Yes, but is it a problem worth solving beyond what we have today? What’s the last time we saw an database integrity failure at the DMV/… leading to cars being owned by people that shouldn’t?

I'm pretty sure it wasn't more recently than the last time people lost control of assets on a blockchain!

Replacing databases which afaik have never been manipulated anywhere in the world (despite representing legal ownership of high value assets) with tokens similar to those people lose access to or are duped out of on a daily basis is very Web3

Was the DMV hacked this week?

https://news.coincu.com/56415-citydao-hacked-discord-95000-d...

when you start to coin terms like rug pull and web3, it sure does feel like a systematic problem. There are people who specialize in asserting if you can trust a new token or not - why would i invest in something so janky?

Databases have been doing that for a long time. Blockchains only add additional guarantees that matter when you have hostile participants, which only matters if you're decentralizing your system, which you probably don't want to do for a lot of things (like tracking ownership of a car).

Your username kind of goes nicely with your point here.

But is this blockchain-like technology better than the alternatives? What advantages does it have over a simple checksum, for example?

A good example of an imaginary problem!

I have never had the state DMV lose record of my ownership of a vehicle. I don’t know anyone that has. I can’t find any record of it happening.

It doesn’t sound like an actual problem to me.

Can't a simple checksum or hash do the same (and without burning as much electricity as all of Argentina)?

mysqldump | sha256sum