Blockchain has no place in Land Registries
Seriously. It would just make it more cumbersome.
Buying a house today involves a great deal of paperwork whose sole purpose is to transfer some entry in a government database from one individual or entity to another.
Some people propose to get rid of all that paperwork, intermediaries and government-controlled databases by storing all the transactions and data about house purchases online, into a public distributed database built with blockchain technology.
Yeah, right
I had already covered another application of this particular snake oil last year, but now there is a recent post on Medium that gives even more excellent explanation why the whole general idea is crap, no matter what use case you dump it on.
The main points are below, and are very simple to understand. But do read the whole post to appreciate their full value!
“Do I suddenly own your house if I have the cryptographic keys to your home? Common sense and common law would say no." But that is basically what would happen by dumping the whole “service” of certifying property on a blockchain alone.
Then, there is the little problem of disputes about home property.
Conflicts about the property of a house “require a central party (acting on behalf of the state and the rule of law) to update the register without the owners' consent forcefully”. But that does not require a blockchain at all to happen. Quite the contrary actually. Throwing a blockchain into the handling of house property disputes would be just “technical convolution for no reason”.
Inside this domain or, again, any other kind of property “the blockchain offers absolutely nothing over traditional databases”. As I said, further details are here, and I repeat the invitation to read them all. But you already know all you really need to know by now:
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I am Marco Fioretti, tech writer and aspiring polymath doing human-digital research and popularization.
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