[LINK] itN/NIST: 'Don't bother with blockchain'

[Roger Clarke]

>On 12/10/18 12:11, Roger Clarke wrote:
>> Don't bother with blockchain: databases or even email could be better ...
At 9:24 +1100 17/10/18, Tom Worthington wrote:
>Land title is one possible application for blockchain. See:

I'm in agreement with Tom on a lot of this, but land title is one of the examples I use for why blockchain is superficially relevant, but actually not of much use.

Back when land titles were, at law, dependent on evidence of a sufficiently long series of successive transactions, a chain of electronic transactions would have reflected the real world of land title.

Torrens Title was invented in South Australia in 1858, and much of the world has adopted it:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrens_title

The key point about Torrens Title is that the legal authority is a register entry, and hence the chain is of no more than historical interest.

So (remnant 'old system title' arrangements aside), the blockchain model has no more relevance to land titles than it has to share-trading.

_________________

>"NSW Land Registry to trial blockchain for conveyancing: The state wants to transition completely to eConveyancing by July 1, 2019:", Asha McLean, zdnet, October 15, 2018: https://www.zdnet.com/article/nsw-land-registry-to-trial-blockchain-for-conveyancing/
>
>I am on the ACS Blockchain Technical Committee and have attended a few meetings with Data 61 who are preparing a report on it for ACS. But I do struggle to find many use cases for blockchain. How often do you have something which needs to be distributed, immutable and not run by a central trusted party?
>
>One application I suggested to the blockchain committee is for micro-credentials. Each student may have several hundred micro-credentials from dozens of institutions, making paper based certificates unworkable. I discussed this in Colombo a few weeks ago at the Sri Lanka national IT conference: http://tomw.net.au/technology/it/digital_economy_learning/
>
>
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Roger Clarke                                 http://www.rogerclarke.com/
			             
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Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law            University of N.S.W.
Visiting Professor in Computer Science    Australian National University