> one of them only learning this after a neighbor tried to annex a chunk of his land

Property rights are messy.

How do you create a new category of mineral rights a hundred years into the blockchain?

Also: Rule change! City is changing parcel sizes by narrowing sidewalks. Another rule change! Single-family home neighborhood rezoned to multi-family; two plots are mostly (but not completely) combining to create a multi-family plot with air rights bought from the church next door. Rule change! Everything east of this line of longitude in those two towns (but not unincorported county land as of the 2009 geological survey) is now federal property per eminent domain.

Generally I think the blockchain is dumb, but I think recording property ownership would be a good usecase. Don't think about it as a highly structured database, think about it like a filing cabinet that can be accessed from the internet and anyone can contribute to the maintenance of.

> How do you create a new category of mineral rights a hundred years into the blockchain?

Same way you add a category of mineral rights now - you pass a law and you add a category name. Then you start recording documents that track those rights.

I actually think blockchain would be an interesting model for media ownership. Buying movies or other things online is sketchy because your 'property' basically gets tied up in the fortunes of a particular company. 'Buy' a movie from StreamIt.com and they go under? No more movie. I'd love to see a consortium that agrees to use a blockchain system to issue movie rights - the media companies agrees that anyone who has control of a wallet with a 'moviecoin' minted by them has the right to watch that movie. Even if all the original companies go out of buisness, new companies could keep running the network and charge smaller fees for bandwidth to stream you the movie you already own.

That might be a concern if you try to cram every possible property of the legal code into the blockchain. So maybe don't do that. But if you do, the whole thing is extensible - so it is possible. But don't.

> maybe don't do that

A partial log of property rights is no longer a property rights register. It's reference material. Annotations.

Pack it up Identrust, digitally signed documents and timestamping are is just annotations.

This is actually a problem I have a hard time to understand. In Germany, these records are kept by a government maintained registry. Every patch of land has a number and a record, and an owner. Changes need certification by a Notary. Records go back to, what feels, eternity. I never heard of any problems with the records themselves, problems usually arise regarding the agreements between parties to change said documents. No idea how blockchain would beat simple, court maintained paper.

The US generally uses a different system than a single registry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recording_(real_estate)

That doesn't necessarily mean that a blockchain would be preferable. If one thought the US system is actually better than a registry, then one might consider a blockchain is essentially a fancy central registry.

Is it really that amazing when getting funding for anything takes pulling teeth? Voters have been convinced that investing in government operations is theft.

> Voters

Just the two? Because it has been a while since I heard anyone ask "Who is John Galt?"

OK, but you don’t need blockchain for that, any sort of Merkle tree will work.

You don't need a blockchain but a blockchain can potentially give the public guarantees that an opaque government solution usually does not.

How about a transparent government solution? https://www.registers.service.gov.uk/

The question wasn't "What is the ideal data structure?"