The idea that distributed, "trustless" consensus methods are needed to maintain vehicle ownership records is especially absurd when those records are ultimately needed for purposes that involve the government, whether it's the government charging vehicle registration fees or two private citizens having an ownership dispute in court. The government itself can, and presently does, maintain authoritative records itself. I guess it appeals to the sort of "person" who believes that the government is an evil entity that disregards all constitutional restraints on its power while simultaneously believing that, if he can just make the correct argument about whether the flag in the courtroom has a gold fringe on it or not, it will somehow be immediately forced into playing fair, and I don't know what to say to that. Anyway, it's clearly much safer to trust the decentralized methods over the recorder's office.

Proof of work depends on each block having a magic number, determined by brute force guessing, embedded in it that will make the SHA hash of the block have a certain number of the least-significant bits be zero. This is predicated on the idea that you need 51% of the network's computational power to substitute a different chain and reverse transactions, and that the number of "miners" is too large to ever allow that sort of cooperation. This might have been true in the beginning with CPU mining, but miners quickly formed "pools" (which might be generously thought of as a co-op and less generously as a cartel) to make payouts more regular and dependable, then use of expensive GPUs caused graphics card shortages and forced out any miner who either couldn't afford or couldn't obtain multiple graphics cards, and then expensive custom processors (first FPGAs and now ASICs) were found to outperform stock hardware. The trend has consistently been toward greater centralization and there's no reason to think it will stop, so the security argument rests on shakier and shakier ground. Also note that the miners on the Ethereum blockchain have already conspired to substitute a new chain (a "hard fork") in order to undo a massive scam transaction and cryptobros have been whistling past the graveyard ever since.

Proof of stake depends on the idea that crypto millionaires can either voluntarily freeze one of their accounts with a sufficient balance of pretend Internet money in exchange for voting rights, or else buy some sort of vote coin that grants voting rights. The chain records the number of voters and each block has to have votes from a majority of the voters to be approved. The idea is that the wealthy stakeholders have a lot invested in the chain, and that arbitrarily undoing transactions would reduce the value of the chain, so they would never abuse that power to benefit themselves at the expense of poorer users. Once you've stopped laughing, imagine the Somalian pirate meme, except it's a Bored Ape and he's saying "Look at me, I'm the Jews now."

Blockchains have been a disaster for mankind and I view it all as a sort of financial Q-Anon meant to distract idiots into a wild goose chase while Blackrock buys all the houses and the Jews loot the Treasury. (Who cares if you can't buy a house and trillions of dollars are sent to Israel, we have monkey JPEGs and Dogecoins and they're the real future!)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5604662&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310919",#48151332)