14 ms·

Honestly, not even bothering to solve the "double spend" problem makes this much less than it could have been. After all, it is very easy to solve the "double

by mcherm 5y ago

Honestly, not even bothering to solve the "double spend" problem makes this much less than it could have been. After all, it is very easy to solve the "double spend" problem without the use of a blockchain: simply use a single trusted authority. You know how every time you buy a house or piece of land you have to get a state-licensed notary to verify your identity, And then after signing the deed you have to send the paperwork to the county registrar because if they don't write it in their books then the land hasn't actually changed hands? That was NFTs working fairly well long before the invention of blockchain or computers or cryptography.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
Trustless solutions have no place in a world with robust trust, which is most of the developed world and parts of the developing world. The solution isn’t blockchain, it’s more trust and the organizations and governance that builds that trust.
- rglullis 5y ago
  Why does it have to be a binary property? Yes, I buy many domains and I don't expect them to be taken away from me. But I like the idea of having alternative ENS names (yes, ENS domains are NFTs) as some kind of hedge against the occasional top-level domain crisis, or in the odd chance that my domain registrar fucks up/gets hacked or even as some kind of back-up plan for the case where registrars decide to collude and increase prices. Same thing for banking/finance. Yes, SEPA works well in Europe and in 99% of the cases I am okay using my credit card. It doesn't negate the case where I'd like to pay someone where the only alternative is Paypal and with it its crazy fees, odd cancellations, poor customer support, etc. For merchants, the same. Not long ago OnlyFans almost destroyed its own business because it wanted to kill its adult content side. The reason? Mastercard. Should we be telling all the sex workers and adult entertainers that we should be better at "building trust", or should we be able to say "crypto payments can be an alternative and do not depend on the interests of some powerful group with the right connections"?
  - shatteredgate 5y ago
    >Should we be telling all the sex workers and adult entertainers that we should be better at "building trust" Given that the reason there was controversy around OnlyFans was because of scandals about child sex trafficking, I'd say yes. The rest of society should be able to trust that OnlyFans is not providing a platform for trafficking children; crypto payments do nothing to solve that problem, they may even make it worse. They're really good at increasing fees for middlemen though, and it's very frustrating to hear them pitched as a solution to something when the original problem seems to so often get lost in translation.
    - rglullis 5y ago
      > controversy around OnlyFans. I'm not going to argue about the specifics of OnlyFans because I'm honestly not aware of the details. In any case, you are missing the point. I could talk about any "legit" adult site and all the extra fees they have to pay because of the risk and credit card fraud associated with the industry, or I could even just use a more "innocent" example such as Gumroad or Steam, who sell only digital content, and would benefit from crypto-payment systems: no chargebacks, no fees for micropayments, no currency conversion fees, etc. > they're really good at increasing fees for middlemen though. I can make transfers now of any amount of ETH/DAI for exactly $0.19. [0] This is already competitive with credit card transfers for less than $5. Raiden [1] released today a new version of their client, so you can have decentralized transfers for virtually free (fractions of a cent if the transfer needs to be mediated by other nodes, but basically free otherwise). [0]: https://l2fees.info/ https://l2fees.info/ [1]: https://raiden.network https://raiden.network
      - shatteredgate 5y ago
        I can't see how that is the point, I honestly don't understand what cryptocurrency provides there at all. I've seen nothing about it that suggests it has some kind of novel solution to fraud prevention; no chargebacks just means the customer now has no recourse from a fraudulent vendor, so you've pushed the cost of fraud all onto them. It's also possible to get no fees for micropayments and no currency conversion fees with a more traditional virtual currency, crypto only adds costs on top of that. >Raiden released today a new version of their client, so you can have decentralized transfers for virtually free I've read some of their blog series: https://medium.com/raiden-network/raiden-protocol-explained-489b429fcd90 https://medium.com/raiden-network/raiden-protocol-explained-... It seems like an interesting way to do peer-to-peer lending, that is not specific to cryptocurrency. I would be interested to see the same algorithm deployed on a credit card network to see if the fees can be reduced even farther.
- darawk 5y ago
