Hello!
When I was creating a CTF for a conference, I’ve finally got to learn about how blockchain and smart contracts actually works in practice, and the whole concept is simply brilliant. A quick introduction for those unfamiliar with it would be in this summary, but just to summarize how I basically understand it, blockchain is simply a VM that runs code (smart contracts) a both the code, and result of every execution of it is calculated by a bunch of users (so, mining is basically running a VM) and appended into the blockchain based on some kind of consensus and proof of work. This means that you get a single source of truth and history of every execution of a smart contract that is decentralized and you can rely on it.
But, almost every use of blockchain or smart contracts I have seen has pretty large issues either in sustainability in the long term, or in cases where you simply need some form of an authority to prevent and punish misuse. While I’m not really that much familiar with every use of blockchain so far, I will first list what I’ve already thought about or seen, and the main issues that I think are a deal-breaker for choosing blockchain for that kind of tasks. It’s possible that some of the issues are wrong or have already been solved, so please correct me if I’m wrong - my knowledge of blockchain isn’t really that in-depth.
First and the most common use is the one you are probably most aware of - cryptocurrencies. If I ignore the biggest and most unfortunate issue of cryptocurrencies turning into an investment-only product, with hugely volatile and inflated price that is not backed by any kind of real value (sure, you can pay with BTC, but it’s slow, expensive and super volatile to be useful, so the only real use is to literally sell it to others for a profit - which also basically means you are scamming someone out of their money down the line), I see the following problems with using blockchain for currencies:
- Longevity - The ledger size is already getting massive, only after a few year. It’s not sustainable, and it will eventually be really hard to keep the whole ledger at a large enough number of places to not run into problems of integrity. It’s growing exponentionally, and is at around 500Gb after around 10 years.
- Gas cost - It’s getting harder and harder to mine and confirm new transactions, which increases the cost while also making less people able to mine new transactions without being at a loss. This will only get worse, and eventually lead to the 50% problem (if someone controls 50%+ of mining nodes, he can confirm fake transactions or do whatever he wants with the blockchain) being a real issue.
- Lack of moderation - This may be one of the more controversial issues, because it goes directly against the whole idea of cryptocurrencies, but is one of the biggest problems I see that are in the way of crypto being able to be considered for wider use. We live in a world where some people are dicks that are not afraid to steal and cheat, and something like a currency simply has to be moderatable. You need to be able to punish criminals, and take back what they have stolen. If someone doesn’t pay their debts and owns me money, the government should be able to just take the money if they have them. If someone uses an account for scamming and stealing, it should be possible to freeze it.
The last issue will eventually show in most of the other uses of blockchain as well, and while I have included it, I’m still not sure how I feel bout it. In an ideal world, you would not have to deal with something like this. I would also really like to have an option to do my transactions privately, without anyone being able to profile my behavior and data, but such a system would have to allow for some safeguards against missuse to be widely adoptable. (Which is an interresting off-topic question - would it be possible to create a system that is private, but also has the possibility for trusted authorities to freeze accounts and force transactions?) And the more that I think about it, the more I’m certain that I’d rather have a centralized system where you can punish criminals and scammers, than a system where lives of people are regularly ruined by someone stealing all of their savings unpunished. But it is a thin line - I only say that because I live in a country that is all-right and I can trust my government - for now. But I definitely agree that such a private unmoderated option should exist - but can’t be considered for widespread use, which I’ve heard some people say that “crypto will replace cash in a few years”. And this is why it never will, IMO. But this discussion shouldn’t be about whether this is a good opinion or not - but more about “what blockchain is a good tool for”.
Next one are NFTs. I will just quickly gloss over them, because they are even bigger scam than crypto is. Ever heard someone say “Someone has copied and minted my NFT?”. Well, it’s a shame that there isn’t some kind of centralized authority that could, you know, not allow them to do that.
Another use I’ve heard someone praise as “the future” was lending money. I’m not sure what were they talking about, but the whole point was that you can… Escrow an amount you are borrowing, and then borrow the same amount? It didn’t make any sense, so I guess I’m missing something, but then again - we have the same issues as above, while also it being just a bizare idea - why simply not use the amount you already have? The person tried to explain it to me, but it just feels gimmicky. And if you escrow a lesser amount, you then have the same problem with moderation as above - nothing can force you to return the money (unless it is already escrowed, but then, why??)
