20 ms·

No need to rewrite. Just add a new compensating transaction to declare new ownership, presumably with the court's private key wallet as the authority.

by ww520 5y ago

cool_dude85 5y ago
So why doesn't the state just make a database then?
- didibus 5y ago
  You'd want a database that is pretty difficult to temper with or hack. This includes from external or internal bad actors. If the government had a database used to identify all ownership of things, but it was possible for internal bad actors to change the data in it, or for external bad actors to do the same, that would be a problem. With a decentralized database, this becomes a lot more difficult to temper with, so the data in the database is much more trustworthy. You can't just bribe your way to its DBA, so there's benefit to it.
  - SahAssar 5y ago
    Is there any proof that a competently run system can not be as secure as a blockchain? > You can't just bribe your way to its DBA Instead you bribe the person that has the court's keys. Or whoever that declares what keys are "special" and granted the special permissions.
    - fastball 5y ago
      Again, the benefit is not that the system is impossible to exploit in some way, the main benefit is that these actions are all recorded transparently, so you can have a complete picture of what exactly happened. That seems better than a database which at a fundamental level cannot have immutable guarantees.
      - vel0city 5y ago
        In at least many places in the US land ownership is transparent. If you know a parcel of land you can search the county records office's website and find out who owns it. It doesn't take a blockchain to make a dataset public.
      - Arelius 5y ago
        You can have the advantages of a publicly verifiable blockchain without the hassle of distributed consensus if you have a trusted entity that can perform consensus. QLDB is a corporate owned example, no reason the government can't do the same thing.
    - didibus 5y ago
      > Or whoever that declares what keys are "special" and granted the special permissions. Yes, that be the "network". Which is a quorum of all nodes running the code base. In most cryptocurrencies, everyone who has a computer can become a "node". So, in an ideal scenario, each person has a computer running a node of the network. Thus "whoever declares" would be a vote amongst everyone. They vote by choosing what version of the code to run. The code tells you what "keys" are special. That's the idea behind decentralization. There's no longer just one person that chooses, instead its got to be a multitude of people all agreeing. The nice thing here too is that you could see the court's key owner was bribed in the ledger itself.
      - SahAssar 5y ago
        So nodes elect other nodes to have power to decide the rules for the shared community. Those nodes will probably need additional nodes to handle the computation needed so they will elect certain other nodes to act on their behalf. Now replace nodes with people. Does this not sound exactly like modern democracies but expressed in terms that are tech friendly? What is the actual difference? What is it solving?
        didibus 5y ago
        It's like snail mail Vs email. Same thing, but yet not the same, one allows you to run things using computers, the other doesn't. Most of software is simply finding ways to model real life processes with computers so you can manage those with computers instead of whatever non-computer based approach was there before. The hope is that computers can make managing those processes more efficient and potentially allow for more optimizations. One such thing is scarcity, that has always been hard to model in a computer when things can be freely copied. Another challenge was double spend, making sure that something is transfered without copying or duplication, it's a challenge to model things with computers that needs this property. Another challenge is trust in a system involving parties that don't trust each other. All these have always been difficult to model, now we have a technology that could model these, so the question is are there use cases that being able to do this now opens up to digitize and by doing so can it reduce the cost to manage the process and increase its scale and efficiency, lowers its defects, etc.
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    In the real world almost literaly no one "tempers with the database" directly. And blockchain solves literally zero problems with the actual tempering that is happening: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564
- ww520 5y ago
  Sure. If the state can speed billions mining the bitcoins.
- tantalor 5y ago
  The advantage of decentralized ledger is recording "normal" transactions without the central authority's involvement. A central database is vulnerable to attack, downtime, data loss, etc.
  - hannasanarion 5y ago
    Those problems are all solved by backups, not blockchain.
- yuliyp 5y ago
  They do for some things. In many places whenever you transfer ownership of real estate, you submit a piece of paper that says "I am transferring ownership of X to Y" to a clerk/recorder/registrar. People can then go and search their database of transactions to verify that yes, someone did grant you ownership of X previously, and that that someone granted ownership beforehand, etc. (this research is usually done by a title company, who then provides insurance on their claim).
- ww520 5y ago
  On a more serious note. Public ledger is better than a private database because it's public, open to inspection and verification by all. It's especially important for government and court to open their records.
  - SahAssar 5y ago
    A database can be public. Data in it can be signed. Keys for signing can be stored securely on hardware (for example many ID cards are smartcard capable, which would fit well for interacting with the legal/government systems). None of this is unique to a blockchain and has been around since way before blockchains.
    - ww520 5y ago
      The central database is not verified by everyone.
      - SahAssar 5y ago
        The central database would be verified by the same authority that would have access to modify it, as talked about above.
      - Raidion 5y ago
        I think the whole point of it being central is that it's not verified by everyone. "Everyone" doesn't have the force of law without getting into politics, but that "central" body does. It doesn't make a difference if 51% of my neighbors think the house belongs to me, it matters who is going to get removed for trespassing. That's the problem people have with blockchain, it doesn't matter what the blockchain says, because the blockchain can't enforce anything. If the blockchain could mindlessly enforce anything, I would own your house if I stole the private key. If you need a 3rd party to be able to make a judgement call and unwind legal situations, then the power resides in them, making the blockchain just a database with extra steps. You can make a database open and "verifiable" by anyone (like property tax records) without a blockchain.
karpierz 5y ago
So the court can decide to transfer any assets at will, without the consent of anyone else on the blockchain?
- pfortuny 5y ago
  Yep: in that case the State (the Judiciary, at least) owns everything. Exactly what bitcoin is against.
  - TheCoelacanth 5y ago
    That's part of the definition of the word "state". A polity that isn't the ultimate arbiter of ownership within its territory isn't a state.
- ww520 5y ago
  We as a society have entrusted upon the court system to sort out ownership of properties, so yes, the court can declare ownership. The court issuing a transaction is just like the court issuing a paper declaring a judgement. The consent of everyone on the blockchain only applies to the integrity of the transaction, i.e. yes, this transaction is issued from this particular wallet. That's it. No more. No less. Everyone on the blockchain consents that the transaction is indeed from the court's wallet, not from some random guy off the street. The court's wallet is a well known one and carries some authority. Once the question of ownership is contested again, everyone can trace it back to the court's issuing of the transaction.
  - oblio 5y ago
    So you're saying that in this distributed ledger where we proof-of-stake and proof-of-work and proof-of-doge everything, there are some agents which are more special than other and we should trust them? Interesting.
    - Spivak 5y ago
      Look it’s easy to nay-say. There must be something that connects the ledger to the real world and that something is going to have to be able to modify the ledger when the real world doesn’t match. Blockchains aren’t magic and can’t just query the state of the world without the help of people in meatspace. This is not a fixable problem. It’s just a question of who the somebody is. It’s why I think blockchain for IRL goods is pointless because whatever entity you have to trust to enforce the database constraints could just run the database without a blockchain.
wombatpm 5y ago
Because government entities would never lose their keys, because they are so technologically adept. And who be able to designate that organization X should have that ability? Are we back to verified SSL carts from verisign ?

