Regarding the conclusions about the unsuitability of blockchain for real estate registration, I partially agree. In its pure form—yes. I have been working on this issue at the University of Bologna for four years. Last year, when I visited Kyiv, I gave a presentation on how to apply blockchain as a real estate registry. So, if you are interested in learning more: theory, protocols, system architecture, regulation. I presented it quite simply in my presentation at the blockchain hub.
Alexey Konashevich
Thank you, I watched the presentation with great interest. My concept of property rights registration was approached slightly from a different angle and sketched out in much broader strokes. Not being a programmer, I was answering not the question of “how,” but rather the question of “who would handle this without the state, why would they do it, and why would they do it well.”
Your presentation implicitly suggests that the state, as a monopoly territorial jurisdiction in the validation system for the transfer of property rights, is a resource-intensive atavism that does not increase system efficiency but complicates its optimization.
In order to formally describe the functioning system of decentralized legal mechanisms, you build “smart laws” on top of smart contracts—an additional abstraction that validates smart contracts, separating legal ones from illegal ones. Then you raise the question of who creates the smart laws and introduce a new abstraction, e-voting:
But in the world of decentralized ledgers, it doesn’t work that way. E-voting for a law is, essentially, its validation by a group of independent validators. What happens if a certain minority votes against a law in current legal reality? They are forced to obey the law passed by the majority. What happens under decentralized law? The minority has the opportunity to create a fork. Two alternative smart laws emerge, each describing its own set of permissible smart contracts, and different voluntary transactions can take place in different legal fields.
Essentially, these are the same good old contractual jurisdictions that I’ve already talked the audience’s ears off about here.