain could mindlessly enforce anything, I would own your house if I stole the private key. If you need a 3rd party to be able to make a judgement call and unwind legal situations, then the power resides in them, making the blockchain just a database with extra steps. You can make a database open and "verifiable" by anyone (like property tax records) without a blockchain.
Because government entities would never lose their keys, because they are so technologically adept. And who be able to designate that organization X should have that ability? Are we back to verified SSL carts from verisign ?
