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- You owe somebody money and a court declares that you pay up and uses a legal warrant to take your car as collateral. What use is your internet token now? Th

- You owe somebody money and a court declares that you pay up and uses a legal warrant to take your car as collateral. What use is your internet token now? The problem with tokens which merely proxy ownership of something else is that this link can be undone by humans in the real world, and then the ledger does not map to reality. If you need the ledger to map to reality, you need somebody who has the authority to adjust the ledger without having every other user of the ledger sign off such modifications. Inevitably: the ledger ends up being controlled by a single authority - at which point you figure that the blockchain was actually a waste of time because the central authority could've done it cheaper with MySQL. It only makes sense that the internet token represents ownership of the token itself. If it is a proxy for ownership of something else, it is no better than a penned signature on paper. It's not the paper that is valuable, but the car. However, with Bitcoin, it is the bitcoin itself which is valuable. The bitcoin isn't a proxy for some other wealth, but the token encapsulates the wealth. Given that we have a token which can encapsulate wealth, what purpose are there for N other tokens which purport to do the same thing?

koonsolo 7y ago
This is an argument for the ownership part, but doesn't dismiss the history part. Ownership is indeed trickier, but nothing says that you have to undo previous entries, you can add a new entry tagged with the "official authority" certificate. Central authority will remain a big problem in the car industry, also because cars go over country borders all the time.
- sparkie 7y ago
  The history can be managed by having every log entry be hashed and each new entry refer to the previous hash. Each time the log is updated, the new hash is reported to the vehicle authority, which can prevent modifications to the history. No blockchain needed. Of course, this can be sidestepped by having work done on the vehicle and not updating the log. How do you prevent that?
  - koonsolo 7y ago
    Which vehicle authority are you talking about? There is no such thing as a vehicle authority. You buy the second hand car with history, not the one without.

koonsolo 7y ago

This is an argument for the ownership part, but doesn't dismiss the history part. Ownership is indeed trickier, but nothing says that you have to undo previous entries, you can add a new entry tagged with the "official authority" certificate. Central authority will remain a big problem in the car industry, also because cars go over country borders all the time.

sparkie 7y ago
The history can be managed by having every log entry be hashed and each new entry refer to the previous hash. Each time the log is updated, the new hash is reported to the vehicle authority, which can prevent modifications to the history. No blockchain needed. Of course, this can be sidestepped by having work done on the vehicle and not updating the log. How do you prevent that?
- koonsolo 7y ago
  Which vehicle authority are you talking about? There is no such thing as a vehicle authority. You buy the second hand car with history, not the one without.