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Blockchains don't really work for ownership of non-digital assets. I think they can and will be incredibly useful for digital trade, but too many people are tr
by cwkoss 8y ago
Blockchains don't really work for ownership of non-digital assets.
I think they can and will be incredibly useful for digital trade, but too many people are trying to make rigid secure digital systems represent the squishy nondeterminism of analog law. Fundamentally, you can't keep an accurate ledger, because there is no interface for proving ownership of physical items.
- coralreef 8y agoThere is an interface for proving ownership of physical items. It is a centralized system, composed of courts and governments, but it works. If someone challenges your ownership of property, you bring your papers to court. The same thing could work for cryptoassets: you have a centralized, trusted system for validation of custody of assets, and then its share distribution is handled on the blockchain.
- kfarr 8y agoCryptocourt? Bitjudge?
- robbiep 8y agoIn this instance, what advantage does blockchain offer over the existing systems?
- coralreef 8y agoI guess fast, low cost transactions
- cwkoss 8y agoUsing cryptotokens as a method of recording who-owns-X-physical-thing seems useful at first glance. It would work for as long as there are no bad actors. The main issue is dealing with a 'fork'. If Person A has the private key that 'possesses' an item, but the courts say that Person B is the rightful owner (and physically transfers it to them), how do you securely fix the chain? If person A cannot or will not be compelled to transfer the cryptoasset with their private key, then the chain now has incorrect and uncorrectable information on it. If some records on your chain are not trustworthy, trust in the whole chain breaks down. The only fix is requiring a centralized backdoor, at which point you might as well just use a non-blockchain database.
- kang 8y agoBlockchains don't work for digital assets either because there is no way to 'give' anything digital i.e., ensuring sender no longer has a digital copy
- insulanus 8y agoTrue for things likes movies and songs, but you can make sure that a "bitcoin" / UTXO is transferred. So, "things" on the blockchain you are interested in can be accounted for. And that can be used in conjunction with a server-side process to give a client some benefit of server-side processing. e.g. Player A has sword "X" in their inventory.
- cwkoss 8y agoYeah, I think access rights is a big use case. Even could be useful for real-world services, assuming people are willing to trust the service provider. - Spend a cryptotoken as the cost of creating a forum account to fight spammers or malicious users. - Only stream this video to people who have signed a message with a privkey that controls a token which corresponds to the video. Use steganography to encode privkey into stream, so if they release it publicly, their access rights can be stolen. - Concert tickets that can be validated and transferred on a blockchain would also be cool, but maybe a bit heavyweight and unnecessary. Have trust when buying ticket from a scalper that it is real and valid, transfer to your own privkey so it can't be sold twice. All of this is complicated by regulatory uncertainty, though. No way that any of these are economically viable if you have to deal with AML on every transaction, and it's not clear you can transact in non-monetary cryptoassets without being liable for following money transmitter laws.
- AlexCoventry 8y agoAWS and Google Cloud are in the business of providing digital assets to customers (results of calculations.)
- decentralised 8y agoI disagree, the ERC721 standard for non-fungible assets is serves just that purpose. https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721 https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721