RE: Phil, this is Phil. It's a pleasure to meet you, Phil.
Technically, this is very easy. You could do this natively on Bitshares already (or on Nxt, or Counterparty, or Omni, or etc etc...). If you wanted to surely connect it to a Steem account, something like Pocket would be a way to go.
But you and @sirstackalot make good points: there are strong incentives not to register your coins. The game theorist in me is geeking out about the freeriding problem you'd end up with: everybody collectively benefits from the existence of a registry, but each person also has a strong individual incentive not to register. For me, the best situation imaginable is if I'm the only person who hasn't registered his coins.
So the technical challenge is deceptively difficult: how do you build a system that has the benefits of a registry without the individual disadvantages of registering? The person who solves that problem could become quite wealthy by it. :)
Oh my goodness. I guess I'll start by saying Hello to other Phil @biophil.
That's some serious high level geeking out there, I am certainly not the one to solve this riddle as it's taking all my mental faculties just to understand it...lol. The only benefit I see to this is if there is ever a problem with counterfeit rounds and confirming the authenticity of something.
It's the Wild West, you're sitting at a table in the saloon, and someone walks up and offers you a key.
This is for that homestead up the next bend in the river. I need money, how much will you give me for it?
You offer him a dollar, just in case, but you're not confident he actually owns the place.
He pulls out a deed and points to the name - Jeffrey Example.
It comes with a deed in my name, I'll sign it over to you and it's all yours. What will you give me for the key and the deed?
You offer him $10. It's a big property, and you're a bit more confident that it may be legitimately for sale, although you're still not sure. He may not even be Jeffrey Example.
Come over to the registry office with me. They'll identify me, and change the registered owner of the property from me to you, and I'll throw in the key and the deed. How much will you give me for all that?
You offer him $100, because the Titles office will only record one owner at a time, and you know this.
He may have an accurate key, and an official looking document, but there could be dozens of identical keys and documents claiming to bestow ownership over that homestead, while each property only has one owner recorded in the Titles office, and you know that's going to give you the best claim to exclusive use of the homestead.
If there wasn't a Titles office, just the deed and the key, the property would only be worth $10.
It's only worth what people will pay for it, and they'll discount their estimate substantially in the face of uncertainty.
(Even attending the homestead in person wouldn't offer definitive proof. The real owner might be away.)
Building a Titles office would therefore add a massive amount of wealth to the community, driving up the price of registered land, and even increasing the value of the remaining unregistered land.
Maybe the homesteader who lives on the unregistered land doesn't want his name in the office; but he'd be glad, when the time comes, to sell to somebody who does.
The buyer, knowing he can establish himself definitively as the first, registered owner of the land will happily pay more, knowing he'll have the option to sell for more.
We don't actually know how much the uncertainty around counterfeiting (both of coins and certificates) has depressed the value of silver coins, because there's never been a Titles office.
This is certainly becoming more interesting and I've been pondering it extensively since I read this yesterday. It does become interesting once we consider the potential growth in interest in the coins. 1500 is not very much. We now have a proof of concept perhaps we can sell 5-10k annually in following years, as interest in these coins and steemit grows and blockchain technology grows they will most definitely raise dramatically in value. It would likely be valuable for us to have a mechanism to track the coins down the line.