No, they won't. This will turn out like every other attempt to create "NFTs for X" or "Y but on the blockchain".
Oxhead Alpha will milk the DMV until the project's funding runs out, and then it will be quietly killed. I wouldn't be surprised if the DMV's chief digital officer gets a kickback, or if they have a bunch of crypto holdings in that particular blockchain.
I don't understand. Given that titles and such are necessarily centralized databases, what's the value of using blockchain and NFTs for this? The things that the article mentions don't seem to really provide value, as they can all be done just as easily with the existing systems.
> I don’t understand. Given that titles and such are necessarily centralized databases, what’s the value of using blockchain and NFTs for this?
My guess is some executive at DMV had a resume-padding idea for migration into the private sector, and didn’t factor in how long government projects are vs. the speed at which the hype cycle turns meant that by the time this “accomplishment” was on their resume, having been involved in any kind of NFT effort would no longer be a selling point.
When someone finds a bug in the smart contract which allows me to transfer the car title to you, or the DMV loses their keys, or $whatever happens and suddenly some 13-year-old elbonian hacker owns every car in California I think "restore from yesterday's backup" is a better solution than rewriting the immutable blockchain.
And, anyway, blockchains can be altered, you just need a majority to agree. Look at eth.
As a California resident for the past several decades, I would much prefer the DMV focus on addressing the far more fundamental issues in basic service fulfillment first.
None of this makes any sense to me (seriously). A private instance of a blockchain? How’s that any different than a private server? Who’ll have access to this? Who’ll do the mining (or equivalent)? And why?
Edit: Let me just add that I know very little to nothing about blockchains.
Regular databases can be distributed across many servers.
If the blockchain is private, the DMV would have unilateral control to just roll things back if they desired. All of the public mirrors would notice that but they'd have no say in it. If the public nodes did have access the DMV wouldn't be able to control the chain (and wouldn't be able to revert mass errors/failures) and they won't let things out of their control.
How is that immutable if all the nodes connected to the blockchain are governed by the same entity? If you mean transparent, then ok, I can see it. However, my question then is, do we have an actual problem with transparency in car registry?
NFT seems to be an idea ("hopes to create") by the chief digital officer.
"The DMV worked with Oxhead Alpha and Tezos to create a private instance of the Tezos blockchain, which would increase security compared to relying on a public blockchain."
My understanding is they have a blockchain completely run by the California DMV. In the future maybe multiple states, consumer facing applications, NFTs. It's not clear if the blockchain is in active use or used as source-of-truth of title ownership yet.
Tracking physical assets with NFTs will not end well, no way (that I have seen) to ensure the ownership is in sync. I've attempted to find out more in the past, see this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29271460, but the answers were not confidence inspiring and missed the point. There are services that claim to do this, however there is no guarantee that the person selling an asset needs to mention there's an NFT associated with the ownership of it.
For a real asset to be backed by an NFT it seems your options are either to maintain physical control over the asset, or to use legal maneuvering on other claims of title to make the NFT hold value. So a painting or gold bar goes in a vault and only changes hand after the NFT is sold, and land sales become contingent on NFT transfers - and I suspect a ton of people would be incredibly surprised to hear that even contractual clauses with indefinite survival periods very rarely last forever, instead surviving only for a defined statutory period!
So under option one the NFT means the real item is worthless (and potentially not ever yours) because it is never in your actual possession, under option two it is subordinated to existing law.
A lawyer friend once jokingly said anyone drawing a contract should replace any mention of "NFT" with "magic bean" and see if the fundamentals still held: if they did, you don't need a blockchain; if they don't, the contract is already deficient.
I know NFT disgust should be an automatic reflex but chains of title are probably one of the few areas where a publicly accessible, append only, blockchain ledger is a clear win for everyone involved.
The entire purpose for a title is that you went to a large central entity with guns - the state - who will enforce your claim to property, with those guns if needed.
There are precisely zero competitors who can issue an alternate title. The state definitely uses those guns to ensure that, because not doing so is an existential threat.
There is one issuer, trusted universally. That problem is solved by a centrally maintained database, not a blockchain.
