20 ms·

Real world ownership is not a use case for blockchain

251 points by leifg 5y ago

anticristi 5y ago
Interesting read, but I can easily come up with way more complicated scenarios. Imagine inheriting the house of your dying relative who forgot to unlock the key. Or needing to split the inheritance with your siblings ... according to local law. Leaving Blockchain aside, it would be cool if clearing house, such as Euroclear, would record -- but not decide -- ownership of non-financial assets too. Think houses, cars, bikes, artwork, everything!
oblio 5y ago
I'm super curious what we'll be left with once this is done and dusted, in 10 years or so. My guess? Something as boring and generally avoided as CORBA.
- asjdflakjsdf 5y ago
  I'd imagine the default world currency will have a dog on it by then
  - oblio 5y ago
    I'm not sure a world where 60% (was it more?) of the currency ever created in the history of mankind has been created in the last year is the best benchmark for what's hype and what's not. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, but it can't stay irrational longer than the real world forces allow it to. Everything that goes up must come down.
pstuart 5y ago
I worked for a non-ICO blockchain company (no longer in business). We used Hyperledger Fabric for our offering and after leaving the company was informed that AWS was hosting Fabric and if I could develop anything to leverage that I'd have their support. And after some contemplation, could not come up with a compelling pitch for a blockchain solution -- a pity because I liked Fabric and would have been happy to take it to the cloud.
- wpietri 5y ago
  Exactly. This makes me think of a funnel. Into the top, you pour all of the people interested in maybe using a blockchain. A lot of sober evaluators of technology exit the funnel for the same reason: blockchains don't provide much advantage for most real-world projects. That means further down the funnel you end up with a lot of people who for whatever reason miss or ignore that. I remember a meeting with a would-be entrepreneur whose product was "reporting sexual harassment in the the workplace but with blockchain". When I asked what "blockchain" brought to the project, they said it brought security. When I asked how users would see that, the answer was basically that users would just have to take the company's word for it. I explained that if that was the case, they didn't have an advantage over competitors. The entrepreneur did not like that one bit, and that was basically the end of the meeting. n
- leifg 5y ago
  Not to mention that most blockchain enthusiasts don’t even consider Hyperledger a blockchain (it’s not public).
  - pstuart 5y ago
    Meh. It's a private blockchain and the general principles stand. The company I worked for was so incompetent that they wanted to have customers access the data directly through their APIs, and that the blockchain entities were all the same -- effectively making it a really slow and expensive K/V store. I should write up the story of my time there -- it was insane. When I came aboard their system was a MySQL frontend with a ton of code to replicate it to the chain (because they couldn't figure out how to get more than one transaction per second, which was because they had no idea how Fabric actually worked).
ww520 5y ago
Blockchain provides a public ledger to trace the linage of transactions. It doesn't enforce ownership. The legal system enforces the ownership. Blockchain just makes the court's job easier. With blockchain, we can know that Mona Lisa is illegally transferred to the corrupted official, and know who that is.
- jcrawfordor 5y ago
  Wouldn't this only ever be true if we enforced some sort of blockchain-based Torrens title, though? Otherwise it will always become a matter of title research, and at that point I struggle to imagine how a blockchain is more useful than a conventional recorded deed.
  - ww520 5y ago
    Speed and cost. It takes time and money to register and maintain the title records. Searching takes time and money. Blockchain just lowers that, supposedly, if they can lower the cost of mining.
    - SahAssar 5y ago
      Is there any proof that a blockchain is (or can be) more efficient than a normal database? Seems like every blockchain I've heard about wastes a lot of energy and time to try to make stuff securely decentralized and if we are going to have special authorities anyway the least secure part will be their keys/access to the chain and the decentralized part isn't really true anymore.
    - jcrawfordor 5y ago
      But many (most?) counties have already digitized recorded deeds, at least by index... so it's just a matter of logging into the clerk's system and searching for the situs address or APN or whatever's handy and you get the deed history, out of a good old fashioned relational database. How does blockchain improve on that?
    - deleted 5y ago
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ahelwer 5y ago
This has always been obvious to anyone who spent the smallest amount of time working in consumer retail. Customer comes in and wants to buy a patio set they saw in the catalog. You check the database - says there are two in the back. You go to the back. You look for like ten minutes. Patio set is nowhere to be found. Customer has left in frustration by the time you return. The hard problem has never been the specific form of database used to store info about the real world. The hard problem has always - and will always - be enforcing the correspondence between what's in the database and what's in the real world. This problem couldn't be solved at a single store in a single fairly small city. It's not gonna be solved worldwide.
- nikanj 5y ago
  Easy! Let's just make sure the people who stole the two patio sets update the blockchain. I mean, people who steal / ransom / hack bitcoin still update the blockchain, so criminals clearly can follow the rules
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > make sure the people who stole the two patio sets It probably isn’t stolen. It’s more likely delivered to another store, still on the truck, still at the factory, or was sold and not recorded.
    - zarq 5y ago
      Or someone has it on their cart on the way to the checkout.
      - nucleardog 5y ago
        Or someone had it on their cart on the way to the checkout, changed their mind, and somehow managed to cram it in a freezer behind some milk or something.
        barkingcat 5y ago
tantaman 5y ago
Except real estate. Someone can already come with a made up deed and say they own your house. Blockchain would make this much more secure than it is today.
- oblio 5y ago
  How does this work with privacy, though? Would you be able to see all the properties someone owns?
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > Would you be able to see all the properties someone owns? Property records are public in most jurisdictions.
  - crysin 5y ago
    You kind of already can, at least in the US. Property ownership is public record and so are the property taxes individuals pay.
  - wombat-man 5y ago
    that's how it works in my city. If you want, you can incorporate a company and buy the property through that though.
    - bena 5y ago
      Still traceable though. I had a friend who did that and his name was still got attached to his physical address.
      - wombat-man 5y ago
        hm, maybe. I can't find my landlord's name attached to the building I owned. But his name is associated with the company which owns it. My old boss also would buy property through LLCs, so if I looked up his address he would not be associated with it. I was not able to link him to the company because the LLC didn't actually transact any business aside from holding this property. But maybe I just don't know where to look.
seibelj 5y ago
Furious masturbation on HN today as crypto prices drop to what they were... 3 months ago. Let’s not write the whole industry off quite yet!
cheph 5y ago
And at this point, people pushing blockchain for representing real world ownership is either scamming you or stupid.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  Why not both?
endisneigh 5y ago
Serious question: How is blockchain superior than me just creating a git repository on GitHub called "allmoney" and just setting it up such that a commit represents a transaction and the log represents the ledger? I also don't see how block chains or smart contracts can override reality. Let's say you buy a house using a smart contract, and someone, in real life, comes to you with a gun and says give me your wallet and transfer it to me, or you die. Are we supposed to just accept that? If not, what mechanism will undo the crime and restore the house back to the [rightful] owner? it just all seems dumb, imo - technology cannot exist in a vacuum, ever.
- asjdflakjsdf 5y ago
  well one reason is that you (or github) would be the owner of that ledger. And we would have to put all of our trust in you
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    is that a problem, though? all participants could clone the repo. it would be trivial to see if GitHub or I tampered with the ledger.
    - dumbfoundded 5y ago
      Yeah so like you've just rediscovered proof of work. If a bunch of people clone it, who can say which repo is the real repo? Well you burn a bunch of electricity in a provable way to vote for a repo. The repo with the most burned electricity is the real repo.
      - endisneigh 5y ago
        > Yeah so like you've just rediscovered proof of work. If a bunch of people clone it, who can say which repo is the real repo? Well you burn a bunch of electricity in a provable way to vote for a repo. The repo with the most burned electricity is the real repo. what? no, the original repo is the real repo. my point is, is that the transparency makes it impossible for you to not trust me/GitHub. why wouldn't you trust? you can see nothing was altered yourself - and if it is altered, the issue isn't trust anymore, I've simply committed fraud and you can use the existing legal system to punish me. this is the same reason you would trust open source software installed on your machine, said machine that presumably has access to your environment/browser/etc which could contain a virus to take your existing fiat money today.
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Marsupiall 5y ago
It's been more than 10 years now. Crypto isn't going to replace financial institutions. It's naive to think that a New World Order will come where banks don't exist and we're all happy trading in bitcoin Over 10 years and NO real life use yet. None.
- knorker 5y ago
  Well that's not true. It's great for crime such as ransomware.
- jerry1979 5y ago
  I have heard of unbanked refugees fleeing with crypto and using it to make a new life.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  DeFi, almost exclusively on Ethereum, grew from $1 billion to $60 billion in the total value of assets locked, in one year: https://defipulse.com/ https://defipulse.com/
the_snooze 5y ago
The title can afford to drop a few words and still be accurate: > No Real Use Case for Blockchain
- hanniabu 5y ago
  Wow so smart and clever
cblconfederate 5y ago
Kind of a strawman. AFAIK most NFTs are actual digital assets which can be copied, and in general people are not claiming that blockchain is magically going to enforce itself. BUT, blockchains may replace Patreon and the like, by offering the satisfaction of connection to art, and the ability to prove it.
- armoredkitten 5y ago
  The article is not talking about NFTs, it's talking about the use of blockchain for tracking real, physical goods. Some of it may also be relevant for discussing NFTs. But the article is not about NFTs.
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    NFTs were originally called deeds. They were designed for this exact use case.
apples_oranges 5y ago
Let's say it were. Ooops, key stolen, item transferred, no rollback, etc etc.
pydry 5y ago