  Trust requires us to give leverage to centralized authorities over our critical records. If you deposit money in a bank, they can unilaterally decide that you can't withdraw it today. Their systems can be down. They can be closed at a time you want access to your money, etc. Or the person at the front desk can simply not like you, and if they're the only branch in town, you're out of luck. Critically, trust like this comes from scale. The likelihood of a bank screwing you personally over diminishes as the bank grows larger. In other contexts, people call this a network effect, and it is an anti-competitive moat. Even if we completely trust the bank, which we don't, this anti-competitive moat leads to all sorts of problems, like stagnation of service quality (look how long it took us to get same day wire transfers and decent quality online banking). Decentralized systems democratize trust. They break anti-competitive network effect driven moats. This is a good thing, even if we completely trust our centralized authorities, which again, we should not.
  - epolanski 5y ago
    > Decentralized systems democratize trust. No they don't, they are trustless. They do exactly the opposite. Anyway, not a single thing you say justifies using blockchains in our life. And banks evolved because they aren't one giant organization, but competing organizations so as others added features so they did.
    - darawk 5y ago
      > No they don't, they are trustless. They do exactly the opposite. They allow anyone to build a trusted application. That is the sense in which they democratize trust. Prior to crypto, anyone building a stateful software application that ran remotely had to be trusted by their users. Their users had to have personal faith in the credibility and trustworthiness of the organization. Even if the organization was ostensibly open source, there was no way to validate what the code on their servers was doing, or where the data was going. Crypto changes that. It enables anyone to write an application, deploy it, and guarantee to its users that it does what the code says it does. That is a new thing in the history of software. Whether or not you think that thing is valuable is up to you. That it is new, and that crypto does it, is not.
- voakbasda 5y ago
  I think you overestimate the amount of trust that some of us have in organizations and governance.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    So we should implement suboptimal systems, proven to be inferior technically, at scale for a vocal minority?
    - rglullis 5y ago
      Who is the "we" that is actually implementing things and putting their skin in the game, if not this "vocal minority" that wants to build an alternative? I don't know of any developer in crypto being forced to work on things against their will.
- anonporridge 5y ago
  The fundamental problem with systems based on trust in humans, is that even if you completely trust the humans in control today those people will eventually be replaced, by death if nothing else. So, you also need a system of determining succession of trusted individuals that not only selects humans who can be trusted, but humans who understand the challenge of defending the purity of succession procedure. All it takes is one corrupted transition. One person submitting to a little nepotism, to poison the entire system. And of course, wherever you create a centralized repository of power, whether it's a hoard of wealth, a position of authority, the head of cult following, or admin access to a database, you immediately create a game for power hungry people to figure out a way to corrupt the systems in place that prevent abuse of that power. This is why so many people are working towards decentralizing systems of power. Hell, even the US constitution is an instantiation of that, with the established separation of powers between the 3 branches of government. While we recognize that centralizing all governmental power in a single position can lead to incredible efficiencies if you get the right person in charge, it is also incredibly fragile and dangerous in the long run. We accept the inefficiencies of decentralized systems in exchange for long term stability and anti-fragility.
  - hooande 5y ago
    I don't see this problem of trust evidencing itself anywhere in my daily life. I do not commonly consider that my bank will become corrupt and take my money, or that the county land manager will take my property because of nepotism. 90% of the websites I have accounts with haven't abused my trust in any significant way, other than data breaches. I understand that these things are possible. But it doesn't seem worth any level of effort to a resolve a problem that doesn't occur and doesn't seem likely
    - anonporridge 5y ago