There's not one issuer. In the US there are 51 issuers of car titles alone (50 states + DC) not counting the territories. Plus while the title is signed but not registered with the new owner it's a bearer instrument. People wash titles by taking them out of state because there's no effective way of binding both title histories together.
Again though what benefits are offered by adding the complexity of a blockchain compared to simply having a shared central database? Either way to be effective you have to get all the parties involved to agree on using one system, that's the actually hard part, the technical side is trivial by comparison.
The only situations where blockchains really make sense are when you have multiple parties involved who don't trust each other AND are unwilling to agree to trust a third party. Digital currency is basically it. Almost anything else is better served by a traditional database or append-only log. Certificate Transparency provides a good example of a more efficient way to do things when you're willing to at least partially trust certain authorities.
That's the right argument for the wrong customer. The end user is supposed to trust the government to act as one - that's the point. But a government is always in a state of partial synchronization with respect to record-keeping. That's why there are delays and loopholes in the system. And the naive answer of "just trust the one database bro" immediately creates gridlock: for the number of services that government provides, all pragmatic answers instantly turn into Byzantine General negotiations: who hosts the servers, who gets access, what kind of access do they get, whomever has the most stringent uptime and disclosure requirements will push the others into adopting the same, and so on...
On the other hand, if you say "it's append-only and distributed at the top level and every agency can put what they want on top of that, add new nodes at will, etc.", you have a blockchain. It redefines the desynchronization problem in a way that narrows the scope of the technical/political crossover. Negotiations still take place, unnecessary duplication and desynchronization still happens, but basic issues around where the global source of truth "is" are no longer a factor.
I don't think the effort described is even a perfect match for the tech, but it's the kind of "wrong in the right direction" needed to move forward in studying the issue.
Nothing that can't be solved more efficiently by making the data publicly available via traditional means.
What would the blockchain be the superior choice here, since the DMV would ultimately be the only one with "write" access to the whole thing? Why would any other nodes host that blockchain if they have nothing to gain from it?
These issuers are not in an adversarial trust-free environment, also, it seems unlikely that California will convince 50 other issuers to use NFTs to issue titles.
Can this also be solved with W3C Verified Claims and ~ https://blockcerts.org/ (and an append-only, multiply distributed/synchronized/replicated/redundantly-backed-up permissioned database/Blockchain)?
And then, again, what is the TPS of the DB? How many read and write Transactions Per Second do the candidate datastores support with or without strong Consistency, Availability, and/or Partition Tolerance? And then what about cryptographic Data Integrity assurances.
FWIU, issuing shares on a Blockchain is challenging due to lost keys / shared cryptographic keys and reissuance?
"Possible" and "beneficial" are separate questions entirely.
The whole point of government is to be a central authority. That's the DMV's entire job: to be a central authority for driver's licenses and vehicle titles. Their database isn't open for everybody to modify, and it also shouldn't be. It also shouldn't be open for everybody to read, because we have a right to privacy.
What benefit does the DMV get from hosting its records on a blockchain? And what happens if that blockchain stops attracting miners? Does the DMV have to mine it? Does the price of mining rigs start to affect how much it costs to register your car? What happens if they get hit by a 51% attack?
Your average Californian is definitely not a crypto user, and doesn't have a digital wallet. One in twenty don't even speak English. What happens when somebody loses their private key? If you have to keep those keys in a conventional database, then a blockchain makes zero sense except as a money-waster.
There is nothing wrong with them just running a regular database, with normal SRE stuff like backups and replication. The California DMV has a lot of problems. But "how do we store records?" isn't one of them.
It takes patience to keep politely explaining the inadequacies of "5 people and the manager and the owner share the sole root backup credentials - which aren't cryptographic keys, so there is no way to tell whether data has been rewritten without the correct key - and tape backup responsibilities; and we have no way to verify the online database against the tape backups [so, can we write it off now]"
Oxhead Alpha will milk the DMV until the project's funding runs out, and then it will be quietly killed. I wouldn't be surprised if the DMV's chief digital officer gets a kickback, or if they have a bunch of crypto holdings in that particular blockchain.