>Think of this scenario. The French government has a top notch security protocol in place to secure the private key to the ownership of the Mona Lisa. But we have a change of government and some high ranking government official gets corrupted. They have access to the keys and he uses them to transfer the Mona Lisa to one of his rich buddies Joe Shmoe. A "top notch security protocol" would require more than one official to sign off on the transfer precisely because this particular attack is so easily anticipated. A blockchain for asserting ownership of the mona lisa would be largely ceremonial anyway - a bit like the land title deeds for the French Parliament. That doesn't mean that, like the deeds, it won't some day exist, but it will, like the deeds, not really mean anything. The "true owner" will forever be whomever has a monopoly on violence in France. His assertion that a database is just as good for recording ownership, I think, misunderstands what blockchain is good at - distributing trust (everybody runs the database), rather than centralizing it (one party runs the database). This isn't a theoretical concern, either. I see the blockchain as a tool to prevent the MERS debacle, where a group of banks decided to come together and tried to make their privately run centralized database of mortgage titles into, quite literally, law (if you're in our database, we can foreclose on your house): https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/01/mers-the-law-and-the-state.html https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/01/mers-the-law-and-the... This gambit worked in a lower court but, IIRC failed in the supreme court, but it created an almighty paperwork headache.
rushabh 5y ago
Blockchains are slowly becoming a pseudoscience. People spout a bunch of jargon and crypto math but have no idea how anything is connected to the real world. Most of the fraud that exists out there is due to social hacking. There is no real problem a blockchain solves. The surprising thing is how many people are falling for it.
- arberx 5y ago
  They solve the problem of centralized trust.
  - oblio 5y ago
    Yeah, but property is also enforcement. That's trust. Centralized trust.
  - wittyusername 5y ago
    He said "real problem" so..yeah
    - arberx 5y ago
      Byzantine fault tolerance is definitely a real problem.
      - vkou 5y ago
        For whom? Folks at Google, Facebook, and Amazon that are building distributed databases aren't re-writing their backends to use blockchains, for obvious reasons. As for people who aren't building general-purpose distributed databases, a solution to the Byzantine generals problem is more of a solution to a problem that they don't have - as other posts in this thread demonstrate.
    - noofen 5y ago
      Both can be true: 1) The original BTC paper was a huge breakthrough in decentralized systems. 2) Most "blockchain" projects today are merely elaborate Ponzis.
throwaway4good 5y ago
A central land register or a written title of ownership doesn’t absolve the need for a court system to settle disputes or enforce laws. Those things can still be useful, though.
- skybrian 5y ago
  It seems like a basic principle is that the court needs to be able to order the land registry to be changed? A blockchain that allows court orders to work might as well be a centralized database controlled by the court system. Merkle trees are still useful, though. Compare with certificate transparency for DNS.
DebtDeflation 5y ago
The last sentence in the article: >"All in all: when your source of truth is the legal system, there is absolutely no point for a blockchain and you might as well record ownership in a database." Could be generalized a lot further than the author seems to imagine. For 99.999% of proposed blockchain use cases you absolutely would be better off just using a database.
chowndown 5y ago
Remember those IBM commercials talking about blockchain for coffee supply chains? What prevents the Colombian farmer from putting whatever beans they want in the bag?
dehrmann 5y ago
Essentially, possession is nine-tenths of the law, and controlling a cryptographic token is unlikely to change that.
he0001 5y ago
If you have a blockchain like that wouldn’t you be able to rewrite the blockchain if you are the only one with the access? Isn’t the idea that that there should be enough others so you can’t rewrite it? AFICT this is what happens when you fork a chain?
erivlis 5y ago
This is nonsense. What he describes is not a oroblem with the Blockchain but a problem with the security of the "wallet" of keys. That is a basic issue with any system that has security. If someone gets the "keys" (password, access etc. ) he can whatever he want. The solution make the "locking mechanism" more complex. Add additional / multiple keys. Methodolgies to secure system are all ready used. Wgat blockchain adds is a datastore that is more tamper proof (while adtionaly adding decentralization and fault tolerance using consensus mecahniam). Any system can have vulnerabilities. Blockchain-like technologies may have the potential abilty to reduce and/or eliminate some of them.
- dalbasal 5y ago
  No. The security issues is an arbitrary example. The actual problem is that when a disagreement between the legal system and the database, whether or not its blockchain. Courts are the source of truth concerning ownership. The legal system needs the ability to overrule or edit the db, otherwise the blockchain is inaccurate. You can think of "security problem" as an armed robber forcing you to reveal your password. With Bitcoin, they now have the coins and there's no going back. It doesn't matter that a court doesn't consider the robber to be the owner. Bitcoin doesn't represent anything outside of the blockchain. With a painting, stock or deed, something outside of blockchain needs to honour your blockchain claim. If the blockchain is unreliable, they won't, and it no longer reflects true ownership. If your blockchain isn't the fundamental source of truth, there's really no point. Instead of a centralised db, you have centralised control over a distributed DB.
- knowaveragejoe 5y ago
  The other problem he's circling around is how you remediate a worst-case scenario of theft, losing the keys, etc. For the layperson there's not much they can do right now, but there is a lot of thought being put into the issue.
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bronzeage 5y ago
Crypto anarchism (the movement to move all the trust to crypto and leave nothing to the government) is suffering from Dunning-Kruger effect in their understand of the legal system, it's purpose and nuances and generally the fact that the real world has to base its law system around humans interpreting the law because there are simply no better solutions, and the legal system came where it is after years and years of evolution and if simple inflexible rules would be a viable solution you wouldn't need a legal system. It's the same flawed logic that usually opposes government access to communications, even with warrants, as if they are something sacred (while the government can literally jail you up if you break the law, even freedom isn't sacred, and it's much more vital than communications). You need to respect the rule of law and the fact that there are simply no better solutions than the legal system - it is just like decades old code that has been refined to deal with all the nuances of the real world.
chrischattin 5y ago
The killer app for blockchain is, and always has been, a currency. Immutability/trustlessness has a use outside of money, but we're just starting to scratch the surface. Most of the ideas I've seen could be executed better with a standard database or are still subject to garbage in garbage out. The stuff that's truly new and novel is in the exploratory stages. Unrelated, it feels like there's a coordinated propaganda campaign against crypto going on right now. Many of the comments here, and in other threads, are repeats of emotional talking points that don't really make sense when you think it through. My guess is institutions are looking for or trying to create a buying opportunity. Is that ETF about to be approved or something? /tinfoil
dalbasal 5y ago
So... The explosion of cryptocurrencies/blockchain and the sudden demise of monetarism (overstatement, but YKWIM) is clarifying a lot about what money & sovereignty are. A property registrar, stock exchange or currency that isn't subject to state control, isn't really those things... it seems. Nice concise summary of the problem.
uberdru 5y ago
True, but consensus on real-world ownership is a great use case for blockchain.
- leifg 5y ago
  Consensus on what? The last time I checked we don’t have a democratic process for private ownership.
- knorker 5y ago
  Why? Courts don't rule by consensus.
dcolkitt 5y ago
American law allows for a very wide range of legal trusts. Courts will generally enforce any legal entity that the grantor chooses to structure. It's easy enough to setup the DAO as a formal legal trust that grants ownership rights to whoever can demonstrate ownership of an NFT. Some people might ask what the point is. After all, you're still relying on a fair and enforceable court system at a base layer. That's true, but it allows you to abstract away all the other complexities from higher layers in the financial system. For example the cost of transferring title on land tends to be fairly high. You have stamp tax, title insurance, lawyers to review the contract, etc. With a DAO as the nominal owner, selling property simply becomes a matter of executing a smart contract transaction on the blockchain. From there, you can imagine increasingly complex structures built entirely in the blockchain. A mortgage based smart contract can allow for a specific owner, but transfer the property to the creditor once the payment is missed. Mortgage underwriters can pool their blockchain based loans into pooled securities, and sell CDO-like products as smart contracts. This allows investors to completely bypass all the financial regulations and restrictions that exist on subprime mortgages. It also cuts out an enormous amount of the legal, settlement, and due diligence costs associated with the creation of these securities. Everything's executed atomically and autonomously through smart contracts. The point is you can use a mix-and-match hybrid model, where some layers are secured through fiat law while other layers are secured through crypto law.
- skywhopper 5y ago
  There’s a reason for all those legal, settlement, due diligence costs, and regulations. Finding ways around monetary regulations is called “money laundering” and “fraud” and it’s already illegal. So I wouldn’t recommend pursuing this path.
  - dcolkitt 5y ago
    That's not really true at all. There are entire divisions at investment banking firms called "delta-one" desks. They exist solely for the purpose of creating synthetic equity positions to avoid regulatory, tax, capital, settlement rules on cash equities. I can easily sell you a "total return swap" in lieu of shares, which bypasses all kinds of existing rules. Fraud and money laundering are very narrowly defined, and require mens rea. If simply structuring alternative financial vehicles constituted fraud, then nearly all of Wall Street would be in jail.
simonw 5y ago
Shorter version: if real estate is on the blockchain, and you guess my password or threaten me with a crowbar until I give it to you, do you get to keep my house?
chrisbrandow 5y ago
Even the examples of people forgetting their crypto password and not being able to sell their asset is an example of this. That is completely dysfunctional.
- pelasaco 5y ago
  well, having a process around multi signature would mostly solve it. The blockchain alone won't solve any problem. Blockchain + process may improve some processes. Last time that I checked, Brazil was/is using blockchain quite successfully to authenticate official documentations, but they still request ID validation before operations. Just the signature and registration that the operation happened, are stored in the blockchain. In their use-case, nobody will steal your wallet and transfer the asset, but in another hand it helps to take paperwork out of their way.
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munificent 5y ago
