So that 50% attack results in someone taking all the land? No thanks.
It is a poor idea to use blockchain for government registries. If you want transparency, simply publish signed daily updates and that's enough. Just use simple DB with backups, and optionally, a printer printing changes on a paper.
Merkel tree audit log of the data, the poor man's Blockchain, works fine and good enough. Now you have a db and you can claim to use a blockchain for pr reasons.
It doesn't matter, it's a dumb idea anyway because there is a central authority managing the land registry and there is no need for anyone else to be involved.
Also, SQL database is much more convenient to use, it has query language and indices unlike a blockchain.
Yeah, the overwhelming majority of the benefit of blockchain here is just gotten by making the data public and signed.
Now you may argue "that is a blockchain, not every blockchain is associated with a shitcoin" but to be frank that ship has sailed, if you wanted to defend that you'd have had to do a lot more work over the past decade.
Which could easily be solved by just making data publicly accessible. Actually I see no reason why you shouldn't be able to download land registry say every month. Same actually goes for any stock ownership in companies over certain threshold.
That is what I'm saying. And you may be right, but the security guarantees are math and math is patient. If people decide to ignore it today, it'll still be true any time they decide to take another look.
>Now you may argue "that is a blockchain, not every blockchain is associated with a shitcoin" but to be frank that ship has sailed, if you wanted to defend that you'd have had to do a lot more work over the past decade.
What do you mean by "More Work" here?
There were plenty of tests and pilots of systems like that described. Dual goals of reducing the cost of transferring property and publicly attesting all current ownership. Real lawyers and real lawmakers developed proposals to integrate these sort of services with current public land registries.
The issue as far as I see it isnt the "work" its the "antiwork". If you want to learn about land sale nft pilots you literally have to put -metaverse into the google search to weed out the metaverse nonsense. Theres just too much noise around blockchain for even the best signal to penetrate. The stupid monkey nft guys really fucked the whole space. Probably take another decade to dig out all the toxic waste from blockchains reputation.
> It is a poor idea to use blockchain for government registries. If you want transparency, simply publish signed daily updates and that's enough.
A blockchain is essentially that, just with the daily update that's being signed also including the signature and hash of the previous day.
Blockchain as a technology is actually useful here. It does not mean automatically that blocks have to be mined by third parties, although pseudocurrencies have gone that route for decentralization reasons.
Blockchain is unnecessary complicated, for example, it has mining, rewards for those who add new records, even VM and scripts and all of these are not needed for a government registry. I do not need scripts within a land registry.
A blockchain solves the problem of consensus under Byzantine faults. Payments are an incidental use case, and not even a good one because managing payments including avoiding double spending can be achieved with a weaker primitive than consensus.
No. Blockchain is made for managing transactions between untrusted parties. In case with a land, there is an authority managing the registry, so a standard relational DB (with optional digital signatures) is the bets option. Why someone wants to use a tool, not good for a specific purpose, for that exact purpose?
I would be less comfortable with my land registry tied to a blockchain, as soon as I lose it (who is much more likely to) it's impossible to get my land back.
What's wrong with paper records backup up a digital record and audit trail. This all seems like a solution for a non-problem to me.
A blockchain isn't stopping you from doing any of those things, if anything it's facilitating different backup models by different parties. A paper record is so much more susceptible to various kinds of risks, adversarial and otherwise. I recommend to look past the hype or hate at the technology. A blockchain is the logical extreme of where you end up when you think about how to sync backups, and you recognize that it comes with certain mathematical limitations on how much disruption you can handle.
> A blockchain is the logical extreme of where you end up when you think about how to sync backups
It's not. Blockchains are only eventually consistent among nodes. They're designed for synced backups among adversarial peers.
There's no reason for a government agency to use one internally. There are better ways to sync backups when the people with access to make updates are also authorized to do so.
So that 50% attack results in someone taking all the land? No thanks.
It is a poor idea to use blockchain for government registries. If you want transparency, simply publish signed daily updates and that's enough. Just use simple DB with backups, and optionally, a printer printing changes on a paper.
