The main argument is a logical fallacy: just because some trust is still required doesn't mean there's no value in minimizing it.
The land registry argument is the best example of this fallacy
>the regulatory authority can make its own record and thus rewrite yours, which means that blockchain doesn’t work.
No, the value is precisely the fact that it's the regulatory authority that forcibly changes ownership, and not you. Deed fraud [1] is a serious issue. Blockchain would protect against it completely: forging a signature or a will would be impossible. Rather than a document of dubious provenance, the will's hash would be stored along with the property record.
Very likely in many cases of deed fraud the clerk changing the registry knows it's fraudulent and changes it for financial gain. That would become impossible also.
The only way to forcibly take the property would be a provide a cryptographically signed court order.
That's only for the security side of things. Tokenized real estate would make things that are currently very hard to do trivial, like using 1% of your home in country A as collateral for a rented car in country B. It's theoretically possible right now, but arranging that would require so much effort nobody does it. With a house record on the blockchain you would first tokenize it (transfer the ownership to a smart contract with tokens) and then transfer 1% of tokens to a car rental smart contract.
Same for every kind of possession. Own google stock and want to use it as collateral for X? Why not. Want to sell 1% of your rental property to an investor in another country? Easy, no paperwork needed.
Maybe it's never going to happen, but I think it's going to. The blockchain revolution would do to finance what internet did to information. Everything that's being done online was technically possible before it - theoretically, I could have written this exact post and physically mailed it to everyone who's ever going to read it.
It would be treated just like a forced transfer would be treated today, depending on the jurisdiction. Which at least in some countries means that you would lose your house if the thief managed to sell it fast enough [1][2].
The control over the house, or majority of it, could be set to require multiple signatures, or require each transfer to have a forced delay.
I agree about your first point: acknowledging only trust elimination and denying trust minimization is a simplification from my side. However, I have not seen successfull examples of "trust minimization" so far though it is always suggested in the context of blockchain. Maybe the reason is that the part on which the trust can be minimized by BC is usually not the weekest link.
I also agree that BC could prevent some percent of deed frauds. However, if you consider my argument about not decentralized example land registry BC maintenance you will agree that in many cases this may leed to a forgery, not possible in Bitcoin blockchain.
I completely disagree on a tokenization part. Unless we have a well-described and tested business model. these are more dreams and handwaving than a real use case. It is easy to say "tokenize this and that", the devil is in the detailes.
The land registry argument is the best example of this fallacy
>the regulatory authority can make its own record and thus rewrite yours, which means that blockchain doesn’t work.
No, the value is precisely the fact that it's the regulatory authority that forcibly changes ownership, and not you. Deed fraud [1] is a serious issue. Blockchain would protect against it completely: forging a signature or a will would be impossible. Rather than a document of dubious provenance, the will's hash would be stored along with the property record. Very likely in many cases of deed fraud the clerk changing the registry knows it's fraudulent and changes it for financial gain. That would become impossible also.
The only way to forcibly take the property would be a provide a cryptographically signed court order.
That's only for the security side of things. Tokenized real estate would make things that are currently very hard to do trivial, like using 1% of your home in country A as collateral for a rented car in country B. It's theoretically possible right now, but arranging that would require so much effort nobody does it. With a house record on the blockchain you would first tokenize it (transfer the ownership to a smart contract with tokens) and then transfer 1% of tokens to a car rental smart contract.
Same for every kind of possession. Own google stock and want to use it as collateral for X? Why not. Want to sell 1% of your rental property to an investor in another country? Easy, no paperwork needed.
Maybe it's never going to happen, but I think it's going to. The blockchain revolution would do to finance what internet did to information. Everything that's being done online was technically possible before it - theoretically, I could have written this exact post and physically mailed it to everyone who's ever going to read it.
[1] https://www.lifelock.com/learn-fraud-deed-fraud-losing-your-...