That's very different from what's meant by "reversible transactions" in the context of other payment systems. If the legal system can dictate the reversal of a cash transaction, then it can do so for a crypto transaction - without either needing to have some explicit protocol to do so.
> That level of resilience is completely unnecessary
That's just, like, your opinion, man.
> And who will hold these NFTs?
The owners of the properties they represent.
> And where will the data the NFTs sign be stored?
NFTs can store arbitrary data.
> If they want to distribute the NFTs to the current owners of the houses, than they now need to establish an Ethereum/Cardano/[...] wallet for each person who owns a house in their district
Which is many orders of magnitude easier than the current system.
Besides, it doesn't have to be all or nothing; a gradual opt-in transition would be perfectly doable.
> If they want to make them part of the NFTs and store them on-chain, then minting the NFTs will be exorbitant
On just about anything noteworthy that's not Ethereum, the cost is on the scale of cents. Wow, such unaffordable, many expensive.
And no, you don't need physical scans of the original documents. A transcription will do fine.
Mine and everyone else's who holds important information in databases. The whole financial system for one.
> NFTs can store arbitrary data.
Up to some size.
> Which is many orders of magnitude easier than the current system.
It is not. The current system scales with the number of home transactions. Your proposal scales with the number of homes - a much bigger number.
> Besides, it doesn't have to be all or nothing; a gradual opt-in transition would be perfectly doable.
Sure, but then it's just a whole bunch of extra work for no benefits for 10-20 years. Not just for the county clerk, but also for home owners and buyers: not only will they still need to process the existing requirements, they would also have new requirements to obtain and prove ownership of their ETH/other crypto wallet. And they wouldn't see any advantage at all until the next time they sell their home (hopefully they will still remember their wallet address and private key by then!).
> On just about anything noteworthy that's not Ethereum, the cost is on the scale of cents. Wow, such unaffordable, many expensive.
Well, there are exactly two block chains that are somewhat noteworthy outside the crypto bubble: Bitcoin and Ethereum. And Bitocin doesn't support NFTs.
And any other block gain that becomes even mildly popular quickly explodes in values and transaction fees just like the other two. Turns out that storing hundreds of thousands of copies of the same data, and writing every single transaction to hundreds of thousands of systems before it is considered settled, without any kind of permission system, is actually very costly.
Note: you're right on the cash transaction statement, to some extent. There are still some important differences I feel, mainly related to the fact that today's systems enforce knowing the legal identity of parties to a transaction for something like a house, even if the sale is done in cash - which wouldn't be guaranteed if the house could be traded by selling an NFT on a chain.
If your opinion is that your information warrants less redundancy and resiliency than what Zoomer cryptobros get with their sad monkey NFTs, then maybe your information ain't all that important?
> Up to some size.
That size being more than sufficient to store a land parcel's coordinates, address, and other identifying data.
> The current system scales with the number of home transactions. Your proposal scales with the number of homes - a much bigger number.
They both scale with both. Or do you propose that the current system instantaneously sprung into existence without spending centuries distributing paper deeds beforehand?
> Sure, but then it's just a whole bunch of extra work for no benefits for 10-20 years.
If you don't consider the greatly improved auditability and resiliency to be a benefit then that's further reason to question whether your opinion is actually representative of people with important information needing stored.
> not only will they still need to process the existing requirements, they would also have new requirements to obtain and prove ownership of their ETH/other crypto wallet
That doesn't logically follow. It's quite possible for it to be a "one or the other" deal.
And ownership is pretty trivial to prove: you either can initiate transactions with that wallet's private key or you can't.
> Well, there are exactly two block chains that are somewhat noteworthy outside the crypto bubble: Bitcoin and Ethereum.
There are a lot more than only two which are noteworthy. That you believe otherwise is itself reason enough to disregard your comment as thoroughly misinformed...
> And any other block gain that becomes even mildly popular quickly explodes in values and transaction fees just like the other two.
...as is this. There are multiple NFT-capable blockchains that have demonstrated better scalability both in theory and practice by virtue of them using a consensus method more sane than burning energy on useless SHA256 hashes.
> There are still some important differences I feel, mainly related to the fact that today's systems enforce knowing the legal identity of parties to a transaction for something like a house, even if the sale is done in cash - which wouldn't be guaranteed if the house could be traded by selling an NFT on a chain.
It wouldn't necessarily need to be guaranteed, because the information is already in a public ledger. If you want to get fancy you could address that further with NFTs representing personal identification (which has other applications, like tracking licenses and certifications and other endorsements, but I digress).
What gave you this idea? If I have proof that I paid you cash for a service, and then proof you didn't provide that service, I absolutely expect to be able to reverse that transaction, via the legal system.
> A blockchain is much more resilient; the equivalent would be to have hundreds or thousands of redundant SQL databases around the world and somehow keep them all in sync.
That level of resilience is completely unnecessary and is part of why blockchain is such an extraordinarily wasteful technology.
> Local governments are fully capable of putting real estate NFTs or whatever on something like Ethereum or Cardano and publishing public keys such that people can verify their authenticity.
And who will hold these NFTs? And where will the data the NFTs sign be stored? If the government holds the NFTs, then nothing will change for you: you will have to bring the exact same kind of proof after you bought a house to the government so that they can update the blockchain record.
If they want to distribute the NFTs to the current owners of the houses, than they now need to establish an Ethereum/Cardano/[...] wallet for each person who owns a house in their district - a decade-long project in the best case, involving a level of bureaucracy to ascertain that no house NFT was incorrectly transferred to the wrong owner that will blow your mind (or, more likely, a process which will cause massive fraud and property disputes for decades to come).
And of course, the NFTs don't solve the problem of actually storing the data (physical scans of the documents that were used before the move to digital, at the very least, since the chain of ownership of each piece of property is an extremely important part of how you can settle disputes). Who will hold these records, and update them as needed? If it's still the county clerk, the problem of bureaucracy flies back in. If they want to make them part of the NFTs and store them on-chain, then minting the NFTs will be exorbitant, and it's doubtful the Ethereum blockchain would survive having the entire archives of home ownership in the USA on-chain.