      You're on this site, so you're probably an economically valuable human with social connections to other economically valuable humans. If that's the case, then you're not the ideal target for corrupt people abusing their power. You would create too much of a ruckus if people in power started unfairly abusing you. Privilege creates a bubble that can easily blind you to the abuses that are actively happening all around you. You and I often don't hear about those abuses because we humans can only really keep track of a couple hundred other humans, and there are over 300 million in the US alone. There could absolutely be millions of people getting abused by people in power who don't have the education to understand that they're being abused or the social connections push their stories out to people who could do something about it. As a simple example, white Americans see videos emerging of innocent black Americans getting violently abused by police in a way we can't even fathom in our privilege, and black Americans are completely unsurprised, saying "yeah, this is totally normal. We've been trying to tell you about it for decades but you never believed us." Trevor Noah has a good dialog on this, https://twitter.com/TheDailyShow/status/877533496515989506 https://twitter.com/TheDailyShow/status/877533496515989506 There's also an element of "everyone hates the violent young men in their community until the barbarians are pounding down the city gates". Or like Fauci said early in the pandemic, something to the effect of "if we do a good job, everyone will wonder why we overreacted about nothing." More often than not, bad things don't happen precisely because of the efforts of people assuming they're definitely going to happen, which then leads to the next generation that never experienced the bad things wondering why we're wasting effort on this thing that doesn't happen.
- xyzzy123 5y ago
  What about the permissionless angle. Right now, anyone can go an build a new notary or governance protocol on blockchain, for their own purposes, without asking for anyone's permission. Government trust is great, and bank anchored trust is great, but neither of those parties has as yet volunteered to run the kind of digital infrastructure required to run your own stuff on top of, and can you imagine the paperwork? (I bet there are some bank efforts but good luck getting on their platform).
- rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
  Humans are fundamentally untrustworthy. The solution is less trust and more verify (mathematics).
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    This belief is fundamentally incompatible with the rule of law and human institutions being the final arbiter. Unless those who make and enforce the laws cede authority to the blockchain, the blockchain (and the mathematics that runs on top of it) won’t be the authority.
    - rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
      Agree. The difference in my belief structure is that those that make the laws cannot cede authority to math. The mathematics already overrides their authority. They are beholden to the laws of physics and mathematics, we all are. They cannot be overridden.
- bgroat 5y ago
  This has been my stance for a few years. "Okay, we trust 90%+ of all transactions. Is there a way we can allocate $1T dollars to get that up to 99% without consuming more electricity than many countries?" It costs civilization 1/3 (current crypto marketcap ~$3T) and delays an environmental apocalypse
- voldacar 5y ago
  >Trustless solutions have no place in a world with robust trust, which is most of the developed world and parts of the developing world. Unless you use a silly spherical cow model of history and risk, the robust trust you are referring to is not rational. Catastrophic breakdowns of society happen far more frequently than people like you assume. Please consider the case made by this essay: https://medium.com/s/story/the-surprisingly-solid-mathematical-case-of-the-tin-foil-hat-gun-prepper-15fce7d10437 https://medium.com/s/story/the-surprisingly-solid-mathematic... - napkin math indicates that a person living in america at some uniformly random date post colonization would have a little over 1/3 chance of experiencing a revolution or civil war - Since the fall of Constantinople in 1453, there have been 465 sovereign nations which no longer exist, and that doesn’t even count colonies, secessionist states, or annexed countries. Even if we presume that half of these nation-state transitions were peaceful, which is probably a vast over-estimation, that’s still an average of one violent state transition every 2.43 years. - In 2010, 8.5 million tourists visited Syria, accounting for 14% of their entire GDP. Eight years later, they have almost half a million dead citizens, and ten million more displaced into Europe. They didn’t see this coming, because if they did, they would have fled sooner.
542458 5y ago
The thing I don’t get about NFTs in general is that they don’t actually seem trustless to me. You need some sort of trusted source that says “this NFT is genuine and not just a bootleg”… and at that point you might as well just have that trusted source track ownership.
- basch 5y ago
  The authors name next to the creation? The source of trust is the authors signature, and societies consensus that the author is who they say they are.
  - Qworg 5y ago
    The thousands of stolen artworks from DeviantArt being turned into NFTs beg to differ.
    - eropple 5y ago
      The kicker that amazes me is that when artists register their incredulity and their offense about this (and OpenSea seems to tacitly be A-OK with the whole practice), the randos pile into their mentions asking why they won't work with the people misappropriating their work in this way. Can't imagine why not. Can't at all. Nope.