So far, every use of blockchain I have heard about would be better done in a centralized fashion, especially as far as longevity is concerned. The growing ledger size and increasing gas cost, along with the 50% problem simply makes most of these kind of uses too impractical to work on a larger scale.
But I really like the concept and idea of smart contracts, and I’m sure there has to be some kind of use that is not as “revolutionary” or large scale. I’m just having hard time coming up with any.
I have only one - voting, and maybe transparent randomization (i.e lottery). Smart contracts are an amazing way to collect votes transparently but privately, since you can be sure that no-one can cheat, if you set it up properly. It’s also something that doesn’t suffer from the longevity problem, because it’s more of a one-shot use of blockchain, rather than something ongoing - which also justifies the price.
(tl;dr feel free to start here:) Which is what I’m interested in - does any of you have similar ideas for use of smart contracts and blockchain, that would be practical in a daily live? Be it one-shot smart contracts for a small task, such as voting or random winner selection, maybe some kind of escrow. It doesn’t have to be a “society changing system”, or something revolutionary. A common small code snippets or apps that would solve the trust issue inherent to a centralized task is what I’m after - but have hard time coming up with.
And just a disclaimer - I don’t plan on building anything and am not fishing for the next blockchain thing, I barely even understand it. I would just like to incorporate blockchain into my programming repertoire as a tool, because the concept feels so clever, but is also misused or misunderstood due to hype, but it has to have it’s uses that are overshadowed by people jumping on the blockchain bandwagon without considering whether it’s really the best tool for the job.
But is has to be a good tool for some kind of problems, right? And I would like to start a discussion about what would that be, without it being affected by the hype and reputation surrounding blockchain. I feel like that would be an interesting though exercise, and I’m sure we can come up with some interesting little uses here and there, without it being gimmicky but actually the best tool for the job.
Thank you!
EDIT: And I’d like to add that I never got into the blockchain hype, and my opinion on how it’s used so far is mostly negative. If a product mentions blockchain, I usually just avoid it as a gimmick. But that’s why I’m genuinely interested in this discussion - I don’t judge a tool about how people misuse it.
Blockchains are only useful in cases where non-repudiability (the ability to prevent users from denying that an event happened) is more important than any other factor. And there are preciously few cases where this is the case, the vast majority being related to audit - tracking receipts, votes, certificates, or similar attestations in an environment where no single party can be trusted. Disclaimer, I’ve worked in the past in projects related to the aforementioned - fortunately all of them related to the field of audit.
Notabaly most of these use cases probably don’t benefit from a public ledger though, in the sense that anyone with enough stake / hardware could be a validator. Exposes you to way too much uncertainty about whether validators will screw you over with Maximal Extractable Value tomfoolery, edit: and is obviously slow and very expensive compared to PoA
Fair enough that! I’m surprised to see so few companies saving up their money and processing time, and just using a private distributed ledger among all parties (plus maybe an arbiter node or two). Probably because Ethereum is better supported commercially (guess why!)
You can run Ethereum in PoA mode though, or at least it used to be possible but I dunno whether they’ve kept the option around (probably?) I think the problem is that many people who set these systems up don’t even know that’s possible, or they’re distribution maximalists who balk at the idea of having a private blockchain where some “higher authority” (gasp!) says who can validate blocks and it’s not just based on how much ETH you have.
I mean, not even I knew that Ethereum could be run in an intranet via Proof of Authority, today I learned something new!
I’m an odd breed of (thankfully former) blockchain consultant in that I’ve got a healthy skepticism about the tech and don’t think that slapping a public blockchain on to everything will magically make it better, so I made my business by having a more in-depth understanding of the various options and what they’re really suitable for. I used to joke that my first advice was always “don’t”, and the second was “no seriously, don’t.”
And an important note is that… For decades we have had paper trails fairly locked down given enough incentive. The technology isn’t the problem with performing audits.
buying drugs and scamming people
oh, and throwing gasoline at an already burning planet
Stop using FIAT then.
lol. lmao
It’s true lol.
Want to explain your rational?
Buying drugs, scamming people is the same use case of FIAT.
Blockchain? Oh, hah, no no… none of us were ever hyping up a tech we didn’t understand as the solution to literally any problem.
Say, have you heard about AI? It’s a revolutionary technology that’s the solution to any problem!
I mean, machine learning can theoretically approximate any computable function given enough time and resources…
I still find the ai program that infers your age based on your age pretty funny :p and it never really get’s it completely.
