First US Real Estate Transaction in Blockchain: What’s Next?

To use automobile ownership by analogy, blockchain should do for home ownership what carfax does for automobile history. History is the key word in a title search. And for mortgages which are repackaged (who owns them) there should be a good answer for that as well, simply because the computer program will not take NO for an answer.

Let us assume that only 1% of the population is vindictive enough to have a dodgy local developer murdered for misselling them property, would that second-order of justice not be enough to render title-deed insurance redundant?

Let me tell you, I wouldn’t screw over a client with a bad title plan if I knew I could be massacred in a drive by shooting whilst walking home from Costa Coffee the following week. If I heard that this sort of thing was going on to people like me, I’d play the game very straight indeed, from then on. Just saying.

link to washingtonpost.com

The internet is bringing us back to the medieval period where if you want to purchase enforcement you have the choice of suing either through the king’s courts via the local magistrate and the sheriffs OR you can sue through the lord of the manor and the (virtual) courts of local aristocratic powers (i.e. murderous drug dealers).

I agree – business may not vanish totally as I said, but costs will be cheaper – This is not going to happen overnight

Of course health care is the same. As were know consumers get absolutely gouged as the status quo is protected from change by $$$$ lobbyists.

BTW ZH does not talk up Bitcoin. He posts articles form others who do. Big difference.

Your comment is like talking up CNN and other fake news cites because the Internet is useful. What is Zerohedge’s motive for pumping Bitcoin? What is the motive for businesses that will be displaced by cryptos to bash it?

How does using a non-distributed block chain in any way improve upon using a standard relational database to record property sales? In Florida, each county has a clerk of the courts who is responsible for safely maintaining property ownership records and the corresponding sale and contract information. How does using a block chain database improve on that process?

There are moments in history when technology changes the face of land ownership, such as Britain in the middle ages, when the courts started recognizing land documents, and most small land owners had inherited the land or it was passed them word of mouth or a handshake. The Church understood writing, and documents and quietly went about taking land from the illiterate and poor. The courts were complicit of course just as they were after 2008, when title could not be proven, foreclosures were still done. The only advantage to the home owner in rare instances, is that they were absolved of their obligation, or to wit, stripped of ownership.

Zerohedge keeps talking up Bitcoin like a car salesman. It’s like talking up the Edsel because gasoline is useful.

One topic I’ve never seen discussed is how a blockchain ages, in particular with smart contracts. Real Estate lasts forever. As the smart contracts evolve, for instance when specific plat information is added to avoid duplicate titles, how does the encrypted, unmutable transaction the person in the story entered into get modified with the new information? How do you fix a mistake in a smart contract? The docs for our current house had the correct property location but gave a mailing address that transposed the house number. That got propagated to the property tax department who mailed reminders to that location until we became responsible for paying the taxes and I got the mailing address corrected. For a time there will continue to be a paper trail of RE docs and the processes for recording documents on paper will continue, like other IT projects(think accounts receivable, accounts payable,) eventually that will be abandoned or at least forgotten by those involved in RE transaction (eventually maybe nobody but the two parties.) I hope the system is well engineered with geographic dispersion. Even if the primary system is destroyed in a hurricane or nuclear exchange, property ownership records need to be maintained for hundreds if not thousands of years.

Has Mish written anything about this? – link to congress.gov

I don’t see anything on this site about it.

Title insurance should be one of the first victims of blockchain technology. I would say good riddance! Here in Texas I refer to it as promulgated price gouging. It’s one of the biggest scams going, and one of the most expensive costs for home sellers after agent commissions. Texas has one of the highest costs for title insurance in the country, and not surprisingly homeowners get virtually nothing of value for the cost. Just ask yourself when was the last time you filed a claim on your title insurance? This is one of the reasons why title companies market their services to Realtors rather than end user homeowners. A huge portion of the premiums paid for title insurance here in Texas (rate for premiums set by the state) goes to administrative overhead, not claims. The cost of the premiums in many cases has NOTHING to due with the risk of the policy, and you get screwed even more when you refinance because you get to pay even more premiums/cost for essentially no added risk. It’s enough to make your head spin, but the insurance industry and lobbyists have kept it alive because it’s profitable. Iowa figured out the scam and went to a much cheaper system years ago. link to iowafinanceauthority.gov

I’m surprised this has only just happened in the US. I was aware of this happening in the UK last year.
link to homesgofast.com

I agree mish the Government backed blockchains will outperform decentralised blockchains over the medium term. However we both know that over the next coming decade people’s faith in governments will be severely diminished. The question I ask myself is which governments?

Going forwards far into the future I expect more and more fragmenting of nation states. Blockchain is another technology that will aid the divorce of Texas and California from the States, Scotland from the UK, Catalonia from Spain, and God only knows how this will undermine nations with weaker governments.

I came by these views by reading “The End of Power” by Moises Naím.