    - basch 5y ago
      The author of the hyperlink, not the photo. The NFT is the hyperlink, not what it links to.
      - notahacker 5y ago
        Ah yes, they're not scammers masquerading as the artist, they're authors of genuine artisanal hyperlinks, flawlessly typed with the same hands they lovingly Ctrl/C Ctrl/Vd the image to the handcrafted hyperlink endpoint.
        5y ago
erik_seaberg 5y ago
In theory the state could be a trusted authority on land ownership, but in practice they don’t have their act together. It’s such a mess that you have to pay for third-party “title search” and “title insurance” to protect the lender from the risk that a sale might not be honored because of a dispute about the property line a century ago. I once had an entry-level temp job verifying old claims on microfiche; I could easily believe they still have to do that today.
- jeffffff 5y ago
  are you proposing that there is a technological solution to this? ultimately governments enforce land ownership and whoever they decide is the owner is the owner, no matter what is recorded in a blockchain.
  - erik_seaberg 5y ago
    Bootstrapping a legible system that fully agrees with the current system will be a nightmare. I just didn’t want anyone to come away thinking the current system works well, because it really, really doesn’t.
jmvoodoo 5y ago
> And then after signing the deed you have to send the paperwork to the county registrar because if they don't write it in their books then the land hasn't actually changed hands? This is actually not true. A proper deed, signed by the seller and presented to the buyer, is enough to transfer ownership of land. The reason it gets recorded is so that it's easier for you to prove, and it's possible to get title insurance. However, it is entirely legal, and binding, to transfer property without recording the deed.
- Jetrel 5y ago
  Nominally, but in my hometown, I've actually seen a shithead landlord pull fraud on exactly those terms on some pliable marks — some immigrants who didn't feel secure in either understanding the law nor in seeking legal remedy. Basically the guy sold a house to someone on contract-for-deed, and just quietly took all of the recurring payments that were supposed to pay off the contract and ... pocketed them instead of recording them as paid. Essentially he asserted that they were years behind on paying off the loan, when in fact they had paid it in full. Almost classic "indentured servitude". It's a gamble, plain and simple — the landlord was hustling, and gambling that the tenants would both be too poor (lawyers cost money or at the very least cost time away from work), and simply too afraid to file suit (because a lot of people come from places where if you do try to sue, gangsters come to your house and loosen your teeth a bit). Don't get me wrong - you are technically correct in what you say. But all theft is inherently cheating against the grain of what's technically legal/illegal. Having something on public record makes con jobs like the aforementioned vastly harder to pull off.
throwawaycities 5y ago
> That was NFTs working fairly well long before the invention of blockchain or computers or cryptography. Define fairly well. Title/deed recording is a very fractured system, with almost nearly every county maintaining its own recording system. The cost is astronomical to maintain from the recording offices, employees, to attorneys that complete a majority of the recorded documentation. Finally the “double spend” is in no way solved, title fraud and/or fraudulent deeds are a very real problem, that is rising as much as 30% year over year. What exactly is an acceptable level of fraud to still constitute having solved the double spend problem in your mind?
Uptrenda 5y ago
Fully working? Except for having to go through lawyers, realtors, shitty archaic databases (for 'conveyancing' if such records even exist), and proprietary opaque real estate systems (that often don't even show if a house can be lived in because a tenant is already living there. Have fun having the agent leave that out every time you go to buy a house. Protip: most houses are already being rented.) Even a centralized system with fully digital inspections, contracts, and good indexing would be better than this. But there's too many pieces that are legacy you would need to replace and currently they work very poorly. Buying property is a nightmare of things that can go wrong.
captn3m0 5y ago
My very-similar-idea of signing PDFs for chain-of-custody (also as a NFT satire) included a "use the cert-transparency chain as a side-chain to solve double-spending" bullet point. It doesn't prevent double-spending (selling the same thing twice), but it can ensure that it can be audited.
sandworm101 5y ago
Land can and does move without registering the deed (in most US states). There are dangers in failing to register, but it isn't manditory. Doing so will certainly reduce the legal headaches, but the fact that a land right is not registered does not make that right unenforceable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recording_(real_estate) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recording_(real_estate)

