this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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The thing is - how will your blockchain-based mortgage be enforced? What happens if I start squatting on your blockchain-property? At the end of the day, the answer is "people with guns" - we agree that contracts have legal weight, and there are legal structures (and ultimately law enforcement and their threat of force) that keep you on your land and me out of it. And if we already have to involve all that, what good is blockchain doing that "a database" can't do?
There's a great video about the inherent problems with crypto stuff and contract law here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6aeL83z_9Y
Mostly about the inherent legal unenforcability of contracts on the blockchain.
that's fair, but it's a question of external authority. the idea behind blockchain is that there are contracts digitally built into the token that won't allow the transfer unless the conditions are met.
blockchain provides a publicly verifiable transaction history. of course enforcing exclusivity eventually boils down to giving some group a monopoly on violence, but the difference between using blockchain and a database in tracking who has the right to use that monopoly on violence to enforce their exclusivity is whether there's a verifiable public record of all transactions or just the current state of the data. It allows for the dispute of falsified records, and the automatic verification that all terms of the transfer between owners were met. It doesn't allow someone to sneak behind the scenes and do a quick "DELETE FROM home_owners WHERE owner_name='jrandomhacker'" and then go "Sorry, we don't have a record of your transaction 🤷🤷". You could make the logs of the database public, of course, but then the question just expands from "who has access to the database?" to "who has access to the database and logs?"