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In some Wyoming counties, land registry documents are still in paper form, deposited in pewter cabinets and military green in county courts. The Wyoming Littering Transaction Log is being phased into computer databases by county employees to more easily track and search for land ownership.
But, in a single case, those records could be further moved into the digital era with blockchain.
Doctors Land Governance, a subsidiary of Overstock.com focused on land management, has signed an agreement with Teton County to create a record-based record-keeping system.
The Teton County Chancellor's Office will continue to track the way it currently does on paper and on a computer database. But the company will use Teton data to build a pilot platform to track and verify these records.
"From my point of view, this is the wave of the future," said Teton County employee Sherry Daigle, comparing blockchain records and keeping them now to the outdated mail servers that precede Google. "I do not know how quickly that future will happen, I do not know how complicated this is, but the idea behind it is to make the logs more transparent."
Blockchain was an order word in the Wyoming legislature at the start of the year, and emerging technology has wiped out more than one cowboy in the state from, a blockchain marriage and cattle records in the north -est of Wyoming to potential banking statutory changes to allow blockchain companies to do business in Wyoming can not get anywhere else.
Blockchain also has its fair share of critics and skeptics.
Technology has a bit of a bad reputation, linked to wicked players and fast-paced schemes. Its most famous iteration is the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, known largely, and not completely unfairly, as Internet money generated by people running to create new coins through a series of computers installed in their garages or basements.
But basically, supporters argue, the blockchain is a turning point for information security in the digital age and its potential uses are endless.
Blockchain is a digital ledger book, or rather thousands of books of identical records hosted in computers throughout the system. Any transaction must be verified as legitimate simultaneously by hundreds or thousands of master books.
Once verified, the books are updated through the whole system. So rather than an entity that controls what is entered on that list and what is deleted, such as employees of a bank or the office of a county office, the system is distributed, adding levels of verification difficult to fake or modify.
At this time a government document is verified by the signature of an official, such as a county clerk. What Blockchain does is to put a digital signature on record – one whose truthfulness is traced and maintained through the blockchain.
"Of course blockchain has this mystique around it, and it's actually just a high-end registry system," said Senator Ogden Driskill, R-Devil's Tower.
Driskill is the co-president of the Wyoming Blockchain Task Force, the group that is pushing for Wyoming to open its arms to the blockchain companies before it is beaten by other states.
For Driskill, Wyoming's blockchain approach should be an example of how the state diversifies its economy and brings new business. Decades of work and millions of public funds went to solve that worrying challenge, but the state failed to strengthen its economy compared to its neighboring states, he said.
"On paper we have the best business environment," he said of Wyoming's political and economic benefits to businesses, such as low taxes. "This tells me that maybe we won the card game … In reality we are not testing".
Blockchain is emerging and growing. If Wyoming can take advantage of that game, then it is learning how to attract businesses by finding out which industries they are facing and eliminating the obstacles found in Wyoming, he said.
The pilot program for land registration in Teton County is just the beginning of record keeping that could benefit from the blockchain in the state, he said. A more difficult task of tracing the history of Wyoming's dirt ownership is to trace the registers of what lies beneath it: the minerals.
"As you move into minerals, blockchain becomes absolutely critical," Driskill said. "People spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars to research mineral actions."
Driskill has not proposed a specific invoice regarding mineral records and blockchain. The idea is that which emerged from the numerous meetings of the legislators with companies such as the Governance of the Medici lands.
The move to the blockchain could compromise or stop, said Driskill. Take the change of ore or earth, he said. It would reduce the important revenue the counties receive for records and revenue for the security companies created to track and distribute such paid data.
"There are some really nice things with this," said Blockchain's Driskill. "There are some difficult questions with it."
Teton has already placed his land registry documents dating back to 1996 – when the county started using a state identification number rather than a descriptor to trace parcels – on a computer database. For that county, the chain of blocks is the logical next step.
"I think we should look at it with caution," said Daigle, the county clerk, about the chaos surrounding the blockchain. "That's why we're making this project as a sort of backup of my processes now, so if it fails – which I hope will not fail – I have plan B going."
Follow the energy reporter Heather Richards on Twitter @hroxaner
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