> You are vastly over-estimating the scale at which local government operates

Not really, they could all deploy the same DB solution, we could open source it and containerise it and give it away for free. It could be run as a managed service for a small fee. There's no need for each local government to design their own or even run their own.

Exactly the same as with a blockchain solution.

> Your argument is akin to being anti-Twitter because the local government could build a notification system just as well

My argument is not in the least bit akin to being anti-twitter. My argument is more like saying twitter is possible with multiple different back-ends, conceptually. I'm saying look, your short message service can be implemented in a bunch of different ways - in the back end it could run on a NoSQL server of some sort, or some sort of RDBMS, of which there are many, or we could probably mash something up with SQLite to get off the ground. The important thing that's addressing the need is to build a short message service.

In contrast you're there insisting that only an MSSQL system will enable twitter. But with MSSQL we get archiving for free! And with MSSQL we can just UPDATE a record and it will be changed! Huh, how about that?! Nobody else can do that!

And I'm here scratching my head and saying that's just an implementation detail, sure, it could work, there will be license fees etc, but it's not the only way, and we still need to do the rest of the work.

> If parties agree on data sharing protocols, which is something we've all been talking about forever, then the network gains value.

Yep. And those protocols are still going to have to be designed and deployed by someone, a blockchain solution doesn't magic these into existence any more than any other solution does. APIs and UIs will still have to be built. Data schemas will still have to be defined. It doesn't reduce engineering effort.

> He's literally talking about ownership rights tokenized for convenient settlement with a governance layer that can be overridden by officials.

Sure, and maybe it would work great, but that doesn't require a blockchain either, it doesn't need to be an NFT on a public blockchain to provide that low-friction experience.

Throwing 'blockchain' at a massively complex situation doesn't solve anything in and of itself. It seems to me that saying 'blockchain' allows its proponents to mentally skip to the end of the process, where the value actually comes from one of the early or middle steps.

Step 1: Figure out how to encapsulate land registry records in a simple but comprehensive way
Step 2: Make legislative changes such that these records are now the source of truth
Step 3: Expose these records in an easily digestible and transferable way

"Blockchain" is part of one of several solutions to step 3. That's literally all it is in that picture.

(edit/addendum -
> If you can't tell, I was a fan of the "semantic web" idea.

I always found that really naive, perhaps I just never understood it, but it seemed to rely on honest actors categorising their content in ways that would allow it to be retrieved, catalogued and processed correctly, then presented to users. Some of the professors at my University, Southampton, were well into it. Even back in the late 90s I was jaded enough to know that anything relying on people to be honest and not use all sorts of SEO tricks to game the system was doomed. I know there was more to it than that, and some of its ideas did filter into the modern web in various ways.)