Merkel tree audit log of the data, the poor man's Blockchain, works fine and good enough. Now you have a db and you can claim to use a blockchain for pr reasons.
2/3 attack. Read up on BFT.
It doesn't matter, it's a dumb idea anyway because there is a central authority managing the land registry and there is no need for anyone else to be involved.
Also, SQL database is much more convenient to use, it has query language and indices unlike a blockchain.
1 reply →
Yeah, the overwhelming majority of the benefit of blockchain here is just gotten by making the data public and signed.
Now you may argue "that is a blockchain, not every blockchain is associated with a shitcoin" but to be frank that ship has sailed, if you wanted to defend that you'd have had to do a lot more work over the past decade.
Which could easily be solved by just making data publicly accessible. Actually I see no reason why you shouldn't be able to download land registry say every month. Same actually goes for any stock ownership in companies over certain threshold.
That is what I'm saying. And you may be right, but the security guarantees are math and math is patient. If people decide to ignore it today, it'll still be true any time they decide to take another look.
>Now you may argue "that is a blockchain, not every blockchain is associated with a shitcoin" but to be frank that ship has sailed, if you wanted to defend that you'd have had to do a lot more work over the past decade.
What do you mean by "More Work" here?
There were plenty of tests and pilots of systems like that described. Dual goals of reducing the cost of transferring property and publicly attesting all current ownership. Real lawyers and real lawmakers developed proposals to integrate these sort of services with current public land registries.
The issue as far as I see it isnt the "work" its the "antiwork". If you want to learn about land sale nft pilots you literally have to put -metaverse into the google search to weed out the metaverse nonsense. Theres just too much noise around blockchain for even the best signal to penetrate. The stupid monkey nft guys really fucked the whole space. Probably take another decade to dig out all the toxic waste from blockchains reputation.
> It is a poor idea to use blockchain for government registries. If you want transparency, simply publish signed daily updates and that's enough.
A blockchain is essentially that, just with the daily update that's being signed also including the signature and hash of the previous day.
Blockchain as a technology is actually useful here. It does not mean automatically that blocks have to be mined by third parties, although pseudocurrencies have gone that route for decentralization reasons.
Blockchain is unnecessary complicated, for example, it has mining, rewards for those who add new records, even VM and scripts and all of these are not needed for a government registry. I do not need scripts within a land registry.
2 replies →
If they deleted the blockchain db from the nodes, this is still lost.
Blockchain doesn't have anything esp. to do with data loss. It solves exactly one problem which is distributed double spending in accounting ledgers.
A blockchain solves the problem of consensus under Byzantine faults. Payments are an incidental use case, and not even a good one because managing payments including avoiding double spending can be achieved with a weaker primitive than consensus.
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I suppose the idea could be that you have several different institutions holding the same data, which they know is valid because of the Blockchain.
No. Blockchain is made for managing transactions between untrusted parties. In case with a land, there is an authority managing the registry, so a standard relational DB (with optional digital signatures) is the bets option. Why someone wants to use a tool, not good for a specific purpose, for that exact purpose?
1 reply →
I would be less comfortable with my land registry tied to a blockchain, as soon as I lose it (who is much more likely to) it's impossible to get my land back.
What's wrong with paper records backup up a digital record and audit trail. This all seems like a solution for a non-problem to me.
A blockchain isn't stopping you from doing any of those things, if anything it's facilitating different backup models by different parties. A paper record is so much more susceptible to various kinds of risks, adversarial and otherwise. I recommend to look past the hype or hate at the technology. A blockchain is the logical extreme of where you end up when you think about how to sync backups, and you recognize that it comes with certain mathematical limitations on how much disruption you can handle.
> A blockchain is the logical extreme of where you end up when you think about how to sync backups
It's not. Blockchains are only eventually consistent among nodes. They're designed for synced backups among adversarial peers.
There's no reason for a government agency to use one internally. There are better ways to sync backups when the people with access to make updates are also authorized to do so.
10 replies →