A tenet of sociology is that reality is socially constructed. Since HN is populated with literalists, I will clarify here that this obviously does not mean that all aspects of reality are created by consensus. The Earth will not unroll and flatten itself out given a sufficient number of Flat Earthers. By "reality", they mean that a suprisingly large subset of what we consider "the world" is actually human level authored truth. Some examples: * Janet is a police officer. * Dave is a criminal. * France owns the Mona Lisa. * France is a country. * Idaho is not a country. * Lance Armstrong is a cyclist. * Bats are not birds. * You can buy a car for $20,000. In all of these examples, the fundamental process that determines the truth or falsehood of those statements is consensus. I can hear you already. "If you don't get a paycheck from the city, you aren't a cop." "You aren't a criminal unless you are convicted by the legal system." "The Mona Lisa is literally in the Louvre." "Bats are mammals, in order chiroptera. All birds are in class aves." "If I give someone the money, I will literally have a car that I can drive around." For literal-minded folks like us, the idea that key properties of what we consider cold hard objective reality is in fact just squishy agreement can be unsettling. Hell, half of us got into computers specifically to avoid hand-wavey subjectivism. But it's true. If you root cause any of those statements, you will eventually bottom out on "some people agree on it". There is no ground truth below human consensus on any of these and many many many more critical, tangible facets of our lives. Tech folks will spend a truly Herculean effort to avoid this uncomfortable reality. They really really want things to feel solid. I look at the entire blockchain enterprise as essentially that. A boondoggle to try to subtract the humans out of human-constructed reality. But as this article shows, it is always doomed to failure. If you want your tech to actually do anything, then it has to interact with humans. And those humans will only choose to act in accordance with your tech if they believe the reality that it claims. Which means ultimately it is their belief that defines what the blockchain means, and not vice versa. Consent is always at the bottom.
- 13rac1 5y ago
  > For literal-minded folks like us, the idea that key properties of what we consider cold hard objective reality is in fact just squishy agreement can be unsettling. Hell, half of us got into computers specifically to avoid hand-wavey subjectivism. Objective reality begins to falter even before leaving computing. For example: values for binary ones and zeros are hand-wavey down in the hardware voltage level. People believe it is as simple as: 5V is one and 0V is zero. In reality, (5V TTL logic levels) voltages above 2.7V are high/one and below 0.8V are low/zero. Details: https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/logic-levels/all https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/logic-levels/all
spullara 5y ago
Without some strong, potentially violent, entity enforcing property rights there are no property rights.
billytetrud 5y ago
It should be entirely possible to have a block chain system where every record is basically a multisig address where the source of truth holds enough keys to override. What would the point of that be vs a central database? Well they don't have to be different. A blockchain doesn't need to be decentralized. However, it does provide a very clear and secure record of who did what. It would certainly make sense to have a very redundant set of copies of that blockchain, perhaps with the pubic being given the option to participate. But a blockchain construction could simply make it very secure and clear what records have been changed and by who. This way, in the Mona Lisa case, a court system would decide to take possession back, and they would pull out their government keys out to record that. There are lots of constructions that could be useful there.
- leifg 5y ago
  > A blockchain doesn't need to be decentralized If it's not decentralized it's usually referred to as a "permissioned blockchain" which purists don't consider a "real blockchain" and at this point where "blockchain" becomes a marketing term. But leaving that aside. What bothers me is the implication that only a blockchain implementation can provide sufficient transparacy. There are a million different ways to increase transparency within a computer system: - audit logs - access logs - offside backups - paper copies - distributing data amongst a set of trusted but independent parties - you could even enforce cryptographic signatures on all changes But most importantly: policy If you are losing your job (and get sued) because you changed data in the production database without authorization most people are less likely to do it. And in today's world it's really hard not to cover your tracks. The idea that we need to be 100x safer than that is just absurd.
  - billytetrud 5y ago
    > purists don't consider a "real blockchain" Sure. At that point its semantics, but fair. I certainly wouldn't recommend a proof of work blockchain with hundreds of thousands of nodes for this. A federated blockchain would be ideal for a situation where the final source of truth is a centralized system. > the implication that only a blockchain implementation can provide sufficient transparacy I don't think anything I said implies that. I certainly didn't intend to imply that. Certainly there are other secure solutions, however I'm saying that a blockchain is a pretty well understood solution that should work. > If you are losing your job (and get sued) because you changed data in the production database without authorization most people are less likely to do it. I think people are looking for better solutions than "most people don't screw up the system". > The idea that we need to be 100x safer than that is just absurd. Again, not something I said at all. But if there's a solution that's 100x safer and no more costly (in fact maybe even cheaper), why not do it?
diego_moita 5y ago
This reminds me the idea of using the blockchain to implement land registry in Bolivia, Peru and Paraguay. Some Swedish startup came with this idea, I guess. But if the legal authorities there aren't reliable/competent enough to implement a land registry why would they be reliable to enforce a blockchain-based registry? - "This blockchain says this land is mine!" - "This gun says get the f**k out and that police officer I bribed agrees with my gun".
- knorker 5y ago
  And what if the blockchain and government disagree? Does the blockchain have a police force?
lallysingh 5y ago
Wait, the distributed ledger isn't an appropriate use case when you have a single separate over-ruling authority?? Or it's a bad question with a useless answer.
famil 5y ago
What is the use case of blockchain besides evasion of law enforcement and speculation?
kwdc 5y ago
I don't agree. The article misunderstands a potentially useful aspect of blockchains, physical assets and the legal system. The blockchain is a linked list of immutable data. But this doesn't mean the legal system is prevented from taking action. Lets say that the matter of ownership goes to court but events leading up to that mean the private key has been destroyed. The asset is still owned and is sitting in a gallery or lockup. The naive now think "who holds the now-lost key owns the painting but now the key is lost no one owns it". Wrong. The matter is brought to court and the potential list of owners can be determined from the blockchain itself. The court can then confirm using that record the ownership by going back into the blockchain, finding and determining who is the legitimate owner and then order the creation of a new blockchain asset item[1]. Failing to assert ownership in court might even work against you. Then the new blockchain asset is linked to the old. The old block chain item doesn't even need to be updated or deleted. Even if you could. Why? It still provides valuable history. Blockchains recording ownership of assets is a benefit to the court system. Except for keys to lost cryptocurrency wallets. That's likely always going to be a dead end. But that is no different to burning cash[2] or losing gold because you buried it near a beach. [1] a new blockchain tracking item. Not a new Mona Lisa. [2] except that cryptos once destroyed or lost usually can't be replaced.
- jjulius 5y ago
  >The court can then confirm using that record the ownership by going back into the blockchain, finding and determining who is the legitimate owner and then order the creation of a new asset. - What if the legitimate owner (according to the blockchain) is dead? - What if the last "legitimate owner" in the blockchain decided to give the item to someone else and never updated the blockchain? And if they can't be located to confirm as much? - How does a court order the recreation of an asset such as the Mona Lisa, whose value lies in its history, how complicated it would've been to have painted it when it was painted, and the fact that the painter is certainly not alive to create a new one?
  - kwdc 5y ago
    Present in court. The descendant as proxy isn’t a new concept. Failing to update the blockchain means the sale didn't go through. You can't assert ownership via a blockchain then believe failing to update the blockchain is acceptable. The buyer has records of transfer, eg payment. Right? That would be admissable in court. The court orders new block chain transadtion/item. That new item refers to existing that presumably has all these details. Edit: added "transaction".
sandover 5y ago
A lot of folks here are making some version of the observation that an immutable public unforgeable database is, in practice, equivalent to ANY database which is sponsored by the state. That feels persuasive to me. Does this imply that the blockchain ledger might have greater utility in areas where there is weak or no state control? Basically, the criminal underworld and black markets. What's been written about this?
- NateEag 5y ago
  > What's been written about this? A great many cryptolocker programs. And several websites you can access via Tor to buy illegal drugs from the comfort of your own home via cryptocurrencies.
ridaj 5y ago
IMO there's confusion in this writing between ownership (legal concept) and possession (facts on the ground). The two can get out of sync. That doesn't mean blockchain is an irrelevant tool for tracking ownership - although I personally think it is, but for different reasons. Any ownership tracking ledger is going to have the problem that it doesn't map with real-world ownership, but that's not a failure of the tracking system, actually that's the reason for people to want such ledgers in the first place: because it gives the right to sue or other tools to try to rectify the situation.
jerry1979 5y ago
> All in all: when your source of truth is the legal system, there is absolutely no point for a blockchain and you might as well record ownership in a database. Crypto works well as a source of truth for things that start out in our imaginations but still have a large presence in the real world. For example, ownership of things like money accounts or even shares in group projects both come from and exist within our imagination, and crypto allows us to create rules and boundaries for those things easily and in a relatively trustless manner. I think the article focuses on objects that start out in the real world. If we want to manage the rules and boundaries for those kinds of things, then talking, writing, and violence probably work better than crypto.
- knorker 5y ago
  But it doesn't. Not at all. Society cannot be boostrapped on top of cryptodelusions, exactly because people will not accept it. If your bank account gets drained through something "unfair" (hack, robbed, bug, etc...) society delegates power to courts to order your money back. Society will drop "the blockchain" like day old garbage every time, because people Do. Not. Care, about it. They care that they live in a society of relative fairness, judged by their peers. Not by a bug in a program. There is no link between the blockchain and reality in the shared delusion of society. There is a link between the courts, and the government, and the treasury, and the shared delusion of society. There have been armed uprisings against governments that don't live up to the promise. And to the extent people DON'T rise up against the government it's because the government has guns. The blockchain has no guns. Society will just stop believing in it, when it's wrong. You can't just "stop believing in the government" (i.e. look at the success of "sovereign citizens"). The government of all levels doesn't go away when you're not looking at it. Nor the dollar (because of the government). The blockchain does.
