Mire important than a notary is title insurance. Title insurance is a form of insurance that protects lenders and homebuyers from financial loss from an improper title to a property, for instance someone selling you a property they don’t own.
This is the kind of thing at first glance people say is made for the blockchain, but in reality the incumbent solution is actually pretty reasonable and the actual gains from a new system are negligible.
> the incumbent solution is actually pretty reasonable and the actual gains from a new system are negligible.
This is especially true when you learn about the nasty edge cases title insurance helps with. A lot of people trying to drum up buyers for their hashes talk like the value comes from recording the chain of transfers when you're really paying for things like handling cases where, say, a surveyor made a mistake in 1952 and now two landowners have legal ownership of overlapping properties or some mistake in probate three owners ago meant that someone has a claim on 10% of it.
Title Insurance is indeed a racket at this point. Their payouts are a tiny percentage of their overall premiums. As you mention, this seems like a good option but in fact isn't a good one.
In order to replace title insurance and make it so anybody can verify the state of a property you need to first make all liens ever live on the blockchain. That's the hard part here. If it is possible to have a lien on a home without that appearing on a blockchain then there is still a need for somebody to review the title.
Further, there is no need for decentralization! The state can simply operate a centralized append-only database where transactions are recorded and liens are created and publish that to everybody.
It is true that the price of title insurance is very small compared to the price of the house. But their expected payouts are still a smaller percentage of their premiums than other insurance.
Torrens title is the boring have a database solution. It solves messy issues like courts having to determine if a lien is valid and recording it if so by changing the DB.
This is the kind of thing at first glance people say is made for the blockchain, but in reality the incumbent solution is actually pretty reasonable and the actual gains from a new system are negligible.