Anyone could fake your signature on a few papers, bribe the guy at the land registry or whatever bureau handles property transactions and you could lose your house. It doesn't have to be a house, it can be a company or anything else. All at a fraction of the cost of 51% attack.
However, with a 51% the attacker now authoritatively owns my house. If someone tries to land-snatch my house in the real world, I go to court and get it back.
Meatspace resolution is a feature, not a bug. Including for cryptocurrency, as the ETH/ETC hardfork has definitively shown (comparing the relative values of the two). Everyone talks a big talk about immutability... but nobody actually wants to live on the "authoritative" blockchain where somebody made off with 15% of the money supply.
If your assumption here is that you live in a war-torn country where a warlord can use guns to take away your property, or another situation with no real rule of law... the warlord is not going to care about what some "blockchain" says. Or they'll use their guns to force you to transfer it to them for a penny. Get real.
You and so many other people in this thread misunderstand how a 51% attack would work in this context.
You buy a house, the transaction gets on the blockchain network. Just like you wait for confirmations with Bitcoin you'd wait e.g. for 1 day or for 1 week confirmations, this would be agreed upon by both the seller and buyer.
Now, let's say someone with deep pockets re-computes the last 1 week of transactions in a 51% attack and "undoes" that transaction. The branch of the blockchain that got replaced doesn't just disappear, it has your house in it, thousands of other houses will have been sold through that branch of the chain, and thousands of people will have that full public record.
At this point you and the rest of the owners could obviously go to a court and get your houses back, just as you could if the deeds got lost through a fire today but you had other evidence to prove they existed.
Nobody's suggesting that the entire court system be replaced by a blockchain and we ignore all other mitigating evidence, it's just being suggested that storing e.g. deeds in such a system is more reliable than storing them in a couple of filing cabinets somewhere.
I only want to know one thing: do you guys live in this world? I have been following Bitcoin since the beginning and there seems to be an utter disconnect between the blockchain hypers and the real world.
Seriously, who in their right mind would accept this? That you pull some data in a ... what, app? Provided by whom? And it proves house ownership? Have you ever bought real estate or are you 14 to believe this shit?
In the real world, there is a chain of trust made out of lawyers, notaries, various government agencies and so on. It's only in the fever dreams of juvenile hackers and Ayn Rand believers who thinks the world work without it.
Did you read the comment you are replying to? Not every country in the world is exactly like the United States. I was impressed that you managed to make a comment that was refuted by the comment it was replying to. But then you insult his intelligence? That is some next level idiocy.
> Seriously, who in their right mind would accept this? That you pull some data in a ... what, app? Provided by whom?
Exactly the problem I have with the system - MERS [0,1] - that the banks have been putting in place over the last 20 years. I think having to file, in paper, with local property appraisers may make the most sense as a check on large-scale manipulation, but having some kind of independent, incorruptible single source of truth is desperately needed and isn't especially there right now.
> In the real world, there is a chain of trust made out of lawyers, notaries, various government agencies and so on.
And in that real world, there's plenty of manipulation in which houses get taken from their rightful owners. See, for instance, 'Chain of Title' [2] by David Dayen. Again, some kind of independent, incorruptible single source of truth is desperately needed and isn't especially there right now. I wouldn't want to replace multiple, independent parties checking the validity of transactions, but having an accessible, reliable, incorruptible reference would help everybody, I think.
You seem to misunderstand what we expect from a system like this.
We expect that the ratio of failure compared to the burden on society to be low and so far the real estate registry, notaries, banks, lawyers very occasionally corrected by courts of law are providing this. Even if in a few contrived, complex cases it doesn't work out, that's fine.
Here's an example: I am a resident of Vancouver, Canada and last year I was buying a house in Hungary and I needed to empower my brother to act as my agent, and, repeat, I was the buyer not the seller and yet to give a power of attorney that is recognized for real estate contract purposes I needed a "strong" one: either one with an apostille which you can't get in Canada or one sealed by a consul of Hungary. The honorary consul in Vancouver was on vacation. So my options were: visit the honorary consul in Seattle, visit a notary in Washington State and send the document to the Corporations Division in Olympia, WA for an apostille and hope it gets done in time or fly to the embassy in Ottawa or the high consulate in Los Angeles. Lovely options, all of them. Thanks god, I actually had business in Bellevue anyways and the honorary consul in Seattle was helpful.
This is the sort of documentary strength we demand and accept when exchanging goods of high value. I have a strong trust in seals, signatures and such when backed by the court and ultimately the monopoly on violence by the state -- I have this trust even in Hungary where systematic corruption is in place. If someone debates whether I own that house in Hungary, I have the contract bearing the seal of a lawyer to show I bought it and the title in the real estate registry shows that the previous owner was indeed the seller. That's the chain of ownership. Could you bribe the real estate registry? Sure, I did in 2008 to expedite the copying of an important piece of paper (that's Hungary for you, no express processing available) -- but I have serious doubts of the possibilities of bribing the registry to falsify the title as there is the chain to show it false.
Meanwhile I have zero trust whatsoever in a piece of software. I am a senior software developer / architect / whatever you want to name, and I know how this particular sausage is made and I would not trust it too far.
We could create systems that fail in even fewer cases but as always with engineering as you get closer and closer to 100% precision, costs skyrocket. We could demand that ten good people testify to your ownership like a minyan for The Mourner's Kaddish but society, so far, is satisfied with the current system enough not to do this because it would be terribly onerous.
Not it can't. Because governments can refuse to honor the documents and they can also refuse to honor the blockchain proof too.
Sure like on paper, block chain will show he owns the house but without an approving authority no one cares.
As it is stated in one of the earlier comments, block chain is good for digital currency only.
Ok I have zero interest in blockchains and somewhat firmly believe them to be a fad but, honestly, you read like an Amish decrying "those metal monsters."
Software was good enough to send a few guys to the Moon and back fifty years ago, software is enough to tell you that your house is yours.
Luckily, those kind of attacks can be detected and corrected in a non-blockchain world. A blockchain's features are not a good fit for this kind of use case.
I seem to be missing how this would work or why this would be desirable.