  - jerry1979 5y ago
    Not sure what you mean by bootstrapping society. But I do think that most people won't keep all their money in crypto accounts. Instead, some people will probably just use crypto to move a bit of money around on the internet, maybe use it as a rainy day account, maybe do a group project. It could work pretty well for that.
knorker 5y ago
Duh.
Buttons840 5y ago
Imagine a magic chalkboard that can never be erased, and is very large, and you can write on it with an infinite number of colors of chalk. No two pieces of chalk are the same color. Put this chalkboard in a public space and let people write on it with their uniquely colored pieces of chalk. What uses could such a chalkboard serve? This is how I like to imagine blockchains. The magic chalkboard and a blockchain solve, or fail to solve, the same problems.
- jerry1979 5y ago
  I like your analogy. If people came into the crypto space (and other spaces) with some kind of fan fic about how it works, they wouldn't fall for so many scams or have such a negative attitude about the space's potential.
alexhektor 5y ago
Ever heard of a thing called counterfeit? Now combine blockchain with your favorite collectible, and you have a trustable, secure way to prove ownership of an original. Sure, you can transfer ownership on the blockchain and still sell the physical counterfeit. But what is your "stolen" piece of art now worth without the private key to it? Probably much less, combined with a much smaller and illegal market. Now take that concept and imagine some tamper-proof or difficult to tamper with hardware inside certain items like expensive designer clothes or bags or watches or whatnot, and you can probably make that possibility even harder. It's a real world use case, and digital art should be self-explanatory I assume (although NFTs have a lot of problems (though probably solvable ones) to figure out..)
ryandvm 5y ago
The only DB problem blockchain solves is: when DB users don't agree on who should manage the DB. That's it. Every other attempted use case for blockchain is most likely a newly minted "blockchain consultant" trying to sell you something you don't need. That said, there are _a few_ cases where DB users don't agree on who should own the DB. Most prominently of which would be decentralized digital currency. Say what you will about blockchain hype, but millions of dark market consumers/sellers can't be wrong...
jollybean 5y ago
Ownership is a social construct, dependent on the established social system, particularly a legal one. It's hard to get around that. Maybe there are some niche cases for parameterized control for blockchain i.e. we de-facto leave it to the block chain, but there can be 'amendments' to the chain by specific legal authorities that just become part of the system. Not utopian ideal, but maybe 'mostly practical'.
darawk 5y ago
Criticisms like this are so strange to me. Blockchains are socially constructed tools. They aren't meant to be some absolute source of truth that can never be subverted by any social institution. They are meant to be a ledger that only updates in certain pre-determined conditions in certain pre-determined ways. In the scenario described in the article, the French government can simply issue a new token and say it's the Mona Lisa's. As long as everyone else accepts this, there's no problem. The point of the blockchain isn't to say that chain ownership is the ultimate and final source of truth, it's to say that you cannot secretly contravene that source of truth. If the French government wishes to issue a new Mona Lisa token, they must do so transparently and in view of the public. They are forced to do so transparently because of the properties of the blockchain. It does not prevent anyone from changing the relation of chain entries to social institutions. It simply forces things that in the past could have occurred behind closed doors and without scrutiny into public view, and subject to public social censure. This isn't just theoretical, either. This is exactly what happened with The DAO debacle early on in Ethereum. People didn't like what the blockchain said, so they simply changed it. But critically, they had to do so in public, and they had to do so in a way that was truly democratic. Democratic in the sense that nobody was forced to migrate to the new chain. Ethereum Classic is still operating today, and if you want to transact on it, nobody is stopping you. This is true voluntaryism and democracy in the purest sense.
- munificent 5y ago
  > They aren't meant to be some absolute source of truth that can never be subverted by any social institution. I'm fairly certain that would be news to many of its adherents. The bitcoin whitepaper begins with, "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." > As long as everyone else accepts this If you already have an efficiently functioning consensus system that can answer questions like this, what value does adding a blockchain have?
  - darawk 5y ago
    > If you already have an efficiently functioning consensus system that can answer questions like this, what value does adding a blockchain have? It alters the political topology. I would analogize it to saying "What does social media do? I can already talk to my friends". Essentially it forces accountability and transparency to happen in ways that they were not guaranteed to in the past. If you have a corrupt government, often corruption happens in private, which makes it harder to regulate, and harder for the public to even be aware of. They may know generally that things are happening and assets are being expropriated, but they don't know which or when, and to who. Having a blockchain does not prevent the corruption from occurring in some mechanical sense, but it does force it to the social surface. I think this is a real benefit with important consequences. > I'm fairly certain that would be news to many of its adherents. The bitcoin whitepaper begins with, "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." Ya, I think most people into blockchain/crypto get this wrong. You wouldn't even want an immutable, deterministic system that cannot be altered. Not only is it not what blockchain does, but it's a terrible idea. I think my take on its benefits is much better, and I wish people would adopt it.
duimane 5y ago
The argument makes sense when you put it that way, and especially in the terms of NFTs. In my opinion it all depends on what we envision the future will look like. If you ask me, I’d love to take the responsibility of managing my own keys and being my own bank , regardless of the issues that come with this approach (for example losing the keys). I suggest you take a look at what we at AMPnet (www.ampnet.io) are doing and how we plan to bridge the real world assets to the blockchain. two main issues here pointed out: - losing the keys - ownership transfer issue We are building the decentralised network of auditors, on top of Ethereum. Auditors are randomly selected every now and then to continuously verify listed assets and check if the ownership structure fetched from the government databases matches the blockchain representation of the listed asset. In order for asset to get listed, one must provide the collateral less than or equal to the $$$ value of the asset (depending on some factors this amount can vary from asset to asset). Once the asset is bridged you get all the nice things distributed ledgers can provide, such as the cheap transfer of wealth, or out of the box integration with many existing defi protocols. If something shady happens with the listed asset (for example owner sells the asset in the real world while he remains the owner on the chain) then he gets slashed and the collateral is automatically liquidated. Auditors will detect this in the next auditing cycle. For the faint of heart or the ones wanting to play with the blockchain but are not ready to take care of the keys we’ve integrated the hosted wallet support by using the Arkane services. They hide the wallet behind the simple google/fb signin methods and users don’t have to worry about losing the keys. Arkane guarantees to not lose or leak your keys and provides the insurance on every hosted wallet. So yeah, I agree the challenges exist, but so do the solutions. Benefits of the blockchain are simply too good to not try many different approaches on solving these issues.
shanty 5y ago
I mean, the use case is (generally) providing a verifiable transaction chain. We have complex processes in place for doing this IRL right now for assets such as real estate deeds, vehicle titles, etc. Obviously, these all work because we collectively agree on the system in place. Blockchain would provide an alternative process for this. With tokenization, it would be possible to have multiple stakeholder ownership for a real asset.
stackzero 5y ago
Unfortunately, this is a 2015 take on blockchain. Protocols are now to the point where you can have the ability to create "courts" and social governance protocols on the network itself to resolve this kind of thing, also see: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html
Finnucane 5y ago
Back before there was blockchain, banks selling mortgages didn't like having to record ownership of deeds and mortgages with the county recorders. It was slow and expensive, and they wanted to shred the mortgages up and sell the pieces. So they created a system called MERS, that would track the notes as they went through the bond market. Except that MERS didn't really do that. It just pretended to. When all the loans went bust, it turned out that they hadn't properly kept track of the ownership of the notes. And MERS itself appeared to have no owners or employees--no one took responsibility for it. It was, you know, decentralized. So loan servicers took to forging signatures on papers to claim ownership of the loans they were foreclosing. And courts in some states let them get away with that. So whenever someone says, hey we have a decentralized to do away with the old system of recorders, I think, we have heard this story before. It does not have a happy ending.
osrec 5y ago
Remember, it's not the job of consultants to solve your problems. It's their job to sell you consulting. The blockchain concept was incredible for these guys, because it was so poorly understood by most people (including the consultants) and so incredibly hyped, that it literally sold itself. One of my businesses is a software consultancy, but we try to be ethical, only taking on projects we believe in. At the height of the hype, we were approached by a shoe company who wanted to sell their shoes (yes, shoes) on a blockchain. We repeatedly told them it was a stupid idea, but they were hell bent on proceeding. In the end we actually had to implement it to convince them that it gave them nothing more than their standard database (in fact it gave them poorer reporting capabilities and performance). I decided to drop them as a client after that - you cannot satisfy clients with stupid or poorly defined requirements.
chemmail 5y ago
This thinking might be fine with the Mona Lisa. But what about regular people and the poor? This is what btc/blockchain really helps. In the USA the USD$ is supreme, so you can easily discount about of crypto as a scam. But in most places in the world their government fiat is the scam. Back to ownership of physical on the blockchain. It can help for many physical items such as property to have the ownership easily accessible and hard to refute. In the USA again it is very easy to look up as it is mostly public record. If we go into something like a vehicle, a blockchain system may help. Current inventory control and shipping inventory control is also due for a massive overhaul. I work at a large supplier and everytime we order something from China, there is always something missing. These are usually full shipping containers. There is tons of back and forth and eventually many hours are wasted to negotiate what is suppose to happen because every party says it was the other side that owes whatevers.

