We as a society have entrusted upon the court system to sort out ownership of properties, so yes, the court can declare ownership. The court issuing a transaction is just like the court issuing a paper declaring a judgement.
The consent of everyone on the blockchain only applies to the integrity of the transaction, i.e. yes, this transaction is issued from this particular wallet. That's it. No more. No less.
Everyone on the blockchain consents that the transaction is indeed from the court's wallet, not from some random guy off the street. The court's wallet is a well known one and carries some authority. Once the question of ownership is contested again, everyone can trace it back to the court's issuing of the transaction.
So you're saying that in this distributed ledger where we proof-of-stake and proof-of-work and proof-of-doge everything, there are some agents which are more special than other and we should trust them?
Look it’s easy to nay-say. There must be something that connects the ledger to the real world and that something is going to have to be able to modify the ledger when the real world doesn’t match.
Blockchains aren’t magic and can’t just query the state of the world without the help of people in meatspace.
This is not a fixable problem. It’s just a question of who the somebody is. It’s why I think blockchain for IRL goods is pointless because whatever entity you have to trust to enforce the database constraints could just run the database without a blockchain.
The wallets are the issuers of the transactions into the blockchain. The wallets can be used as the identification and representation of the real world entities.
It's just like the court's stamp on a piece of paper carrying more weight than your and my stamps on a piece of paper.
And each transaction gets to burn the equivalent of 10 gallons of gasoline instead of an atomic logged database transaction (which could even be published and cryptographically signed cheaply).
It will certainly be better with Proof of Stake & sharding, but I was curious how bad it is today, so I looked it up. One ETH transaction consumes 86.94 kWh of energy. Wikipedia says gasoline has 8.83 kWh/l energy content, so it looks like about 10L of gasoline per transaction (not 10gal). Still, there are about 3.8L/gal, so if you factor in that heat engines are about 25% efficient, then you are right. What a crazy world we live in.
The consent of everyone on the blockchain only applies to the integrity of the transaction, i.e. yes, this transaction is issued from this particular wallet. That's it. No more. No less.
Everyone on the blockchain consents that the transaction is indeed from the court's wallet, not from some random guy off the street. The court's wallet is a well known one and carries some authority. Once the question of ownership is contested again, everyone can trace it back to the court's issuing of the transaction.