No need to rewrite. Just add a new compensating transaction to declare new ownership, presumably with the court's private key wallet as the authority.

by ww520 5y ago

No need to rewrite. Just add a new compensating transaction to declare new ownership, presumably with the court's private key wallet as the authority.

cool_dude85 5y ago

So why doesn't the state just make a database then?

didibus 5y ago
You'd want a database that is pretty difficult to temper with or hack. This includes from external or internal bad actors. If the government had a database used to identify all ownership of things, but it was possible for internal bad actors to change the data in it, or for external bad actors to do the same, that would be a problem. With a decentralized database, this becomes a lot more difficult to temper with, so the data in the database is much more trustworthy. You can't just bribe your way to its DBA, so there's benefit to it.
- SahAssar 5y ago
  Is there any proof that a competently run system can not be as secure as a blockchain? > You can't just bribe your way to its DBA Instead you bribe the person that has the court's keys. Or whoever that declares what keys are "special" and granted the special permissions.
  - fastball 5y ago
    Again, the benefit is not that the system is impossible to exploit in some way, the main benefit is that these actions are all recorded transparently, so you can have a complete picture of what exactly happened. That seems better than a database which at a fundamental level cannot have immutable guarantees.
    - vel0city 5y ago
      In at least many places in the US land ownership is transparent. If you know a parcel of land you can search the county records office's website and find out who owns it. It doesn't take a blockchain to make a dataset public.
    - Arelius 5y ago
      You can have the advantages of a publicly verifiable blockchain without the hassle of distributed consensus if you have a trusted entity that can perform consensus. QLDB is a corporate owned example, no reason the government can't do the same thing.
  - didibus 5y ago
    > Or whoever that declares what keys are "special" and granted the special permissions. Yes, that be the "network". Which is a quorum of all nodes running the code base. In most cryptocurrencies, everyone who has a computer can become a "node". So, in an ideal scenario, each person has a computer running a node of the network. Thus "whoever declares" would be a vote amongst everyone. They vote by choosing what version of the code to run. The code tells you what "keys" are special. That's the idea behind decentralization. There's no longer just one person that chooses, instead its got to be a multitude of people all agreeing. The nice thing here too is that you could see the court's key owner was bribed in the ledger itself.
    - SahAssar 5y ago
      So nodes elect other nodes to have power to decide the rules for the shared community. Those nodes will probably need additional nodes to handle the computation needed so they will elect certain other nodes to act on their behalf. Now replace nodes with people. Does this not sound exactly like modern democracies but expressed in terms that are tech friendly? What is the actual difference? What is it solving?
      - didibus 5y ago
        It's like snail mail Vs email. Same thing, but yet not the same, one allows you to run things using computers, the other doesn't. Most of software is simply finding ways to model real life processes with computers so you can manage those with computers instead of whatever non-computer based approach was there before. The hope is that computers can make managing those processes more efficient and potentially allow for more optimizations. One such thing is scarcity, that has always been hard to model in a computer when things can be freely copied. Another challenge was double spend, making sure that something is transfered without copying or duplication, it's a challenge to model things with computers that needs this property. Another challenge is trust in a system involving parties that don't trust each other. All these have always been difficult to model, now we have a technology that could model these, so the question is are there use cases that being able to do this now opens up to digitize and by doing so can it reduce the cost to manage the process and increase its scale and efficiency, lowers its defects, etc.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  In the real world almost literaly no one "tempers with the database" directly. And blockchain solves literally zero problems with the actual tempering that is happening: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564