251 points by leifg 5y ago

Interesting read, but I can easily come up with way more complicated scenarios. Imagine inheriting the house of your dying relative who forgot to unlock the key. Or needing to split the inheritance with your siblings ... according to local law. Leaving Blockchain aside, it would be cool if clearing house, such as Euroclear, would record -- but not decide -- ownership of non-financial assets too. Think houses, cars, bikes, artwork, everything!

oblio 5y ago

I'm super curious what we'll be left with once this is done and dusted, in 10 years or so. My guess? Something as boring and generally avoided as CORBA.

asjdflakjsdf 5y ago
I'd imagine the default world currency will have a dog on it by then
- oblio 5y ago
  I'm not sure a world where 60% (was it more?) of the currency ever created in the history of mankind has been created in the last year is the best benchmark for what's hype and what's not. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, but it can't stay irrational longer than the real world forces allow it to. Everything that goes up must come down.

pstuart 5y ago

I worked for a non-ICO blockchain company (no longer in business). We used Hyperledger Fabric for our offering and after leaving the company was informed that AWS was hosting Fabric and if I could develop anything to leverage that I'd have their support. And after some contemplation, could not come up with a compelling pitch for a blockchain solution -- a pity because I liked Fabric and would have been happy to take it to the cloud.

wpietri 5y ago
Exactly. This makes me think of a funnel. Into the top, you pour all of the people interested in maybe using a blockchain. A lot of sober evaluators of technology exit the funnel for the same reason: blockchains don't provide much advantage for most real-world projects. That means further down the funnel you end up with a lot of people who for whatever reason miss or ignore that. I remember a meeting with a would-be entrepreneur whose product was "reporting sexual harassment in the the workplace but with blockchain". When I asked what "blockchain" brought to the project, they said it brought security. When I asked how users would see that, the answer was basically that users would just have to take the company's word for it. I explained that if that was the case, they didn't have an advantage over competitors. The entrepreneur did not like that one bit, and that was basically the end of the meeting. n
leifg 5y ago
Not to mention that most blockchain enthusiasts don’t even consider Hyperledger a blockchain (it’s not public).
- pstuart 5y ago
  Meh. It's a private blockchain and the general principles stand. The company I worked for was so incompetent that they wanted to have customers access the data directly through their APIs, and that the blockchain entities were all the same -- effectively making it a really slow and expensive K/V store. I should write up the story of my time there -- it was insane. When I came aboard their system was a MySQL frontend with a ton of code to replicate it to the chain (because they couldn't figure out how to get more than one transaction per second, which was because they had no idea how Fabric actually worked).

ww520 5y ago

Blockchain provides a public ledger to trace the linage of transactions. It doesn't enforce ownership. The legal system enforces the ownership. Blockchain just makes the court's job easier. With blockchain, we can know that Mona Lisa is illegally transferred to the corrupted official, and know who that is.

jcrawfordor 5y ago
Wouldn't this only ever be true if we enforced some sort of blockchain-based Torrens title, though? Otherwise it will always become a matter of title research, and at that point I struggle to imagine how a blockchain is more useful than a conventional recorded deed.
- ww520 5y ago
  Speed and cost. It takes time and money to register and maintain the title records. Searching takes time and money. Blockchain just lowers that, supposedly, if they can lower the cost of mining.
  - SahAssar 5y ago
    Is there any proof that a blockchain is (or can be) more efficient than a normal database? Seems like every blockchain I've heard about wastes a lot of energy and time to try to make stuff securely decentralized and if we are going to have special authorities anyway the least secure part will be their keys/access to the chain and the decentralized part isn't really true anymore.
  - jcrawfordor 5y ago
    But many (most?) counties have already digitized recorded deeds, at least by index... so it's just a matter of logging into the clerk's system and searching for the situs address or APN or whatever's handy and you get the deed history, out of a good old fashioned relational database. How does blockchain improve on that?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

ahelwer 5y ago

This has always been obvious to anyone who spent the smallest amount of time working in consumer retail. Customer comes in and wants to buy a patio set they saw in the catalog. You check the database - says there are two in the back. You go to the back. You look for like ten minutes. Patio set is nowhere to be found. Customer has left in frustration by the time you return. The hard problem has never been the specific form of database used to store info about the real world. The hard problem has always - and will always - be enforcing the correspondence between what's in the database and what's in the real world. This problem couldn't be solved at a single store in a single fairly small city. It's not gonna be solved worldwide.

nikanj 5y ago
Easy! Let's just make sure the people who stole the two patio sets update the blockchain. I mean, people who steal / ransom / hack bitcoin still update the blockchain, so criminals clearly can follow the rules
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > make sure the people who stole the two patio sets It probably isn’t stolen. It’s more likely delivered to another store, still on the truck, still at the factory, or was sold and not recorded.
  - zarq 5y ago
    Or someone has it on their cart on the way to the checkout.
    - nucleardog 5y ago
      Or someone had it on their cart on the way to the checkout, changed their mind, and somehow managed to cram it in a freezer behind some milk or something.
      - barkingcat 5y ago

tantaman 5y ago

Except real estate. Someone can already come with a made up deed and say they own your house. Blockchain would make this much more secure than it is today.

oblio 5y ago
How does this work with privacy, though? Would you be able to see all the properties someone owns?
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > Would you be able to see all the properties someone owns? Property records are public in most jurisdictions.
- crysin 5y ago
  You kind of already can, at least in the US. Property ownership is public record and so are the property taxes individuals pay.
- wombat-man 5y ago
  that's how it works in my city. If you want, you can incorporate a company and buy the property through that though.
  - bena 5y ago
    Still traceable though. I had a friend who did that and his name was still got attached to his physical address.
    - wombat-man 5y ago
      hm, maybe. I can't find my landlord's name attached to the building I owned. But his name is associated with the company which owns it. My old boss also would buy property through LLCs, so if I looked up his address he would not be associated with it. I was not able to link him to the company because the LLC didn't actually transact any business aside from holding this property. But maybe I just don't know where to look.

seibelj 5y ago

Furious masturbation on HN today as crypto prices drop to what they were... 3 months ago. Let’s not write the whole industry off quite yet!

cheph 5y ago

And at this point, people pushing blockchain for representing real world ownership is either scamming you or stupid.

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
Why not both?

endisneigh 5y ago

Serious question: How is blockchain superior than me just creating a git repository on GitHub called "allmoney" and just setting it up such that a commit represents a transaction and the log represents the ledger? I also don't see how block chains or smart contracts can override reality. Let's say you buy a house using a smart contract, and someone, in real life, comes to you with a gun and says give me your wallet and transfer it to me, or you die. Are we supposed to just accept that? If not, what mechanism will undo the crime and restore the house back to the [rightful] owner? it just all seems dumb, imo - technology cannot exist in a vacuum, ever.

asjdflakjsdf 5y ago
well one reason is that you (or github) would be the owner of that ledger. And we would have to put all of our trust in you
- endisneigh 5y ago
  is that a problem, though? all participants could clone the repo. it would be trivial to see if GitHub or I tampered with the ledger.
  - dumbfoundded 5y ago
    Yeah so like you've just rediscovered proof of work. If a bunch of people clone it, who can say which repo is the real repo? Well you burn a bunch of electricity in a provable way to vote for a repo. The repo with the most burned electricity is the real repo.
    - endisneigh 5y ago
      > Yeah so like you've just rediscovered proof of work. If a bunch of people clone it, who can say which repo is the real repo? Well you burn a bunch of electricity in a provable way to vote for a repo. The repo with the most burned electricity is the real repo. what? no, the original repo is the real repo. my point is, is that the transparency makes it impossible for you to not trust me/GitHub. why wouldn't you trust? you can see nothing was altered yourself - and if it is altered, the issue isn't trust anymore, I've simply committed fraud and you can use the existing legal system to punish me. this is the same reason you would trust open source software installed on your machine, said machine that presumably has access to your environment/browser/etc which could contain a virus to take your existing fiat money today.

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Marsupiall 5y ago

It's been more than 10 years now. Crypto isn't going to replace financial institutions. It's naive to think that a New World Order will come where banks don't exist and we're all happy trading in bitcoin Over 10 years and NO real life use yet. None.

knorker 5y ago
Well that's not true. It's great for crime such as ransomware.
jerry1979 5y ago
I have heard of unbanked refugees fleeing with crypto and using it to make a new life.
CryptoPunk 5y ago
DeFi, almost exclusively on Ethereum, grew from $1 billion to $60 billion in the total value of assets locked, in one year: https://defipulse.com/ https://defipulse.com/

the_snooze 5y ago

The title can afford to drop a few words and still be accurate: > No Real Use Case for Blockchain

hanniabu 5y ago
Wow so smart and clever

cblconfederate 5y ago

Kind of a strawman. AFAIK most NFTs are actual digital assets which can be copied, and in general people are not claiming that blockchain is magically going to enforce itself. BUT, blockchains may replace Patreon and the like, by offering the satisfaction of connection to art, and the ability to prove it.

armoredkitten 5y ago
The article is not talking about NFTs, it's talking about the use of blockchain for tracking real, physical goods. Some of it may also be relevant for discussing NFTs. But the article is not about NFTs.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  NFTs were originally called deeds. They were designed for this exact use case.

apples_oranges 5y ago

Let's say it were. Ooops, key stolen, item transferred, no rollback, etc etc.