by mcherm 5y ago

toomuchtodo 5y ago

Trustless solutions have no place in a world with robust trust, which is most of the developed world and parts of the developing world. The solution isn’t blockchain, it’s more trust and the organizations and governance that builds that trust.

rglullis 5y ago
Why does it have to be a binary property? Yes, I buy many domains and I don't expect them to be taken away from me. But I like the idea of having alternative ENS names (yes, ENS domains are NFTs) as some kind of hedge against the occasional top-level domain crisis, or in the odd chance that my domain registrar fucks up/gets hacked or even as some kind of back-up plan for the case where registrars decide to collude and increase prices. Same thing for banking/finance. Yes, SEPA works well in Europe and in 99% of the cases I am okay using my credit card. It doesn't negate the case where I'd like to pay someone where the only alternative is Paypal and with it its crazy fees, odd cancellations, poor customer support, etc. For merchants, the same. Not long ago OnlyFans almost destroyed its own business because it wanted to kill its adult content side. The reason? Mastercard. Should we be telling all the sex workers and adult entertainers that we should be better at "building trust", or should we be able to say "crypto payments can be an alternative and do not depend on the interests of some powerful group with the right connections"?
- shatteredgate 5y ago
  >Should we be telling all the sex workers and adult entertainers that we should be better at "building trust" Given that the reason there was controversy around OnlyFans was because of scandals about child sex trafficking, I'd say yes. The rest of society should be able to trust that OnlyFans is not providing a platform for trafficking children; crypto payments do nothing to solve that problem, they may even make it worse. They're really good at increasing fees for middlemen though, and it's very frustrating to hear them pitched as a solution to something when the original problem seems to so often get lost in translation.
  - rglullis 5y ago
    > controversy around OnlyFans. I'm not going to argue about the specifics of OnlyFans because I'm honestly not aware of the details. In any case, you are missing the point. I could talk about any "legit" adult site and all the extra fees they have to pay because of the risk and credit card fraud associated with the industry, or I could even just use a more "innocent" example such as Gumroad or Steam, who sell only digital content, and would benefit from crypto-payment systems: no chargebacks, no fees for micropayments, no currency conversion fees, etc. > they're really good at increasing fees for middlemen though. I can make transfers now of any amount of ETH/DAI for exactly $0.19. [0] This is already competitive with credit card transfers for less than $5. Raiden [1] released today a new version of their client, so you can have decentralized transfers for virtually free (fractions of a cent if the transfer needs to be mediated by other nodes, but basically free otherwise). [0]: https://l2fees.info/ https://l2fees.info/ [1]: https://raiden.network https://raiden.network
    - shatteredgate 5y ago
      I can't see how that is the point, I honestly don't understand what cryptocurrency provides there at all. I've seen nothing about it that suggests it has some kind of novel solution to fraud prevention; no chargebacks just means the customer now has no recourse from a fraudulent vendor, so you've pushed the cost of fraud all onto them. It's also possible to get no fees for micropayments and no currency conversion fees with a more traditional virtual currency, crypto only adds costs on top of that. >Raiden released today a new version of their client, so you can have decentralized transfers for virtually free I've read some of their blog series: https://medium.com/raiden-network/raiden-protocol-explained-489b429fcd90 https://medium.com/raiden-network/raiden-protocol-explained-... It seems like an interesting way to do peer-to-peer lending, that is not specific to cryptocurrency. I would be interested to see the same algorithm deployed on a credit card network to see if the fees can be reduced even farther.
darawk 5y ago