ww520 5y ago
Sure. If the state can speed billions mining the bitcoins.
tantalor 5y ago
The advantage of decentralized ledger is recording "normal" transactions without the central authority's involvement. A central database is vulnerable to attack, downtime, data loss, etc.
- hannasanarion 5y ago
  Those problems are all solved by backups, not blockchain.
yuliyp 5y ago
They do for some things. In many places whenever you transfer ownership of real estate, you submit a piece of paper that says "I am transferring ownership of X to Y" to a clerk/recorder/registrar. People can then go and search their database of transactions to verify that yes, someone did grant you ownership of X previously, and that that someone granted ownership beforehand, etc. (this research is usually done by a title company, who then provides insurance on their claim).
ww520 5y ago
On a more serious note. Public ledger is better than a private database because it's public, open to inspection and verification by all. It's especially important for government and court to open their records.
- SahAssar 5y ago
  A database can be public. Data in it can be signed. Keys for signing can be stored securely on hardware (for example many ID cards are smartcard capable, which would fit well for interacting with the legal/government systems). None of this is unique to a blockchain and has been around since way before blockchains.
  - ww520 5y ago
    The central database is not verified by everyone.
    - SahAssar 5y ago
      The central database would be verified by the same authority that would have access to modify it, as talked about above.
    - Raidion 5y ago
      I think the whole point of it being central is that it's not verified by everyone. "Everyone" doesn't have the force of law without getting into politics, but that "central" body does. It doesn't make a difference if 51% of my neighbors think the house belongs to me, it matters who is going to get removed for trespassing. That's the problem people have with blockchain, it doesn't matter what the blockchain says, because the blockchain can't enforce anything. If the blockchain could mindlessly enforce anything, I would own your house if I stole the private key. If you need a 3rd party to be able to make a judgement call and unwind legal situations, then the power resides in them, making the blockchain just a database with extra steps. You can make a database open and "verifiable" by anyone (like property tax records) without a blockchain.

karpierz 5y ago

So the court can decide to transfer any assets at will, without the consent of anyone else on the blockchain?

pfortuny 5y ago
Yep: in that case the State (the Judiciary, at least) owns everything. Exactly what bitcoin is against.
- TheCoelacanth 5y ago
  That's part of the definition of the word "state". A polity that isn't the ultimate arbiter of ownership within its territory isn't a state.
ww520 5y ago
We as a society have entrusted upon the court system to sort out ownership of properties, so yes, the court can declare ownership. The court issuing a transaction is just like the court issuing a paper declaring a judgement. The consent of everyone on the blockchain only applies to the integrity of the transaction, i.e. yes, this transaction is issued from this particular wallet. That's it. No more. No less. Everyone on the blockchain consents that the transaction is indeed from the court's wallet, not from some random guy off the street. The court's wallet is a well known one and carries some authority. Once the question of ownership is contested again, everyone can trace it back to the court's issuing of the transaction.
- oblio 5y ago
  So you're saying that in this distributed ledger where we proof-of-stake and proof-of-work and proof-of-doge everything, there are some agents which are more special than other and we should trust them? Interesting.
  - Spivak 5y ago
    Look it’s easy to nay-say. There must be something that connects the ledger to the real world and that something is going to have to be able to modify the ledger when the real world doesn’t match. Blockchains aren’t magic and can’t just query the state of the world without the help of people in meatspace. This is not a fixable problem. It’s just a question of who the somebody is. It’s why I think blockchain for IRL goods is pointless because whatever entity you have to trust to enforce the database constraints could just run the database without a blockchain.

wombatpm 5y ago

Because government entities would never lose their keys, because they are so technologically adept. And who be able to designate that organization X should have that ability? Are we back to verified SSL carts from verisign ?