When NFTs were invented, people imagined them being used for things like titles/deeds. Instant transfer and verifiability would be a huge thing. especially in places that have real estate scams due to the slow/corrupt bureaucracy.
The only useful use case I’ve seen is for when you absolutely MUST be able to track historic data and ensure edits don’t destroy the original. Blockchain “solves” this by never allowing saved data to be edited.
The only place I’ve seen it actually being used properly for that was within Brazil’s medical vaccine tracking (ptbr article), which is what allowed them to confirm that Bolsonaro falsified his vaccination card. It doesn’t offer details on what kind of protocol it uses, but it could just be a “decentralized, distributed” database, for all intents and purposes.
We’ve had that for literally 40+ years though with CQRS, which is used in every banking system (it’s why your bank can show you every transaction that has happened on your account). It’s also used by airports and airlines. It’s incredibly common tech that doesn’t require a blockchain or decentralization.
I think you are saying the same thing, but it’s less that history can’t be changed and more than all changes are collectively acknowledged. The Brazilian vaccine record shows why that can be a highly desirable attribute; it prevents a class of corruption while also automating the tasks that could have been corrupted.
A good while back I read a paper, blog post…I read something somewhere a while back that laid out an interesting use case involving vehicular service records for fleet vehicles. And I know exactly about as much about blockchain then, as I do now, but I did spend some time in fleet logistics for a large scale service company with about 20+ field vans and at the time, the notion seemed compelling and interesting on the face of it.
After a very brief google, it seems the topic has been widely written about but nothing in depth compared to the piece I read all those years ago (which felt more like a full on white-paper). Looking around and will edit the comment if I find it so the people in the room who are smarter than I am can weigh in.
I don’t know much about the topic in depth, but I can tell you the greatest problem with using a blockchain for such record keeping: there is no way to ensure that the service that was recorded in the blockchain actually matches the service that was performed. And this is the same problem that every single record keeping system has, so it’s not unique, but simply because of this all the greater reliability of the blockchain is meaningless.
gitIts backing store is an (immutable) merkle tree, which is a chain of crypographically signed object (commits, trees and blob), aka a chain of block, aka a blockchain.
Audit logs and Access control paper trails.
Security event logging has to be:
- Broadly accessible
- Write-protected
- offering some proof of completeness.
These three requirements are tricky and often conflicting. Block-chain might be an inefficient way to achieve these, but the glove does fit quite neatly.
Logistical paperwork
- Purchase Orders/Invoices and packing slips
- Waybills/Bills of lading and CMR’s
These kinds of documents require multiple stages of matching and approval by untrusted 3rd parties. There are dozens of ecosystems of interacting systems that support processing these documents, but most people still use paper. Paper is more reliable when you need to deliver a container full of diapers from Poland to North Sudan. It’s more reliable but incredibly prone to fraud and forgery. Having all of these approvals and transactions tracked on a blockchain and letting different systems interact with the same chain, would make it possible without each ERP having a rest API to each other ERP.
I fail to see what blockchain can provide in the realm of audit logging?
Fundamentally, you need to trust the systems which are logging events to log the correct events at the correct time. How does blockchain change this?
Yeah the problem isn’t the veracity of the logs, it’s providing a mechanism for third parties of proving that the sequence of events in your log hasn’t been tampered with after the fact
Any system which publishes the log to third parties as they are written would do that.
Yeah you’re not wrong, that would be more efficient. Again a blockchain is not an efficient way to do it. But it would be effective.
In practice audit logs are used by and for auditors. Non-technicals that need evidence that would hold up to argument. Yes you could send your logs to a third party. Now you have to prove that third parties trustworthiness twice a year to the standards of each legal entity you operate in. And lawyers are more expensive than blockchain devs haha :p
Having a private blockchain that you can share with several changing parties that can subscribe to it. Without having to update anything about your infrastructure is a benefit.
Even though I’ve lived through several iso 27001 certifications, I’m still walking on thin ice when I say that it would probably easier to explain the blockchain in practice than any other proof of completeness method. Because the public is more aware of it. On the other hand the public is also more skeptical of crypto so it could also backfire :p
How does a private blockchain work? It is my impression that the security of the block chain comes from the difficulty of mining a new block. This in turns depends on having many entities competing for mining the next block because they get some type of financial incentive.
Wouldn’t a private block chain just essentially be like git? In git I can easily rewrite the entire history of my “log” by just rehashing everything. It is just git rebase. For anybody to verify I had not done this, they would always need the newest commit/log entry. So until the time I choose to publish a log entry, I am free to rewrite it and everything after it. Which is exactly the same as if I didn’t use a blockchain.
