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Why on earth do you want to decentralize personal belongings? I absolutely want my possessions centralized, in storage locations I own. That is the much more ob

Why on earth do you want to decentralize personal belongings? I absolutely want my possessions centralized, in storage locations I own. That is the much more obvious solution than putting personal possessions on a blockchain. If you want to store digital tokens for your kids that you can be reasonably assured will still be there when they become adults, use thumb drives. Keep them in a fireproof safe if you're really worried. Somehow, my mom has managed to keep all the videos and photos of key events in my childhood safe and intact for 40 years without having to put them on a public distributed ledger. When betamax went obsolete, she transferred to VHS. When that went away, to DVD. I really don't understand what this woman thinks she is buying. I guess this is a better storage medium for precious moments and collectibles than sending copies of everything to gmail, but so is almost any other way of storing something.

throwaway_isms 6y ago
> my mom has managed to keep all the videos and photos of key events in my childhood safe and intact for 40 years without having to put them on a public distributed ledger No offense, but in all likelihood no one is attempting to counterfeit or pirate your Mom's videos and photos of your childhood, and ownership/p2p ownership transfers are not material. There are almost infinite real world examples were ownership records are benefited by blockchain technologies over centralized services. Take property deeds, usually kept and recorded at the County level, there is almost endless fraud with people filing forged quitclaim deeds on a daily basis. That would be an example of a public record, but their are private record keeping examples such as stock certificates. Usually the "Dole" case is the most famous example, where you have a publicly traded company with all the benefits of corporate record keeping, stock trusts and banks, and centralized stock exchanges, but when the buyer went to take it private low and behold the public company with all the centralized safe guards in the world should have had a total capitalization of 36M shared but somehow had about 49M share issued, it only ended up in $150M in damages, but this could not have happened using blockchain and most agree nearly every publicly traded company likely would have the same inconsistencies.
- lozaning 6y ago
  This is a great idea until you get hit by a bus and now your private keys are gone and your family can no longer recover your estate(house and investments). Should a mechanism exist in your system wherein-by your family can reclaim ownership without your keys, means that whoever the chain says owns something clearly doesn't actually matter anyways.
  - nybble41 6y ago
    Recovery mechanisms can be implemented as smart contracts. For example, you can set up your wallet so that with Key-A can be used to transfer funds/NFTs freely, but Key-B can only transfer to a specific recovery account. Transfers from the recovery account can either be made with Key-B after a certain amount of time has passed, or immediately with Key-A. You keep Key-A, your family gets Key-B. If something happens to you they can get the assets out after a set time using Key-B. If someone tries to abuse Key-B to take the assets while you're still around you just use Key-A to transfer everything to a different account before the waiting period expires.
  - throwaway_isms 6y ago
    The unrecoverable private key is just one implementation of blockchain technology, there are various way to implement a blockchain solution to various use cases. BTW current centralized solutions to estate planning issues are not exactly that great anyway. it is not unusual for family not to know a will, insurance, pensions, and bank accounts even exist for deceased. Just look at the current unclaimed assets for deceased I think its around $2T.
    - throwaway_isms 6y ago
      A Google search shows I was way off the amount is $40-60B but I think there are additional sums not accounted for.
- atweiden 6y ago
  > Usually the "Dole" case is the most famous example, where you have a publicly traded company with all the benefits of corporate record keeping, stock trusts and banks, and centralized stock exchanges, but when the buyer went to take it private low and behold the public company with all the centralized safe guards in the world should have had a total capitalization of 36M shared but somehow had about 49M share issued, it only ended up in $150M in damages, but this could not have happened using blockchain and most agree nearly every publicly traded company likely would have the same inconsistencies. This sounds like a technology problem for which a public blockchain is but one possible solution. Surely other append-only log data structures exist which could step in to fill this void. AFAICT the main issue with crypto equities — and all other similar constructs — is what happens when a court of law overrides them. If a court says your ex owns half of the shares in $WALLET, but the blockchain doesn’t, and $COMPANY which issued the shares is also subject to the whims of the court, then what are we to do about this? OTOH maybe this rabbit hole really just never ends until courts are also somehow replaced by a public blockchain, likely at the behest of the very biased investors who stand to disproportionately profit from this game.

throwaway_isms 6y ago

> my mom has managed to keep all the videos and photos of key events in my childhood safe and intact for 40 years without having to put them on a public distributed ledger No offense, but in all likelihood no one is attempting to counterfeit or pirate your Mom's videos and photos of your childhood, and ownership/p2p ownership transfers are not material. There are almost infinite real world examples were ownership records are benefited by blockchain technologies over centralized services. Take property deeds, usually kept and recorded at the County level, there is almost endless fraud with people filing forged quitclaim deeds on a daily basis. That would be an example of a public record, but their are private record keeping examples such as stock certificates. Usually the "Dole" case is the most famous example, where you have a publicly traded company with all the benefits of corporate record keeping, stock trusts and banks, and centralized stock exchanges, but when the buyer went to take it private low and behold the public company with all the centralized safe guards in the world should have had a total capitalization of 36M shared but somehow had about 49M share issued, it only ended up in $150M in damages, but this could not have happened using blockchain and most agree nearly every publicly traded company likely would have the same inconsistencies.

lozaning 6y ago
This is a great idea until you get hit by a bus and now your private keys are gone and your family can no longer recover your estate(house and investments). Should a mechanism exist in your system wherein-by your family can reclaim ownership without your keys, means that whoever the chain says owns something clearly doesn't actually matter anyways.
- nybble41 6y ago
  Recovery mechanisms can be implemented as smart contracts. For example, you can set up your wallet so that with Key-A can be used to transfer funds/NFTs freely, but Key-B can only transfer to a specific recovery account. Transfers from the recovery account can either be made with Key-B after a certain amount of time has passed, or immediately with Key-A. You keep Key-A, your family gets Key-B. If something happens to you they can get the assets out after a set time using Key-B. If someone tries to abuse Key-B to take the assets while you're still around you just use Key-A to transfer everything to a different account before the waiting period expires.
- throwaway_isms 6y ago
  The unrecoverable private key is just one implementation of blockchain technology, there are various way to implement a blockchain solution to various use cases. BTW current centralized solutions to estate planning issues are not exactly that great anyway. it is not unusual for family not to know a will, insurance, pensions, and bank accounts even exist for deceased. Just look at the current unclaimed assets for deceased I think its around $2T.
  - throwaway_isms 6y ago
    A Google search shows I was way off the amount is $40-60B but I think there are additional sums not accounted for.
atweiden 6y ago
> Usually the "Dole" case is the most famous example, where you have a publicly traded company with all the benefits of corporate record keeping, stock trusts and banks, and centralized stock exchanges, but when the buyer went to take it private low and behold the public company with all the centralized safe guards in the world should have had a total capitalization of 36M shared but somehow had about 49M share issued, it only ended up in $150M in damages, but this could not have happened using blockchain and most agree nearly every publicly traded company likely would have the same inconsistencies. This sounds like a technology problem for which a public blockchain is but one possible solution. Surely other append-only log data structures exist which could step in to fill this void. AFAICT the main issue with crypto equities — and all other similar constructs — is what happens when a court of law overrides them. If a court says your ex owns half of the shares in $WALLET, but the blockchain doesn’t, and $COMPANY which issued the shares is also subject to the whims of the court, then what are we to do about this? OTOH maybe this rabbit hole really just never ends until courts are also somehow replaced by a public blockchain, likely at the behest of the very biased investors who stand to disproportionately profit from this game.