>Think of this scenario. The French government has a top notch security protocol in place to secure the private key to the ownership of the Mona Lisa. But we have a change of government and some high ranking government official gets corrupted. They have access to the keys and he uses them to transfer the Mona Lisa to one of his rich buddies Joe Shmoe.
A "top notch security protocol" would require more than one official to sign off on the transfer precisely because this particular attack is so easily anticipated.
A blockchain for asserting ownership of the mona lisa would be largely ceremonial anyway - a bit like the land title deeds for the French Parliament. That doesn't mean that, like the deeds, it won't some day exist, but it will, like the deeds, not really mean anything. The "true owner" will forever be whomever has a monopoly on violence in France.
His assertion that a database is just as good for recording ownership, I think, misunderstands what blockchain is good at - distributing trust (everybody runs the database), rather than centralizing it (one party runs the database).
This isn't a theoretical concern, either.
I see the blockchain as a tool to prevent the MERS debacle, where a group of banks decided to come together and tried to make their privately run centralized database of mortgage titles into, quite literally, law (if you're in our database, we can foreclose on your house): https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/01/mers-the-law-and-the...
This gambit worked in a lower court but, IIRC failed in the supreme court, but it created an almighty paperwork headache.
A "top notch security protocol" would require more than one official to sign off on the transfer precisely because this particular attack is so easily anticipated.
A blockchain for asserting ownership of the mona lisa would be largely ceremonial anyway - a bit like the land title deeds for the French Parliament. That doesn't mean that, like the deeds, it won't some day exist, but it will, like the deeds, not really mean anything. The "true owner" will forever be whomever has a monopoly on violence in France.
His assertion that a database is just as good for recording ownership, I think, misunderstands what blockchain is good at - distributing trust (everybody runs the database), rather than centralizing it (one party runs the database).
This isn't a theoretical concern, either.
I see the blockchain as a tool to prevent the MERS debacle, where a group of banks decided to come together and tried to make their privately run centralized database of mortgage titles into, quite literally, law (if you're in our database, we can foreclose on your house): https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/01/mers-the-law-and-the...
This gambit worked in a lower court but, IIRC failed in the supreme court, but it created an almighty paperwork headache.