It just seems like the blockchain solution depends on publishing log entries to a third party as they happen, but once you do that, the problem is already solved and you don’t need a blockchain.
But I might not properly understand how private blockchains work?
The security comes from consensus. Everyone needs to agree about what the truth is. The burden of proof is proportional to the number of peers that need to agree. Public chains require a lot of work to create consensus amongst hundreds of thousands of peers. Let’s say your chain consists of 12 companies all using the same chain to validate and verify each other’s transactions so they are ready for an audit.
Yes, it’s easier to have 12 peers conspire to manipulate the chain than to have 200 000 peers. But making 12 businesses conspire to cook the books is already several orders of magnitude more difficult than the checks and balances we have in place now.
So it is not really private to one business, but shared between a couple handfuls. The consensus of this group is then trusted.
In that case, to write a log entry I would have to publish the log into some mempool shared among the group as it is logged. At this point, each member can just store the log entry and then later verify it of asked. Again, it seems like the entire block chain part of this system is redundant and what is really providing utility is the idea of storing your logs with someone else as you create them so you cannot later claim something didn’t happen.
But just to understand the idea of private blockchains better. Would this be some kind of hardcore “code is law” arrangement where each Company is competing on hash power with all the others to prevent them from rewriting the logs to their advantage (and in the best case being able to rewrite the log to their advantage).
Or is there some a priori agreement on what a reasonable amount of hash power is, that you just hope one company doesn’t choose to outspent by a factor 100 the day they really need to rewrite the log?
I guess in that case it will be clear to everybody what has happened. But if you choose to act on this common sense version of events instead of the “truth of the blockchain consensus” you are, once again, undermining the entire idea of using a block chain.
It’s more about tampering with the audit log. “Company A provided their audit logs to prove their innocence.” Did they? Well. Maybe. How do we know it’s the full log. How do we know it wasn’t altered? Sure, the company can digitally sign it, but what does that prove?
Then sign and send the audit log in realtime to the authority which A provided their logs to. Same effect no blockchain.
You could also encrypt and publish it. But realistically there is always going to be some entity actually responsible for enacting the consequences for non-compliance and they are the only entity that really ever needs to check these logs.
I am not sure I understand what the incentives to “mine” this blockchain would be. Without a certain block difficulty, which requires many miners, it will be trivial to rewrite the entire chain.
I’ve given it some though and wouldn’t the fact that the blockchain is public by design be a problem in regard to forward secrecy (I’m not sure I’m using the term right here, but I suppose you get the idea)? If your keys would leak, you are then stuck with a lot of private data leaked without any way how to pull them back.
The audit logging sounds interesting. If you combine it with some kind of encryption, then I can imagine it working pretty well. Aside from the logistical problems/gas cost, that is.
There is no incentive for adding the friction of gas or PoW for these types of systems.
The parties involved can have a shared log and private keys for signing entries. Party A provides a thing and Party B signs an entry that says they were provided with the thing. Party A can wait for that signed entry before releasing the goods, etc. The problem with block chain to track physical stuff is that that handoffs are not instantaneous, so there’s always lag between the real state of the world and what the log says. In practice, this may be a few seconds, and a human might wait for confirmation before physically granting access to a recipient.
To put it another way, the party that is signing is not incentivized to forge that they have received an object from someone else, as that is effectively the fulfillment of the obligation. They’re only going to sign an entry if they get the object.
Blockchains are “just” distributed databases with a guarantee about transaction ordering (doesn’t have to be totally ordered like regular literal chain-of-blocks but eg. some sort of DAG). Then on top of that you have your consensus-forming mechanism like PoW, PoS or PoA (Proof-of-Authority), most of which are designed to work in a network where you don’t trust the participants, except for PoA where nodes that eg. have a cert signed by a specific authority can do validation.
I could see PoA networks being useful for eg. banks, real estate related stuff, DNS (like @jet@hackertalks.com mentioned) etc. Anything where you’d be interested in having all parties agree on some order of transactions, and where validation is only done by trusted actors. DNS-like systems could maybe even be done with public validation, but PoW is out of the question because of the W part, and most PoS-like systems (well, PoW and PoS but still) have lots of problems with validators being incentivized to order transactions in a certain way (“Maximal Extractable Value” et al) that can actually be detrimental to the network (or even consensus) and to the users.