Trust requires us to give leverage to centralized authorities over our critical records. If you deposit money in a bank, they can unilaterally decide that you can't withdraw it today. Their systems can be down. They can be closed at a time you want access to your money, etc. Or the person at the front desk can simply not like you, and if they're the only branch in town, you're out of luck. Critically, trust like this comes from scale. The likelihood of a bank screwing you personally over diminishes as the bank grows larger. In other contexts, people call this a network effect, and it is an anti-competitive moat. Even if we completely trust the bank, which we don't, this anti-competitive moat leads to all sorts of problems, like stagnation of service quality (look how long it took us to get same day wire transfers and decent quality online banking). Decentralized systems democratize trust. They break anti-competitive network effect driven moats. This is a good thing, even if we completely trust our centralized authorities, which again, we should not.
- epolanski 5y ago
  > Decentralized systems democratize trust. No they don't, they are trustless. They do exactly the opposite. Anyway, not a single thing you say justifies using blockchains in our life. And banks evolved because they aren't one giant organization, but competing organizations so as others added features so they did.
  - darawk 5y ago
    > No they don't, they are trustless. They do exactly the opposite. They allow anyone to build a trusted application. That is the sense in which they democratize trust. Prior to crypto, anyone building a stateful software application that ran remotely had to be trusted by their users. Their users had to have personal faith in the credibility and trustworthiness of the organization. Even if the organization was ostensibly open source, there was no way to validate what the code on their servers was doing, or where the data was going. Crypto changes that. It enables anyone to write an application, deploy it, and guarantee to its users that it does what the code says it does. That is a new thing in the history of software. Whether or not you think that thing is valuable is up to you. That it is new, and that crypto does it, is not.
voakbasda 5y ago
I think you overestimate the amount of trust that some of us have in organizations and governance.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  So we should implement suboptimal systems, proven to be inferior technically, at scale for a vocal minority?
  - rglullis 5y ago
    Who is the "we" that is actually implementing things and putting their skin in the game, if not this "vocal minority" that wants to build an alternative? I don't know of any developer in crypto being forced to work on things against their will.
anonporridge 5y ago
The fundamental problem with systems based on trust in humans, is that even if you completely trust the humans in control today those people will eventually be replaced, by death if nothing else. So, you also need a system of determining succession of trusted individuals that not only selects humans who can be trusted, but humans who understand the challenge of defending the purity of succession procedure. All it takes is one corrupted transition. One person submitting to a little nepotism, to poison the entire system. And of course, wherever you create a centralized repository of power, whether it's a hoard of wealth, a position of authority, the head of cult following, or admin access to a database, you immediately create a game for power hungry people to figure out a way to corrupt the systems in place that prevent abuse of that power. This is why so many people are working towards decentralizing systems of power. Hell, even the US constitution is an instantiation of that, with the established separation of powers between the 3 branches of government. While we recognize that centralizing all governmental power in a single position can lead to incredible efficiencies if you get the right person in charge, it is also incredibly fragile and dangerous in the long run. We accept the inefficiencies of decentralized systems in exchange for long term stability and anti-fragility.
- hooande 5y ago
  I don't see this problem of trust evidencing itself anywhere in my daily life. I do not commonly consider that my bank will become corrupt and take my money, or that the county land manager will take my property because of nepotism. 90% of the websites I have accounts with haven't abused my trust in any significant way, other than data breaches. I understand that these things are possible. But it doesn't seem worth any level of effort to a resolve a problem that doesn't occur and doesn't seem likely
  - anonporridge 5y ago