pydry 5y ago

>Think of this scenario. The French government has a top notch security protocol in place to secure the private key to the ownership of the Mona Lisa. But we have a change of government and some high ranking government official gets corrupted. They have access to the keys and he uses them to transfer the Mona Lisa to one of his rich buddies Joe Shmoe. A "top notch security protocol" would require more than one official to sign off on the transfer precisely because this particular attack is so easily anticipated. A blockchain for asserting ownership of the mona lisa would be largely ceremonial anyway - a bit like the land title deeds for the French Parliament. That doesn't mean that, like the deeds, it won't some day exist, but it will, like the deeds, not really mean anything. The "true owner" will forever be whomever has a monopoly on violence in France. His assertion that a database is just as good for recording ownership, I think, misunderstands what blockchain is good at - distributing trust (everybody runs the database), rather than centralizing it (one party runs the database). This isn't a theoretical concern, either. I see the blockchain as a tool to prevent the MERS debacle, where a group of banks decided to come together and tried to make their privately run centralized database of mortgage titles into, quite literally, law (if you're in our database, we can foreclose on your house): https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/01/mers-the-law-and-the-state.html https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/01/mers-the-law-and-the... This gambit worked in a lower court but, IIRC failed in the supreme court, but it created an almighty paperwork headache.

rushabh 5y ago

Blockchains are slowly becoming a pseudoscience. People spout a bunch of jargon and crypto math but have no idea how anything is connected to the real world. Most of the fraud that exists out there is due to social hacking. There is no real problem a blockchain solves. The surprising thing is how many people are falling for it.

arberx 5y ago
They solve the problem of centralized trust.
- oblio 5y ago
  Yeah, but property is also enforcement. That's trust. Centralized trust.
- wittyusername 5y ago
  He said "real problem" so..yeah
  - arberx 5y ago
    Byzantine fault tolerance is definitely a real problem.
    - vkou 5y ago
      For whom? Folks at Google, Facebook, and Amazon that are building distributed databases aren't re-writing their backends to use blockchains, for obvious reasons. As for people who aren't building general-purpose distributed databases, a solution to the Byzantine generals problem is more of a solution to a problem that they don't have - as other posts in this thread demonstrate.
  - noofen 5y ago
    Both can be true: 1) The original BTC paper was a huge breakthrough in decentralized systems. 2) Most "blockchain" projects today are merely elaborate Ponzis.

throwaway4good 5y ago

A central land register or a written title of ownership doesn’t absolve the need for a court system to settle disputes or enforce laws. Those things can still be useful, though.

skybrian 5y ago
It seems like a basic principle is that the court needs to be able to order the land registry to be changed? A blockchain that allows court orders to work might as well be a centralized database controlled by the court system. Merkle trees are still useful, though. Compare with certificate transparency for DNS.

DebtDeflation 5y ago

The last sentence in the article: >"All in all: when your source of truth is the legal system, there is absolutely no point for a blockchain and you might as well record ownership in a database." Could be generalized a lot further than the author seems to imagine. For 99.999% of proposed blockchain use cases you absolutely would be better off just using a database.

chowndown 5y ago

Remember those IBM commercials talking about blockchain for coffee supply chains? What prevents the Colombian farmer from putting whatever beans they want in the bag?

dehrmann 5y ago

Essentially, possession is nine-tenths of the law, and controlling a cryptographic token is unlikely to change that.

he0001 5y ago

If you have a blockchain like that wouldn’t you be able to rewrite the blockchain if you are the only one with the access? Isn’t the idea that that there should be enough others so you can’t rewrite it? AFICT this is what happens when you fork a chain?

erivlis 5y ago

This is nonsense. What he describes is not a oroblem with the Blockchain but a problem with the security of the "wallet" of keys. That is a basic issue with any system that has security. If someone gets the "keys" (password, access etc. ) he can whatever he want. The solution make the "locking mechanism" more complex. Add additional / multiple keys. Methodolgies to secure system are all ready used. Wgat blockchain adds is a datastore that is more tamper proof (while adtionaly adding decentralization and fault tolerance using consensus mecahniam). Any system can have vulnerabilities. Blockchain-like technologies may have the potential abilty to reduce and/or eliminate some of them.

dalbasal 5y ago
No. The security issues is an arbitrary example. The actual problem is that when a disagreement between the legal system and the database, whether or not its blockchain. Courts are the source of truth concerning ownership. The legal system needs the ability to overrule or edit the db, otherwise the blockchain is inaccurate. You can think of "security problem" as an armed robber forcing you to reveal your password. With Bitcoin, they now have the coins and there's no going back. It doesn't matter that a court doesn't consider the robber to be the owner. Bitcoin doesn't represent anything outside of the blockchain. With a painting, stock or deed, something outside of blockchain needs to honour your blockchain claim. If the blockchain is unreliable, they won't, and it no longer reflects true ownership. If your blockchain isn't the fundamental source of truth, there's really no point. Instead of a centralised db, you have centralised control over a distributed DB.
knowaveragejoe 5y ago
The other problem he's circling around is how you remediate a worst-case scenario of theft, losing the keys, etc. For the layperson there's not much they can do right now, but there is a lot of thought being put into the issue.

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bronzeage 5y ago

Crypto anarchism (the movement to move all the trust to crypto and leave nothing to the government) is suffering from Dunning-Kruger effect in their understand of the legal system, it's purpose and nuances and generally the fact that the real world has to base its law system around humans interpreting the law because there are simply no better solutions, and the legal system came where it is after years and years of evolution and if simple inflexible rules would be a viable solution you wouldn't need a legal system. It's the same flawed logic that usually opposes government access to communications, even with warrants, as if they are something sacred (while the government can literally jail you up if you break the law, even freedom isn't sacred, and it's much more vital than communications). You need to respect the rule of law and the fact that there are simply no better solutions than the legal system - it is just like decades old code that has been refined to deal with all the nuances of the real world.

chrischattin 5y ago

The killer app for blockchain is, and always has been, a currency. Immutability/trustlessness has a use outside of money, but we're just starting to scratch the surface. Most of the ideas I've seen could be executed better with a standard database or are still subject to garbage in garbage out. The stuff that's truly new and novel is in the exploratory stages. Unrelated, it feels like there's a coordinated propaganda campaign against crypto going on right now. Many of the comments here, and in other threads, are repeats of emotional talking points that don't really make sense when you think it through. My guess is institutions are looking for or trying to create a buying opportunity. Is that ETF about to be approved or something? /tinfoil

dalbasal 5y ago

So... The explosion of cryptocurrencies/blockchain and the sudden demise of monetarism (overstatement, but YKWIM) is clarifying a lot about what money & sovereignty are. A property registrar, stock exchange or currency that isn't subject to state control, isn't really those things... it seems. Nice concise summary of the problem.

uberdru 5y ago

True, but consensus on real-world ownership is a great use case for blockchain.

leifg 5y ago
Consensus on what? The last time I checked we don’t have a democratic process for private ownership.
knorker 5y ago
Why? Courts don't rule by consensus.

dcolkitt 5y ago

American law allows for a very wide range of legal trusts. Courts will generally enforce any legal entity that the grantor chooses to structure. It's easy enough to setup the DAO as a formal legal trust that grants ownership rights to whoever can demonstrate ownership of an NFT. Some people might ask what the point is. After all, you're still relying on a fair and enforceable court system at a base layer. That's true, but it allows you to abstract away all the other complexities from higher layers in the financial system. For example the cost of transferring title on land tends to be fairly high. You have stamp tax, title insurance, lawyers to review the contract, etc. With a DAO as the nominal owner, selling property simply becomes a matter of executing a smart contract transaction on the blockchain. From there, you can imagine increasingly complex structures built entirely in the blockchain. A mortgage based smart contract can allow for a specific owner, but transfer the property to the creditor once the payment is missed. Mortgage underwriters can pool their blockchain based loans into pooled securities, and sell CDO-like products as smart contracts. This allows investors to completely bypass all the financial regulations and restrictions that exist on subprime mortgages. It also cuts out an enormous amount of the legal, settlement, and due diligence costs associated with the creation of these securities. Everything's executed atomically and autonomously through smart contracts. The point is you can use a mix-and-match hybrid model, where some layers are secured through fiat law while other layers are secured through crypto law.

skywhopper 5y ago
There’s a reason for all those legal, settlement, due diligence costs, and regulations. Finding ways around monetary regulations is called “money laundering” and “fraud” and it’s already illegal. So I wouldn’t recommend pursuing this path.
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  That's not really true at all. There are entire divisions at investment banking firms called "delta-one" desks. They exist solely for the purpose of creating synthetic equity positions to avoid regulatory, tax, capital, settlement rules on cash equities. I can easily sell you a "total return swap" in lieu of shares, which bypasses all kinds of existing rules. Fraud and money laundering are very narrowly defined, and require mens rea. If simply structuring alternative financial vehicles constituted fraud, then nearly all of Wall Street would be in jail.

simonw 5y ago

Shorter version: if real estate is on the blockchain, and you guess my password or threaten me with a crowbar until I give it to you, do you get to keep my house?

chrisbrandow 5y ago

Even the examples of people forgetting their crypto password and not being able to sell their asset is an example of this. That is completely dysfunctional.

pelasaco 5y ago
well, having a process around multi signature would mostly solve it. The blockchain alone won't solve any problem. Blockchain + process may improve some processes. Last time that I checked, Brazil was/is using blockchain quite successfully to authenticate official documentations, but they still request ID validation before operations. Just the signature and registration that the operation happened, are stored in the blockchain. In their use-case, nobody will steal your wallet and transfer the asset, but in another hand it helps to take paperwork out of their way.

