>Simply having a fraudulent piece of paper saying "Deed" doesn't go very far beyond getting you a free trip to jail.
That's exactly what MERS did. It tossed people out of their homes on the basis of a row in their privately run database.
It took a supreme court ruling to overturn this. Lower courts (e.g. the supreme court of michigan) LET them foreclose. The row in the privately run database reigned supreme.
>Further I don't see how a blockchain would help at all.
MERS was created to circumvent this whole legal system around property transfer because the system might be trustworthy, but is archaic, slow and frustrating.
A nationwide adopted blockchain system that didn't require private ownership by a party like MERS whom you clearly can't trust or an archaic, slow and frustrating paperwork system serves everybody's interests (except the people who used MERS to, y'know, steal people's homes).
I have zero doubt that there are flawed systems in some jurisdictions. That's the nature of the real world, with its ugly edges.
However a cursory examination is that MERS wasn't title registration at all. It was a registration of mortgage holders, where mortgages would be "assigned" to MERS. And the dispute wasn't over the accuracy of the rows in that database (which would be trivial to legally dispute and correct), but a technicality of whether MERS could be the one to foreclose -- itself a whole legal process, only at the very end impacting the title -- versus the one who assigned the mortgage. The net effect is identical, and I'm not sure if the difference between ABC Credit foreclosing on a defaulted mortgage versus MERS foreclosing means "stealing" someone's home.
That's exactly what MERS did. It tossed people out of their homes on the basis of a row in their privately run database.
It took a supreme court ruling to overturn this. Lower courts (e.g. the supreme court of michigan) LET them foreclose. The row in the privately run database reigned supreme.
>Further I don't see how a blockchain would help at all.
MERS was created to circumvent this whole legal system around property transfer because the system might be trustworthy, but is archaic, slow and frustrating.
A nationwide adopted blockchain system that didn't require private ownership by a party like MERS whom you clearly can't trust or an archaic, slow and frustrating paperwork system serves everybody's interests (except the people who used MERS to, y'know, steal people's homes).