    You're on this site, so you're probably an economically valuable human with social connections to other economically valuable humans. If that's the case, then you're not the ideal target for corrupt people abusing their power. You would create too much of a ruckus if people in power started unfairly abusing you. Privilege creates a bubble that can easily blind you to the abuses that are actively happening all around you. You and I often don't hear about those abuses because we humans can only really keep track of a couple hundred other humans, and there are over 300 million in the US alone. There could absolutely be millions of people getting abused by people in power who don't have the education to understand that they're being abused or the social connections push their stories out to people who could do something about it. As a simple example, white Americans see videos emerging of innocent black Americans getting violently abused by police in a way we can't even fathom in our privilege, and black Americans are completely unsurprised, saying "yeah, this is totally normal. We've been trying to tell you about it for decades but you never believed us." Trevor Noah has a good dialog on this, https://twitter.com/TheDailyShow/status/877533496515989506 https://twitter.com/TheDailyShow/status/877533496515989506 There's also an element of "everyone hates the violent young men in their community until the barbarians are pounding down the city gates". Or like Fauci said early in the pandemic, something to the effect of "if we do a good job, everyone will wonder why we overreacted about nothing." More often than not, bad things don't happen precisely because of the efforts of people assuming they're definitely going to happen, which then leads to the next generation that never experienced the bad things wondering why we're wasting effort on this thing that doesn't happen.
xyzzy123 5y ago
What about the permissionless angle. Right now, anyone can go an build a new notary or governance protocol on blockchain, for their own purposes, without asking for anyone's permission. Government trust is great, and bank anchored trust is great, but neither of those parties has as yet volunteered to run the kind of digital infrastructure required to run your own stuff on top of, and can you imagine the paperwork? (I bet there are some bank efforts but good luck getting on their platform).
rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
Humans are fundamentally untrustworthy. The solution is less trust and more verify (mathematics).
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  This belief is fundamentally incompatible with the rule of law and human institutions being the final arbiter. Unless those who make and enforce the laws cede authority to the blockchain, the blockchain (and the mathematics that runs on top of it) won’t be the authority.
  - rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
    Agree. The difference in my belief structure is that those that make the laws cannot cede authority to math. The mathematics already overrides their authority. They are beholden to the laws of physics and mathematics, we all are. They cannot be overridden.
bgroat 5y ago
This has been my stance for a few years. "Okay, we trust 90%+ of all transactions. Is there a way we can allocate $1T dollars to get that up to 99% without consuming more electricity than many countries?" It costs civilization 1/3 (current crypto marketcap ~$3T) and delays an environmental apocalypse
voldacar 5y ago
>Trustless solutions have no place in a world with robust trust, which is most of the developed world and parts of the developing world. Unless you use a silly spherical cow model of history and risk, the robust trust you are referring to is not rational. Catastrophic breakdowns of society happen far more frequently than people like you assume. Please consider the case made by this essay: https://medium.com/s/story/the-surprisingly-solid-mathematical-case-of-the-tin-foil-hat-gun-prepper-15fce7d10437 https://medium.com/s/story/the-surprisingly-solid-mathematic... - napkin math indicates that a person living in america at some uniformly random date post colonization would have a little over 1/3 chance of experiencing a revolution or civil war - Since the fall of Constantinople in 1453, there have been 465 sovereign nations which no longer exist, and that doesn’t even count colonies, secessionist states, or annexed countries. Even if we presume that half of these nation-state transitions were peaceful, which is probably a vast over-estimation, that’s still an average of one violent state transition every 2.43 years. - In 2010, 8.5 million tourists visited Syria, accounting for 14% of their entire GDP. Eight years later, they have almost half a million dead citizens, and ten million more displaced into Europe. They didn’t see this coming, because if they did, they would have fled sooner.

