> one of them only learning this after a neighbor tried to annex a chunk of his land
Property rights are messy.
How do you create a new category of mineral rights a hundred years into the blockchain?
Also: Rule change! City is changing parcel sizes by narrowing sidewalks. Another rule change! Single-family home neighborhood rezoned to multi-family; two plots are mostly (but not completely) combining to create a multi-family plot with air rights bought from the church next door. Rule change! Everything east of this line of longitude in those two towns (but not unincorported county land as of the 2009 geological survey) is now federal property per eminent domain.
Generally I think the blockchain is dumb, but I think recording property ownership would be a good usecase. Don't think about it as a highly structured database, think about it like a filing cabinet that can be accessed from the internet and anyone can contribute to the maintenance of.
> How do you create a new category of mineral rights a hundred years into the blockchain?
Same way you add a category of mineral rights now - you pass a law and you add a category name. Then you start recording documents that track those rights.
I actually think blockchain would be an interesting model for media ownership. Buying movies or other things online is sketchy because your 'property' basically gets tied up in the fortunes of a particular company. 'Buy' a movie from StreamIt.com and they go under? No more movie. I'd love to see a consortium that agrees to use a blockchain system to issue movie rights - the media companies agrees that anyone who has control of a wallet with a 'moviecoin' minted by them has the right to watch that movie. Even if all the original companies go out of buisness, new companies could keep running the network and charge smaller fees for bandwidth to stream you the movie you already own.
That might be a concern if you try to cram every possible property of the legal code into the blockchain. So maybe don't do that. But if you do, the whole thing is extensible - so it is possible. But don't.
Property rights are messy.
How do you create a new category of mineral rights a hundred years into the blockchain?
Also: Rule change! City is changing parcel sizes by narrowing sidewalks. Another rule change! Single-family home neighborhood rezoned to multi-family; two plots are mostly (but not completely) combining to create a multi-family plot with air rights bought from the church next door. Rule change! Everything east of this line of longitude in those two towns (but not unincorported county land as of the 2009 geological survey) is now federal property per eminent domain.