Yeah, but you'd accomplish nothing. Because the only way a registry could be meaningful in determining ownership, is if the government that protects your property rights considers the registration valid. And in that case, you have to trust the government which means a trust-based registry is far more simple and efficient. Could still be blockchain based though, with proof-of-authority. Could be nice to see a ledger seeing exactly who signed (with cryptographic signatures) the transfer of the property etc. Okay, that' be a kind of NFT-system, but not in the sense that most people think of NFTs (trustless)

For houses this is easy to prove. But this goes for nearly every other suggested NFT application, including tickets.

The trust calculus is different though. You still need to trust the legal framework in your jurisdiction honours the blockchain's authority over ownership.

But you can at least not need to trust the registry's "database" of who owns what.

I'm honestly not sure if you are joking or not. In case you are not, the problem with house buying is not to find out who owns it, but trying to address the value and condition etc. And that you have to spend that 1 million in one go instead of Microsoft stock that you can buy $10 at the time.

> could use an NFT to represent digital ownership of the underlying physical asset

So, you arrive at "your" property with a 20x20 pixel jpeg that you call your ownership rights (even such a jpeg would be prohibitively expensive to store on blockchain, but whatever).

So, you arrive, and there's someone else living there. They don't want to move out, no matter how much you wave your jpeg around. What does your NFT give you in this case?

They may even have a copy of your JPEG! Now you are really screwed...

you could but things like easements would make that much more complicated There are a lot of things that come / don't come with a piece of property (mineral rights, water rights, homeowner associations) that make it a complicated thing to own.

The problem is the very definition of "the underlying physical asset".

The state would have to legislatively enact the fact the their land registry database is now an NFT based blockchain.

Sure, I was taking that for granted more or less.

But that doesn't mean anyone will buy a house by browsing some site and buying an NFT, even if this were prefectului legally worked out.

And that is because a house and piece of land are complex real world objects that don't live on-chain, and can be arbitrarily different from when the NFT was minted. Perhaps there was flooding and the house is now damaged. Perhaps there is some insect infestation. Perhaps the land is in the process of being expropriate for highway construction. Perhaps a nearby high-rise is obscuring all the sunlight and the house is to dark for your tastes.

The complexity in real-estate transactions comes from appraising all of these sorts of things, not from the need of keeping the lands registry up to date. To buy a house, you need to have an expert appraise it's status. You also need a contract that gives you some protection from hudden huge issues that your expert may have missed. These things take the majority of the time and effprt, and NFTs do nothing to help with them.