deleted 5y ago

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munificent 5y ago

A tenet of sociology is that reality is socially constructed. Since HN is populated with literalists, I will clarify here that this obviously does not mean that all aspects of reality are created by consensus. The Earth will not unroll and flatten itself out given a sufficient number of Flat Earthers. By "reality", they mean that a suprisingly large subset of what we consider "the world" is actually human level authored truth. Some examples: * Janet is a police officer. * Dave is a criminal. * France owns the Mona Lisa. * France is a country. * Idaho is not a country. * Lance Armstrong is a cyclist. * Bats are not birds. * You can buy a car for $20,000. In all of these examples, the fundamental process that determines the truth or falsehood of those statements is consensus. I can hear you already. "If you don't get a paycheck from the city, you aren't a cop." "You aren't a criminal unless you are convicted by the legal system." "The Mona Lisa is literally in the Louvre." "Bats are mammals, in order chiroptera. All birds are in class aves." "If I give someone the money, I will literally have a car that I can drive around." For literal-minded folks like us, the idea that key properties of what we consider cold hard objective reality is in fact just squishy agreement can be unsettling. Hell, half of us got into computers specifically to avoid hand-wavey subjectivism. But it's true. If you root cause any of those statements, you will eventually bottom out on "some people agree on it". There is no ground truth below human consensus on any of these and many many many more critical, tangible facets of our lives. Tech folks will spend a truly Herculean effort to avoid this uncomfortable reality. They really really want things to feel solid. I look at the entire blockchain enterprise as essentially that. A boondoggle to try to subtract the humans out of human-constructed reality. But as this article shows, it is always doomed to failure. If you want your tech to actually do anything, then it has to interact with humans. And those humans will only choose to act in accordance with your tech if they believe the reality that it claims. Which means ultimately it is their belief that defines what the blockchain means, and not vice versa. Consent is always at the bottom.

13rac1 5y ago
> For literal-minded folks like us, the idea that key properties of what we consider cold hard objective reality is in fact just squishy agreement can be unsettling. Hell, half of us got into computers specifically to avoid hand-wavey subjectivism. Objective reality begins to falter even before leaving computing. For example: values for binary ones and zeros are hand-wavey down in the hardware voltage level. People believe it is as simple as: 5V is one and 0V is zero. In reality, (5V TTL logic levels) voltages above 2.7V are high/one and below 0.8V are low/zero. Details: https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/logic-levels/all https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/logic-levels/all

spullara 5y ago

Without some strong, potentially violent, entity enforcing property rights there are no property rights.

billytetrud 5y ago

It should be entirely possible to have a block chain system where every record is basically a multisig address where the source of truth holds enough keys to override. What would the point of that be vs a central database? Well they don't have to be different. A blockchain doesn't need to be decentralized. However, it does provide a very clear and secure record of who did what. It would certainly make sense to have a very redundant set of copies of that blockchain, perhaps with the pubic being given the option to participate. But a blockchain construction could simply make it very secure and clear what records have been changed and by who. This way, in the Mona Lisa case, a court system would decide to take possession back, and they would pull out their government keys out to record that. There are lots of constructions that could be useful there.

leifg 5y ago
> A blockchain doesn't need to be decentralized If it's not decentralized it's usually referred to as a "permissioned blockchain" which purists don't consider a "real blockchain" and at this point where "blockchain" becomes a marketing term. But leaving that aside. What bothers me is the implication that only a blockchain implementation can provide sufficient transparacy. There are a million different ways to increase transparency within a computer system: - audit logs - access logs - offside backups - paper copies - distributing data amongst a set of trusted but independent parties - you could even enforce cryptographic signatures on all changes But most importantly: policy If you are losing your job (and get sued) because you changed data in the production database without authorization most people are less likely to do it. And in today's world it's really hard not to cover your tracks. The idea that we need to be 100x safer than that is just absurd.
- billytetrud 5y ago
  > purists don't consider a "real blockchain" Sure. At that point its semantics, but fair. I certainly wouldn't recommend a proof of work blockchain with hundreds of thousands of nodes for this. A federated blockchain would be ideal for a situation where the final source of truth is a centralized system. > the implication that only a blockchain implementation can provide sufficient transparacy I don't think anything I said implies that. I certainly didn't intend to imply that. Certainly there are other secure solutions, however I'm saying that a blockchain is a pretty well understood solution that should work. > If you are losing your job (and get sued) because you changed data in the production database without authorization most people are less likely to do it. I think people are looking for better solutions than "most people don't screw up the system". > The idea that we need to be 100x safer than that is just absurd. Again, not something I said at all. But if there's a solution that's 100x safer and no more costly (in fact maybe even cheaper), why not do it?

diego_moita 5y ago

This reminds me the idea of using the blockchain to implement land registry in Bolivia, Peru and Paraguay. Some Swedish startup came with this idea, I guess. But if the legal authorities there aren't reliable/competent enough to implement a land registry why would they be reliable to enforce a blockchain-based registry? - "This blockchain says this land is mine!" - "This gun says get the f**k out and that police officer I bribed agrees with my gun".

knorker 5y ago
And what if the blockchain and government disagree? Does the blockchain have a police force?

lallysingh 5y ago

Wait, the distributed ledger isn't an appropriate use case when you have a single separate over-ruling authority?? Or it's a bad question with a useless answer.

famil 5y ago

What is the use case of blockchain besides evasion of law enforcement and speculation?

kwdc 5y ago

I don't agree. The article misunderstands a potentially useful aspect of blockchains, physical assets and the legal system. The blockchain is a linked list of immutable data. But this doesn't mean the legal system is prevented from taking action. Lets say that the matter of ownership goes to court but events leading up to that mean the private key has been destroyed. The asset is still owned and is sitting in a gallery or lockup. The naive now think "who holds the now-lost key owns the painting but now the key is lost no one owns it". Wrong. The matter is brought to court and the potential list of owners can be determined from the blockchain itself. The court can then confirm using that record the ownership by going back into the blockchain, finding and determining who is the legitimate owner and then order the creation of a new blockchain asset item[1]. Failing to assert ownership in court might even work against you. Then the new blockchain asset is linked to the old. The old block chain item doesn't even need to be updated or deleted. Even if you could. Why? It still provides valuable history. Blockchains recording ownership of assets is a benefit to the court system. Except for keys to lost cryptocurrency wallets. That's likely always going to be a dead end. But that is no different to burning cash[2] or losing gold because you buried it near a beach. [1] a new blockchain tracking item. Not a new Mona Lisa. [2] except that cryptos once destroyed or lost usually can't be replaced.

jjulius 5y ago
>The court can then confirm using that record the ownership by going back into the blockchain, finding and determining who is the legitimate owner and then order the creation of a new asset. - What if the legitimate owner (according to the blockchain) is dead? - What if the last "legitimate owner" in the blockchain decided to give the item to someone else and never updated the blockchain? And if they can't be located to confirm as much? - How does a court order the recreation of an asset such as the Mona Lisa, whose value lies in its history, how complicated it would've been to have painted it when it was painted, and the fact that the painter is certainly not alive to create a new one?
- kwdc 5y ago
  Present in court. The descendant as proxy isn’t a new concept. Failing to update the blockchain means the sale didn't go through. You can't assert ownership via a blockchain then believe failing to update the blockchain is acceptable. The buyer has records of transfer, eg payment. Right? That would be admissable in court. The court orders new block chain transadtion/item. That new item refers to existing that presumably has all these details. Edit: added "transaction".

sandover 5y ago

A lot of folks here are making some version of the observation that an immutable public unforgeable database is, in practice, equivalent to ANY database which is sponsored by the state. That feels persuasive to me. Does this imply that the blockchain ledger might have greater utility in areas where there is weak or no state control? Basically, the criminal underworld and black markets. What's been written about this?

NateEag 5y ago
> What's been written about this? A great many cryptolocker programs. And several websites you can access via Tor to buy illegal drugs from the comfort of your own home via cryptocurrencies.

ridaj 5y ago

IMO there's confusion in this writing between ownership (legal concept) and possession (facts on the ground). The two can get out of sync. That doesn't mean blockchain is an irrelevant tool for tracking ownership - although I personally think it is, but for different reasons. Any ownership tracking ledger is going to have the problem that it doesn't map with real-world ownership, but that's not a failure of the tracking system, actually that's the reason for people to want such ledgers in the first place: because it gives the right to sue or other tools to try to rectify the situation.

jerry1979 5y ago

> All in all: when your source of truth is the legal system, there is absolutely no point for a blockchain and you might as well record ownership in a database. Crypto works well as a source of truth for things that start out in our imaginations but still have a large presence in the real world. For example, ownership of things like money accounts or even shares in group projects both come from and exist within our imagination, and crypto allows us to create rules and boundaries for those things easily and in a relatively trustless manner. I think the article focuses on objects that start out in the real world. If we want to manage the rules and boundaries for those kinds of things, then talking, writing, and violence probably work better than crypto.

knorker 5y ago
But it doesn't. Not at all. Society cannot be boostrapped on top of cryptodelusions, exactly because people will not accept it. If your bank account gets drained through something "unfair" (hack, robbed, bug, etc...) society delegates power to courts to order your money back. Society will drop "the blockchain" like day old garbage every time, because people Do. Not. Care, about it. They care that they live in a society of relative fairness, judged by their peers. Not by a bug in a program. There is no link between the blockchain and reality in the shared delusion of society. There is a link between the courts, and the government, and the treasury, and the shared delusion of society. There have been armed uprisings against governments that don't live up to the promise. And to the extent people DON'T rise up against the government it's because the government has guns. The blockchain has no guns. Society will just stop believing in it, when it's wrong. You can't just "stop believing in the government" (i.e. look at the success of "sovereign citizens"). The government of all levels doesn't go away when you're not looking at it. Nor the dollar (because of the government). The blockchain does.
- jerry1979 5y ago
  Not sure what you mean by bootstrapping society. But I do think that most people won't keep all their money in crypto accounts. Instead, some people will probably just use crypto to move a bit of money around on the internet, maybe use it as a rainy day account, maybe do a group project. It could work pretty well for that.

knorker 5y ago

Duh.