I’m not really super sold on the idea of public blockchain networks where anyone (well, anyone with the means, which is not a small barrier) can be a validator, they mostly seem a bit like a solution looking for a problem. I can easily envision blockchains becoming something like Linux in the sense that they could be used “in the background” in many contexts, but so that us plebs rarely actually have to deal with them (the majority of the Internet runs on some flavor of Linux, but most people don’t “consciously” use it apart from Android which does its damndes to pretend not to be Linux).
Your comment pivoted from smart contracts to the foundations of why blockchains are useful. If we’re going down to strictly what a blockchain can be used for, replacing the web of trust for certificate validation.
Monero is a good example of what digital money should look like. Fungible, not an open ledger, usable like cash is.
If we ever put an authority in a position where they can surgically change things on a distributed ledger. It’s much more efficient to simply have a central ledger controlled by that same authority.
It does get interesting when we look at partitionable blockchains with Central oversight but those are pretty rare. But if you do have a partition will blockchain your the government functions could keep operating if there’s some network partition government event natural disaster communication interruption or say colonies on different planets. That could be interesting.
Yeah my comment was all over the place, but I hope not too much to be totally worthless.
PoA doesn’t mean the validators can change history, at least unless the network is specifically designed for that – which most aren’t, although I’d argue there’s potential use cases for allowing to eg. “undo” transactions, like what your bank does if your credit card number gets stolen.
Re. partitionable chains, it’d be fun to think about how to manage transactions when some nodes are potentially light years away. We already have the “interplanetary file system” after all 😄
Well we kind of already have historical examples of partitionable ledgers. It’s all about the merge. So historical documents written in far off offices merge or central offices. And they just kind of ignored conflict effects.
So if you have a very partitionable environment and we are using a distributed blockchain we might have to do something like record authority moving between partitions. That could be really interesting
Eventual consistency would be really eventual, heh.
And if the network is generally partitioned (or DAG-like I guess?), how do you handle eg. someone hopping on a (slower-than-light! I don’t believe in that FTL nonsense) ship and going from eg. Earth to live on Alpha Centauri? Do they have to bring a part of the DAG with them (or some sort of zk proof of it anyhow) in some form, so that it can be “transplanted” into the consensus on the other end when they arrive?
I can only imagine in such an environment you would have packetized network updates. You wouldn’t try to run a globally consistent ledger. You would bake in the partition network. And if you know somebody’s going to transit from network aid to network b you might sign something you might do a key you might give some sort of authority for this record to now get updated in a different partition. And if that traveled with a human all the better.
I imagine the partitions would also keep best effort consistent copies of other partitions, but they wouldn’t consider them you know up to date for any logistical purpose. So if you had a record that dealt with partition a but you were in partition b you would leverage as much data in partition be as possible and send an update record to a who would be the authority to do the thing and then send you the result.
But that’s a very very very naive approach. I’m sure we could come up with something more interesting. A distributed eventually consistent ledger with very sparse updates. Could get interesting
And this is exactly what I meant when I said that this sort of interstellar networking stuff is super fun to think about 😄
Name lookups. Like DNS.
If you have a trusted Oracle on whatever chain you’re using, then your smart contracts can start working with real world data. And that opens up lots of possibilities. Of course it puts a lot of faith in oracles. But for instance you could have an inheritance scheme that triggers on the death of a relative. You could do life insurance. You could affect any sort of contract was transaction money or currency.
To your points about central control, I think it’s anthema to the idea of a distributed system. If your resistant to malicious actors you have to be resistant to censorship. Because it’s only a matter of time until the central authority becomes a malicious actor. At least for some of the population.
Land deeds and property titles.
Maintaining a provable chain of ownership and legal transfer of land and property is required for mortgages, for title insurance, inheretance, etc.
A public, decentralized ledger of land/property transfers could revolutionize home ownership, lending, insurance, etc
How does a central government database not also solve those problems?
A central database would be just a list of all the land and who owns it.
Right now, the deed system is a bunch of deeds that say “remember when I got this land, on page 302 of book 75 in the county recorder’s office? Well now Jimantha owns it actually, since they bought it from me for ten dollars and a peppercorn.”. This is great for accountability: it lets you trace ownership history and provides a piece of evidence to substantiate every transfer, and so helps you answer inconvenient questions like “why should you own that house when it was my grandmother’s house and I want to own it?”. It also lets you roll transfers back if they are found to be fraudulent, and neatly captures how all current ownership is contingent on the theft of the whole place from any disposessed original inhabitants.
