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> 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 distrib

> 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
  >This sounds like a technology problem for which a public blockchain is but one possible solution. I don't disagree, and "blockchain" as used sort of is misleading because at this point their are many solutions within the blockchain technologies and it is still rapidly evolving. >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? You could hold a non-complying party in jail/contempt of court for one, this happens with real world assets that do not get turned over now. But again there are implementation of blockchain solutions, where say the Company that issued shares did so on a smart contract and with a Court order they could burn half the tokens/stock in the wallet mint that same number and transfer them to the wife per the Court order.
  - atweiden 5y ago
    > You could hold a non-complying party in jail/contempt of court for one, this happens with real world assets that do not get turned over now. This doesn’t appear to resolve the issue of the blockchain reflecting a different reality than that decided by a court. > But again there are implementation of blockchain solutions, where say the Company that issued shares did so on a smart contract and with a Court order they could burn half the tokens/stock in the wallet mint that same number and transfer them to the wife per the Court order. How would this hypothetical court order be verified without the involvement of trusted third parties? Presumably judges in many places could be bribed or coerced into rubber stamping such an order. This seems ripe for abuse.
retrac 5y ago
What happens when the blockchain does not reflect the actual legal situation of ownership? For example, assuming a classic blockchain model where my property deed is given to me as a private key, and I have to sign the transaction to transfer the property, what happens when I lose the key and yet the city has expropriated my lot to build a park? This seems to require the authorities to have some kind of master key or ability to retroactively edit the blockchain. Which negates much of the security advantage of a blockchain model?
- e3bc54b2 5y ago
  I suppose the answer to that would be to treat blockchain as the record of truth. Kind of how if you have properly motorized property papers (I have no idea how this works in US), and find your land was inappropriately allocated by county without your knowledge you get to sue them, just with block chain record instead of paper.
  - rjmunro 5y ago
    But what if the key is lost? No one could update the blockchain. The property would become impossible to own.
warkdarrior 5y ago
> this could not have happened using blockchain Why couldn't this happen on blockchain? It really assumes everyone is using that same blockchain network, which is not a guarantee. Were the stock certificates released on Ethereum? On WAX? Are you sure you checked all of the networks?
tialaramex 5y ago
The "Dole" case you're talking about was not actually how you describe it. This will shock no-one who is used to "blockchain" fans trying to bamboozle them. [Edited to add: The court case that makes this happen isn't related to the share records, it's just the routine shadiness of business owners trying to pay less than something is worth, the discrepancy is noted after the court case is done when trying to reconcile the people who have proof they owned shares, and thus are entitled to a settlement versus how many shares existed] The record keeping worked exactly as intended but it isn't how people tend to imagine, and this is the difference you've tried to portray as somehow being solved by a blockchain when in fact it would not be. Specifically, those millions of "extra" shares are because of short selling. Some of the people who had good reason to believe they'd owned Dole shares, had in fact bought from short sellers who'd sold shares they didn't yet have. If Dole had not gone private, the short seller buys those shares (maybe for a lot more but they hope for a lot less) and passes them on. But it did go private, so the short seller is responsible for paying up what the private buyer agreed to pay for these shares. This part all worked, all those shareholders got their money. But the court case changes how much money they were entitled to, years later - and since the court isn't in the business of doing complicated financial paperwork it just told the businesses which implement all this it's their problem and wished them luck. Most of these owners will be huge institutions and will have an existing relationship with an equally huge broker and that relationship will have likely determined what happened next (e.g. this loss from hard-to-trace shorts isn't worth it, just give them their money in full and write it off). The blockchain could have exactly reproduced this outcome, but it would not have improved upon it at all.
elzbardico 5y ago
Brasil solves the problem of land titles with a central land ownership database feed by private local notaries under jurisdiction of the department of justice. In some remote locations there are still fraud, but because the local notaries are corrupt. Not a problem that a distributed database would solve. A blockchain only gives a certain guarantee that the records haven’t been altered, but not that the information was input correctly in the first place.
- throwaway_isms 5y ago
  It doesn't sound much different from the US, but we don't feed the local recordings to a national database (I would like that). As it is each local government can have different systems, not even all of them have digital systems yet, some are still all hard copies. So uniformity at the local levels would also be nice, or at least some minimal standards. We suffer from the same problem where nothing stops errors in the recorded documents. But most of the intentional fraud is as simple as: You own Property A and I file a Quit Claim Deed transferring Property A from You (the lawful owner) to myself. As far as I know all the local levels do require these documents to be notarized, but we too suffer from bribery or just simply corruption where a notary may either be part of the fraud or just helping a friend/family member commit the fraud. If the transfer required signature by private key it would help curb this type of fraud, but there would need to be additional safeguards and there are many other types of fraud and unintentional errors that exist. A system like Git might actually help with some of the errors as it would highlight changes from a current recording to a past records and even incorporate the official land records of the local governments.

