Recently I was told by local council that the spa and the attached deck in my backyard are illegal since there is no barrier around the spa and there is no building permit for the deck according to council's record. This shocked me because both of them were not built by me, the spa was installed by ex-owner of the property while the deck was built by unknown previous owner. However, I should take the full responsibility of these 'illegal work'.
At first, I suspect there is no such regulation for barrier around spa when the spa was built, this proved to be wrong. So the spa is definitely illegal. Then I suspect the deck was built with permit but the council lost it. I remember I called local council 2 years ago for the architecture plan and engineer plan but they said it was too long time ago they cannot guarantee they still have the full document. The property was built around 1970, so it spanned a big gap from now. However, now the council insisted I should either remove the deck or certify it since they cannot see any record of building permit. I suspect they lost the document and if so they breached the law since according to Section 30 and 31 of the Building Act 1993, it is council's legal responsibility to keep all documents. I don't have solid evidence saying it is their fault, if I take legal suits, I would pay much more to lawyer. As such, I have to compromise to remove the deck.
This situation should be preventable with the assistant of blockchain technology. If we can put those documents to a distributed database system, it won't get lost. Moving further along the way, if each landlord is enforced to put photos of the property to the blockchain, while councils are enforced to upload all relevant building permit of the property to the blockchain, so that the subsequent home owners can have a clear visibility of the transaction history, the building permit, and how the evolution of the building works of the property. With all these record in the blockchain, we can trace back the responsibility to the right owner. Current law in Australia just imposes the responsibility to the present property owner, which is unfair.
Steem might be a good place to put all these information. The system should work in this way:
1. when there is a building permit application, councils are enforced to save the issued permit to the steem blockchain with a public key issued by landlord.
2. after a landlord sold the property, it is required to place all the relevant advertisement photos of the property, the purchase contract ( including the contact information of the seller and buyer ) to the steem blockchain with the public key;
3. there is a private key protected by password which can be accessible by a steem wallet. The private key is handed over by one property owner to another. Since it is protected by a password and unreadable, it is safe to hold and won't be accessible by ex-owner. This steem wallet is enforced to be handed from seller to the buyer. Once the purchaser of the property changed the password, he or she has the unique access to this private key. Public key is derived from this private key so that the property owners can use this private key to decrypt all documents relevant to the property they possessed.
4. there are no motivations for any other people to hack the private key to get access to specific property information so that we can take this as a safe system. A hacker cannot benefit from the information, neither can they destroy the system with the private key.
https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmTxA8XsNnHtUbX8239RUnaNRX2V6iSMpGPXgaYKYh36Go/image.pngPlease see full description:
https://steemit.com/teamaustralia/@chenlocus/using-steem-for-property-archive-storage-steemI am looking for anyone who feel interested in the same topic and can share more ideas.
