This article doesn’t address the main objection I have about the practical value of cryptocurrency, namely, why I can’t take such an application, replace the distributed ledger with a SQL database, and get a solution that’s better in every way. As soon as you have a trusted central authority (monitoring and reversing payment transactions, interacting with government agencies to execute real estate transaction, etc.)…
It wouldn't be better "in every way", though. A blockchain is much more resilient; the equivalent would be to have hundreds or thousands of redundant SQL databases around the world and somehow keep them all in sync. By the time you've done that, you've very likely reinvented a blockchain, at many times the cost of just using an already-existing public blockchain. > monitoring and reversing payment transactions I disa…
What gave you this idea? If I have proof that I paid you cash for a service, and then proof you didn't provide that service, I absolutely expect to be able to reverse that transaction, via the legal system.
> A blockchain is much more resilient; the equivalent would be to have hundreds or thousands of redundant SQL databases around the world and somehow keep them all in sync.
That level of resilience is completely unnecessary and is part of why blockchain is such an extraordinarily wasteful technology.
> Local governments are fully capable of putting real estate NFTs or whatever on something like Ethereum or Cardano and publishing public keys such that people can verify their authenticity.
And who will hold these NFTs? And where will the data the NFTs sign be stored? If the government holds the NFTs, then nothing will change for you: you will have to bring the exact same kind of proof after you bought a house to the government so that they can update the blockchain record.
If they want to distribute the NFTs to the current owners of the houses, than they now need to establish an Ethereum/Cardano/[...] wallet for each person who owns a house in their district - a decade-long project in the best case, involving a level of bureaucracy to ascertain that no house NFT was incorrectly transferred to the wrong owner that will blow your mind (or, more likely, a process which will cause massive fraud and property disputes for decades to come).
And of course, the NFTs don't solve the problem of actually storing the data (physical scans of the documents that were used before the move to digital, at the very least, since the chain of ownership of each piece of property is an extremely important part of how you can settle disputes). Who will hold these records, and update them as needed? If it's still the county clerk, the problem of bureaucracy flies back in. If they want to make them part of the NFTs and store them on-chain, then minting the NFTs will be exorbitant, and it's doubtful the Ethereum blockchain would survive having the entire archives of home ownership in the USA on-chain.