Land Registrars On The Blockchain is Bullshit
Everyone always brings up land registry use cases when asked about potential real-world use cases of blockchain or NFTs. Someday, all land registries that track titles for houses will be stored on some hypothetical public distributed digital ledger. This almost kind of makes sense until you think about it for more than 30 seconds and realize it’s complete bullshit.
The premise is simple, 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. This data is all a matter of public record, and changes or transfers of the deed for the house are routine matters of simply a shared “ledger” of data. This is a system we’ve built and used for millennia now, and the premise is that we could take our already digital land registries and then somehow put them “on the blockchain,” and this would be an improvement somehow through hand-waving means.
The most significant problem with this is the custodial problem. If we accept the premise that a digital land deed “on the blockchain” would be self-custodied by the user by a digital wallet or cryptographic key, then what guarantees the connection between the legal owner of the house and the key? Do I suddenly own your house if I have the cryptographic keys to your home? Common sense and common law…