That's not our experience. It's pretty hard to do an instantaneous transfer of very large sums of money, with atomic transactions of some complexity, using any other system we are aware of.
With all due respect, these attributes you've described are irrelevant:
- Large sums of money. Ok? Standard-issue transactional databases can transact in large numbers just fine. No problem there...
- Atomic transactions of some complexity. How does blockchain help here? It doesn't. There are other systems doing some checks, after which a transaction is committed. That very same system could just as easily use a centralized transactional database
The only advantage a blockchain has is allowing arbitrary untrusted writers to the database. Exceedingly few situations require this, and you pay a very hefty price for that feature. Acknowledging that there's an authority in your system (the legal system) means you do not need this feature of blockchains.
Transactional databases have to settle later. We do not want settling later, we want an atomic swap: cash for real estate. And we don’t want to be holding either the cash or the real estate on behalf of these third parties.
It sounds to me like you haven’t understood the way we are using an atomic transaction to execute multiple legal contracts in a single event?
Anyway, we built it, it works. If you are confident a centralised database is better, you could always build a service to do this thing that we do without all these blockchain overheads.
My understanding is the settlement to another currency is deferred, but the legal right to that settlement is established atomically, or not, according to whether the multi-party transaction is accepted by the network.
And as it is said possession is 9/10 of the law, practically that right is backed up by possession of the account key and the existence of a variety of exchanges who accept ETH.
You can of course execute multi-party transactions without a trustless distributed ledger, but in practice then you have to trust a particular intermediary with your assets. I.e. they can run away with them mid-transaction and you have things like costly legal battles, lengthy timescales and stressful burdens of proof, to recover your assets despite them being yours.
Though legal frameworks can be created to minimise the risks associated with intermediaries, legal rights in principle are a different experience from rights backed by possession of things like cash, bank balances, title deeds etc.
Possession of ETH and the property NFT in accounts you exclusively hold keys for, as well as a conveyance-encoding transaction on a widely agreed public ledger as evidence to back them up, are in a similar category to posession of bank balances and title deeds on paper or in a land registry. The common factors are their meaning is widely recognised, they are in your control already, and they behave in recognised ways. ETH you can use immediately with an ecosystem of exchanges. The property NFT along with the legalese and history that gave it meaning prior to the transaction are convincing evidence to future parties who need to know you have legal title to the property. As with all property in the real world, someone can always challenge your ownership by the courts or by fraud, but a well established NFT gives you favourable evidence, so they are unlikely to succeed and less likely to try.