lozaning 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
>This sounds like a technology problem for which a public blockchain is but one possible solution. I don't disagree, and "blockchain" as used sort of is misleading because at this point their are many solutions within the blockchain technologies and it is still rapidly evolving. >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? You could hold a non-complying party in jail/contempt of court for one, this happens with real world assets that do not get turned over now. But again there are implementation of blockchain solutions, where say the Company that issued shares did so on a smart contract and with a Court order they could burn half the tokens/stock in the wallet mint that same number and transfer them to the wife per the Court order.
- atweiden 5y ago
  > You could hold a non-complying party in jail/contempt of court for one, this happens with real world assets that do not get turned over now. This doesn’t appear to resolve the issue of the blockchain reflecting a different reality than that decided by a court. > But again there are implementation of blockchain solutions, where say the Company that issued shares did so on a smart contract and with a Court order they could burn half the tokens/stock in the wallet mint that same number and transfer them to the wife per the Court order. How would this hypothetical court order be verified without the involvement of trusted third parties? Presumably judges in many places could be bribed or coerced into rubber stamping such an order. This seems ripe for abuse.

retrac 5y ago

What happens when the blockchain does not reflect the actual legal situation of ownership? For example, assuming a classic blockchain model where my property deed is given to me as a private key, and I have to sign the transaction to transfer the property, what happens when I lose the key and yet the city has expropriated my lot to build a park? This seems to require the authorities to have some kind of master key or ability to retroactively edit the blockchain. Which negates much of the security advantage of a blockchain model?

e3bc54b2 5y ago
I suppose the answer to that would be to treat blockchain as the record of truth. Kind of how if you have properly motorized property papers (I have no idea how this works in US), and find your land was inappropriately allocated by county without your knowledge you get to sue them, just with block chain record instead of paper.
- rjmunro 5y ago
  But what if the key is lost? No one could update the blockchain. The property would become impossible to own.

warkdarrior 5y ago

> this could not have happened using blockchain Why couldn't this happen on blockchain? It really assumes everyone is using that same blockchain network, which is not a guarantee. Were the stock certificates released on Ethereum? On WAX? Are you sure you checked all of the networks?

tialaramex 5y ago

The "Dole" case you're talking about was not actually how you describe it. This will shock no-one who is used to "blockchain" fans trying to bamboozle them. [Edited to add: The court case that makes this happen isn't related to the share records, it's just the routine shadiness of business owners trying to pay less than something is worth, the discrepancy is noted after the court case is done when trying to reconcile the people who have proof they owned shares, and thus are entitled to a settlement versus how many shares existed] The record keeping worked exactly as intended but it isn't how people tend to imagine, and this is the difference you've tried to portray as somehow being solved by a blockchain when in fact it would not be. Specifically, those millions of "extra" shares are because of short selling. Some of the people who had good reason to believe they'd owned Dole shares, had in fact bought from short sellers who'd sold shares they didn't yet have. If Dole had not gone private, the short seller buys those shares (maybe for a lot more but they hope for a lot less) and passes them on. But it did go private, so the short seller is responsible for paying up what the private buyer agreed to pay for these shares. This part all worked, all those shareholders got their money. But the court case changes how much money they were entitled to, years later - and since the court isn't in the business of doing complicated financial paperwork it just told the businesses which implement all this it's their problem and wished them luck. Most of these owners will be huge institutions and will have an existing relationship with an equally huge broker and that relationship will have likely determined what happened next (e.g. this loss from hard-to-trace shorts isn't worth it, just give them their money in full and write it off). The blockchain could have exactly reproduced this outcome, but it would not have improved upon it at all.

elzbardico 5y ago

Brasil solves the problem of land titles with a central land ownership database feed by private local notaries under jurisdiction of the department of justice. In some remote locations there are still fraud, but because the local notaries are corrupt. Not a problem that a distributed database would solve. A blockchain only gives a certain guarantee that the records haven’t been altered, but not that the information was input correctly in the first place.

throwaway_isms 5y ago
It doesn't sound much different from the US, but we don't feed the local recordings to a national database (I would like that). As it is each local government can have different systems, not even all of them have digital systems yet, some are still all hard copies. So uniformity at the local levels would also be nice, or at least some minimal standards. We suffer from the same problem where nothing stops errors in the recorded documents. But most of the intentional fraud is as simple as: You own Property A and I file a Quit Claim Deed transferring Property A from You (the lawful owner) to myself. As far as I know all the local levels do require these documents to be notarized, but we too suffer from bribery or just simply corruption where a notary may either be part of the fraud or just helping a friend/family member commit the fraud. If the transfer required signature by private key it would help curb this type of fraud, but there would need to be additional safeguards and there are many other types of fraud and unintentional errors that exist. A system like Git might actually help with some of the errors as it would highlight changes from a current recording to a past records and even incorporate the official land records of the local governments.