Buttons840 5y ago

Imagine a magic chalkboard that can never be erased, and is very large, and you can write on it with an infinite number of colors of chalk. No two pieces of chalk are the same color. Put this chalkboard in a public space and let people write on it with their uniquely colored pieces of chalk. What uses could such a chalkboard serve? This is how I like to imagine blockchains. The magic chalkboard and a blockchain solve, or fail to solve, the same problems.

jerry1979 5y ago
I like your analogy. If people came into the crypto space (and other spaces) with some kind of fan fic about how it works, they wouldn't fall for so many scams or have such a negative attitude about the space's potential.

alexhektor 5y ago

Ever heard of a thing called counterfeit? Now combine blockchain with your favorite collectible, and you have a trustable, secure way to prove ownership of an original. Sure, you can transfer ownership on the blockchain and still sell the physical counterfeit. But what is your "stolen" piece of art now worth without the private key to it? Probably much less, combined with a much smaller and illegal market. Now take that concept and imagine some tamper-proof or difficult to tamper with hardware inside certain items like expensive designer clothes or bags or watches or whatnot, and you can probably make that possibility even harder. It's a real world use case, and digital art should be self-explanatory I assume (although NFTs have a lot of problems (though probably solvable ones) to figure out..)

ryandvm 5y ago

The only DB problem blockchain solves is: when DB users don't agree on who should manage the DB. That's it. Every other attempted use case for blockchain is most likely a newly minted "blockchain consultant" trying to sell you something you don't need. That said, there are _a few_ cases where DB users don't agree on who should own the DB. Most prominently of which would be decentralized digital currency. Say what you will about blockchain hype, but millions of dark market consumers/sellers can't be wrong...

jollybean 5y ago

Ownership is a social construct, dependent on the established social system, particularly a legal one. It's hard to get around that. Maybe there are some niche cases for parameterized control for blockchain i.e. we de-facto leave it to the block chain, but there can be 'amendments' to the chain by specific legal authorities that just become part of the system. Not utopian ideal, but maybe 'mostly practical'.

darawk 5y ago

Criticisms like this are so strange to me. Blockchains are socially constructed tools. They aren't meant to be some absolute source of truth that can never be subverted by any social institution. They are meant to be a ledger that only updates in certain pre-determined conditions in certain pre-determined ways. In the scenario described in the article, the French government can simply issue a new token and say it's the Mona Lisa's. As long as everyone else accepts this, there's no problem. The point of the blockchain isn't to say that chain ownership is the ultimate and final source of truth, it's to say that you cannot secretly contravene that source of truth. If the French government wishes to issue a new Mona Lisa token, they must do so transparently and in view of the public. They are forced to do so transparently because of the properties of the blockchain. It does not prevent anyone from changing the relation of chain entries to social institutions. It simply forces things that in the past could have occurred behind closed doors and without scrutiny into public view, and subject to public social censure. This isn't just theoretical, either. This is exactly what happened with The DAO debacle early on in Ethereum. People didn't like what the blockchain said, so they simply changed it. But critically, they had to do so in public, and they had to do so in a way that was truly democratic. Democratic in the sense that nobody was forced to migrate to the new chain. Ethereum Classic is still operating today, and if you want to transact on it, nobody is stopping you. This is true voluntaryism and democracy in the purest sense.

munificent 5y ago
> They aren't meant to be some absolute source of truth that can never be subverted by any social institution. I'm fairly certain that would be news to many of its adherents. The bitcoin whitepaper begins with, "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." > As long as everyone else accepts this If you already have an efficiently functioning consensus system that can answer questions like this, what value does adding a blockchain have?
- darawk 5y ago
  > If you already have an efficiently functioning consensus system that can answer questions like this, what value does adding a blockchain have? It alters the political topology. I would analogize it to saying "What does social media do? I can already talk to my friends". Essentially it forces accountability and transparency to happen in ways that they were not guaranteed to in the past. If you have a corrupt government, often corruption happens in private, which makes it harder to regulate, and harder for the public to even be aware of. They may know generally that things are happening and assets are being expropriated, but they don't know which or when, and to who. Having a blockchain does not prevent the corruption from occurring in some mechanical sense, but it does force it to the social surface. I think this is a real benefit with important consequences. > I'm fairly certain that would be news to many of its adherents. The bitcoin whitepaper begins with, "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." Ya, I think most people into blockchain/crypto get this wrong. You wouldn't even want an immutable, deterministic system that cannot be altered. Not only is it not what blockchain does, but it's a terrible idea. I think my take on its benefits is much better, and I wish people would adopt it.

duimane 5y ago

The argument makes sense when you put it that way, and especially in the terms of NFTs. In my opinion it all depends on what we envision the future will look like. If you ask me, I’d love to take the responsibility of managing my own keys and being my own bank , regardless of the issues that come with this approach (for example losing the keys). I suggest you take a look at what we at AMPnet (www.ampnet.io) are doing and how we plan to bridge the real world assets to the blockchain. two main issues here pointed out: - losing the keys - ownership transfer issue We are building the decentralised network of auditors, on top of Ethereum. Auditors are randomly selected every now and then to continuously verify listed assets and check if the ownership structure fetched from the government databases matches the blockchain representation of the listed asset. In order for asset to get listed, one must provide the collateral less than or equal to the $$$ value of the asset (depending on some factors this amount can vary from asset to asset). Once the asset is bridged you get all the nice things distributed ledgers can provide, such as the cheap transfer of wealth, or out of the box integration with many existing defi protocols. If something shady happens with the listed asset (for example owner sells the asset in the real world while he remains the owner on the chain) then he gets slashed and the collateral is automatically liquidated. Auditors will detect this in the next auditing cycle. For the faint of heart or the ones wanting to play with the blockchain but are not ready to take care of the keys we’ve integrated the hosted wallet support by using the Arkane services. They hide the wallet behind the simple google/fb signin methods and users don’t have to worry about losing the keys. Arkane guarantees to not lose or leak your keys and provides the insurance on every hosted wallet. So yeah, I agree the challenges exist, but so do the solutions. Benefits of the blockchain are simply too good to not try many different approaches on solving these issues.

shanty 5y ago

I mean, the use case is (generally) providing a verifiable transaction chain. We have complex processes in place for doing this IRL right now for assets such as real estate deeds, vehicle titles, etc. Obviously, these all work because we collectively agree on the system in place. Blockchain would provide an alternative process for this. With tokenization, it would be possible to have multiple stakeholder ownership for a real asset.

stackzero 5y ago

Unfortunately, this is a 2015 take on blockchain. Protocols are now to the point where you can have the ability to create "courts" and social governance protocols on the network itself to resolve this kind of thing, also see: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html

Finnucane 5y ago

Back before there was blockchain, banks selling mortgages didn't like having to record ownership of deeds and mortgages with the county recorders. It was slow and expensive, and they wanted to shred the mortgages up and sell the pieces. So they created a system called MERS, that would track the notes as they went through the bond market. Except that MERS didn't really do that. It just pretended to. When all the loans went bust, it turned out that they hadn't properly kept track of the ownership of the notes. And MERS itself appeared to have no owners or employees--no one took responsibility for it. It was, you know, decentralized. So loan servicers took to forging signatures on papers to claim ownership of the loans they were foreclosing. And courts in some states let them get away with that. So whenever someone says, hey we have a decentralized to do away with the old system of recorders, I think, we have heard this story before. It does not have a happy ending.

osrec 5y ago

Remember, it's not the job of consultants to solve your problems. It's their job to sell you consulting. The blockchain concept was incredible for these guys, because it was so poorly understood by most people (including the consultants) and so incredibly hyped, that it literally sold itself. One of my businesses is a software consultancy, but we try to be ethical, only taking on projects we believe in. At the height of the hype, we were approached by a shoe company who wanted to sell their shoes (yes, shoes) on a blockchain. We repeatedly told them it was a stupid idea, but they were hell bent on proceeding. In the end we actually had to implement it to convince them that it gave them nothing more than their standard database (in fact it gave them poorer reporting capabilities and performance). I decided to drop them as a client after that - you cannot satisfy clients with stupid or poorly defined requirements.

chemmail 5y ago

This thinking might be fine with the Mona Lisa. But what about regular people and the poor? This is what btc/blockchain really helps. In the USA the USD$ is supreme, so you can easily discount about of crypto as a scam. But in most places in the world their government fiat is the scam. Back to ownership of physical on the blockchain. It can help for many physical items such as property to have the ownership easily accessible and hard to refute. In the USA again it is very easy to look up as it is mostly public record. If we go into something like a vehicle, a blockchain system may help. Current inventory control and shipping inventory control is also due for a massive overhaul. I work at a large supplier and everytime we order something from China, there is always something missing. These are usually full shipping containers. There is tons of back and forth and eventually many hours are wasted to negotiate what is suppose to happen because every party says it was the other side that owes whatevers.