This is also basically how ownership works in many current blockchain systems: you select something you own based on the transaction that gave you ownership, and then you say who should own it now in a signed message.
But the blockchain systems verify signatures cryptographically, whereas the county recorder verifies the authority to transfer stuff on the “you think someone would just tell lies? On the Internet?” principle. And the centralized database doesn’t even keep the transfers around for review, it just has the database operator in charge of who owns any given thing at the moment.
Would you rather walk up to a grumpy person with a shotgun and demand that they move out while brandishing a printout of an SQLite database recently recovered after the ransomware attack at the county administrative building? Or with a deed with their spouse’s signature on it?
Then the problem is to make the deeds more machine-readable, and to get better at not putting in deeds from people who have no business writing to that part of the ledger, for which pieces of blockchain technology might be useful.
How does forced repossession of property work? You didn’t pay your bills. The only asset you have is the land. Court authorized giving it up in a lawsuit. I don’t know. Either way, there must be some way to enforced transfers without voluntarily relying on the person.
And who’s managing the keys? The land owner? What happens if they lose them? What happens if they die prior to transferring property?
Tying keys to natural people is indeed an unsolved problem.
The system can be designed to recognize more people than just the current owner as authorized to do a transfer. You could do the whole tax record tracking in the same system, to ensure that property can be seized for back taxes exactly when back taxes are owed.
Then it has the same weaknesses you pointed out in a centralized system, except it’s less efficient and uses more power…
Not all of the same weaknesses. If it’s just “let the judge move stuff around because they’re a judge”, then yeah. But if you implement any sort of security on it, you can say that the judge can only move stuff when also countersigned by the jury, who were demonstrably selected by a fair random draw, or something.
And even if you don’t do that you still have a great record of which judge exactly is stealing everyone’s stuff.
You can’t just wave a blockchain wand and get a government that works, but you can just wave a blockchain wand and get an accountable record of things.
A central database would be just a list of all the land and who owns it.
Says who? Why would it not be a list of who owned/owns that land and when they owned it?
Would you rather walk up to a grumpy person with a shotgun and demand that they move out while brandishing a printout of an SQLite database recently recovered after the ransomware attack at the county administrative building? Or with a deed with their spouse’s signature on it?
Yes, the document from the county administration would be much better, than some “magic” contract from the internet that may or may not be enforced by the county.
If the county isn’t actually using the system you try to present evidence from, of course it will not work.
If you have a list of who owned the land and when, and you have evidence to support each transfer, then you have a log-structured or relatively blockchain-like database.
Why would the county not use their own system? What are you even talking about? You seem to simultaneously make arguments for and against blockchains in the same sentence.
Yes, the document from the county administration would be much better, than some “magic” contract from the internet that may or may not be enforced by the county.
If the magic contract from the Internet is not actually likely to be enforced by the county, then the county is not actually using the magic Internet contract system. If the system were adopted by the county, then the official records from the system would be known to be enforceable.
I sound like I am for and against blockchain because I am. I don’t think you can stand up any existing blockchain system and start slapping government functions onto it and get a good result. People won’t understand it well enough or have sufficient resources to be true peers in the system, and if they did it wouldn’t scale very well.
But I do think that governmental systems can be improved by taking inspiration form blockchain technology and drawing on its underlying philosophical principles of accountability and consensus.
How do you prove someone in the central government didn’t take a bribe and tamper with the records? What if you’re from a country where the central government is less than stable? How would you prove ownership if something were to happen to that database? How do you prove that someone is who they say they are? How do citizens and businesses access that database? Is there a standardized format for it? Does it use some proprietary software built by the lowest bidder?
Not saying that blockchain has all the answers or that it is the right tool in all cases, but these are some of the problems it is trying to solve.
If you live in such a shitty country, the records would probably not be respected anyway. Also a blockchain still has to allow new inputs from a trusted source. And that source could still make up a fake sale and give your land to someone else.
(And no, priavate wallets wouldn’t work to protect that transaction… because what if you lose your wallet?)
Blockchain gives a protocol that allows new data sources to join and leave without any coordination while also ensuring data consistency in the data added up to the will of the majority of validators. If, for example, the validators are people, the data sources are doctors and hospitals, and the data is medical history. You can have all your medical history collected together and only accessible to you.
In a blockchain, the government is the majority of nodes. That’s who can revert fraudulent transactions. Ethereum already did this once.
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