Re:In defense of cryptocurrency
by tsimionescu on Friday June 10, 2022 @04:38AM
(#31691570)
> The idea is that a universally trusted, always-on database allows you to build new types of applications.
If you think a government bureaucrat or judge will trust a blockchain because "proof of X" when a dispute does happen, you've got some weirdly conflicting beliefs about government. Furthermore, if you think they would trust it more because it's public then they would trust a DB that, say, Price Waterhouse Coopers were running that any county clerk could sign in to with an audited account and put some information in, then again I really don't understand what is your mental picture of the government.
However you slice it, the fact remains that, if there is ever a dispute on the ownership of your property, the government will want to consult an official paper trail of how that ownership came about. The more layers of abstraction you add, the more places your trail could be attacked, the longer it will take to do it, the more expensive experts will have to be hired for the trial and so on.
Permissionless databases also lend themselves well to a kind of DoS attacks, where someone can trivially bury the real data in mountains of low-effort fake data (perhaps with some high-effort fakes thrown in as well). If the county clerk's intern can mint an NFT for each house in the real registry, I can easily mint 100,000,000 fake NFTs for the same houses as well - good luck disputing the ownership then if your house purchase wasn't registered in the paper registry.
A permissioned DB run by a trusted entity (which could easily be some company, even though I hate that this is what usually happens, and would much rather see the government handling internally) that is responsible for auditing who has access to modify the digital registry and so on is the only possible solution for improving the bureaucracy of this. And even then, it will only improve it so much, since you will still need to send documents that prove you are who you say you are, and the other party is who they say they are, and you both agreed to the contract that made this transfer possible. Of course, much of this can also be fixed by using a government-certified digital certificate proving your identity (this is a common service in the EU at least).
If you think a government bureaucrat or judge will trust a blockchain because "proof of X" when a dispute does happen, you've got some weirdly conflicting beliefs about government. Furthermore, if you think they would trust it more because it's public then they would trust a DB that, say, Price Waterhouse Coopers were running that any county clerk could sign in to with an audited account and put some information in, then again I really don't understand what is your mental picture of the government.
However you slice it, the fact remains that, if there is ever a dispute on the ownership of your property, the government will want to consult an official paper trail of how that ownership came about. The more layers of abstraction you add, the more places your trail could be attacked, the longer it will take to do it, the more expensive experts will have to be hired for the trial and so on.
Permissionless databases also lend themselves well to a kind of DoS attacks, where someone can trivially bury the real data in mountains of low-effort fake data (perhaps with some high-effort fakes thrown in as well). If the county clerk's intern can mint an NFT for each house in the real registry, I can easily mint 100,000,000 fake NFTs for the same houses as well - good luck disputing the ownership then if your house purchase wasn't registered in the paper registry.
A permissioned DB run by a trusted entity (which could easily be some company, even though I hate that this is what usually happens, and would much rather see the government handling internally) that is responsible for auditing who has access to modify the digital registry and so on is the only possible solution for improving the bureaucracy of this. And even then, it will only improve it so much, since you will still need to send documents that prove you are who you say you are, and the other party is who they say they are, and you both agreed to the contract that made this transfer possible. Of course, much of this can also be fixed by using a government-certified digital certificate proving your identity (this is a common service in the EU at least).