542458 5y ago

The thing I don’t get about NFTs in general is that they don’t actually seem trustless to me. You need some sort of trusted source that says “this NFT is genuine and not just a bootleg”… and at that point you might as well just have that trusted source track ownership.

basch 5y ago
The authors name next to the creation? The source of trust is the authors signature, and societies consensus that the author is who they say they are.
- Qworg 5y ago
  The thousands of stolen artworks from DeviantArt being turned into NFTs beg to differ.
  - eropple 5y ago
    The kicker that amazes me is that when artists register their incredulity and their offense about this (and OpenSea seems to tacitly be A-OK with the whole practice), the randos pile into their mentions asking why they won't work with the people misappropriating their work in this way. Can't imagine why not. Can't at all. Nope.
  - basch 5y ago
    The author of the hyperlink, not the photo. The NFT is the hyperlink, not what it links to.
    - notahacker 5y ago
      Ah yes, they're not scammers masquerading as the artist, they're authors of genuine artisanal hyperlinks, flawlessly typed with the same hands they lovingly Ctrl/C Ctrl/Vd the image to the handcrafted hyperlink endpoint.
      - 5y ago

erik_seaberg 5y ago

In theory the state could be a trusted authority on land ownership, but in practice they don’t have their act together. It’s such a mess that you have to pay for third-party “title search” and “title insurance” to protect the lender from the risk that a sale might not be honored because of a dispute about the property line a century ago. I once had an entry-level temp job verifying old claims on microfiche; I could easily believe they still have to do that today.

jeffffff 5y ago
are you proposing that there is a technological solution to this? ultimately governments enforce land ownership and whoever they decide is the owner is the owner, no matter what is recorded in a blockchain.
- erik_seaberg 5y ago
  Bootstrapping a legible system that fully agrees with the current system will be a nightmare. I just didn’t want anyone to come away thinking the current system works well, because it really, really doesn’t.

jmvoodoo 5y ago

> And then after signing the deed you have to send the paperwork to the county registrar because if they don't write it in their books then the land hasn't actually changed hands? This is actually not true. A proper deed, signed by the seller and presented to the buyer, is enough to transfer ownership of land. The reason it gets recorded is so that it's easier for you to prove, and it's possible to get title insurance. However, it is entirely legal, and binding, to transfer property without recording the deed.

Jetrel 5y ago
Nominally, but in my hometown, I've actually seen a shithead landlord pull fraud on exactly those terms on some pliable marks — some immigrants who didn't feel secure in either understanding the law nor in seeking legal remedy. Basically the guy sold a house to someone on contract-for-deed, and just quietly took all of the recurring payments that were supposed to pay off the contract and ... pocketed them instead of recording them as paid. Essentially he asserted that they were years behind on paying off the loan, when in fact they had paid it in full. Almost classic "indentured servitude". It's a gamble, plain and simple — the landlord was hustling, and gambling that the tenants would both be too poor (lawyers cost money or at the very least cost time away from work), and simply too afraid to file suit (because a lot of people come from places where if you do try to sue, gangsters come to your house and loosen your teeth a bit). Don't get me wrong - you are technically correct in what you say. But all theft is inherently cheating against the grain of what's technically legal/illegal. Having something on public record makes con jobs like the aforementioned vastly harder to pull off.

throwawaycities 5y ago

> That was NFTs working fairly well long before the invention of blockchain or computers or cryptography. Define fairly well. Title/deed recording is a very fractured system, with almost nearly every county maintaining its own recording system. The cost is astronomical to maintain from the recording offices, employees, to attorneys that complete a majority of the recorded documentation. Finally the “double spend” is in no way solved, title fraud and/or fraudulent deeds are a very real problem, that is rising as much as 30% year over year. What exactly is an acceptable level of fraud to still constitute having solved the double spend problem in your mind?

Uptrenda 5y ago

Fully working? Except for having to go through lawyers, realtors, shitty archaic databases (for 'conveyancing' if such records even exist), and proprietary opaque real estate systems (that often don't even show if a house can be lived in because a tenant is already living there. Have fun having the agent leave that out every time you go to buy a house. Protip: most houses are already being rented.) Even a centralized system with fully digital inspections, contracts, and good indexing would be better than this. But there's too many pieces that are legacy you would need to replace and currently they work very poorly. Buying property is a nightmare of things that can go wrong.

captn3m0 5y ago

My very-similar-idea of signing PDFs for chain-of-custody (also as a NFT satire) included a "use the cert-transparency chain as a side-chain to solve double-spending" bullet point. It doesn't prevent double-spending (selling the same thing twice), but it can ensure that it can be audited.

sandworm101 5y ago

Land can and does move without registering the deed (in most US states). There are dangers in failing to register, but it isn't manditory. Doing so will certainly reduce the legal headaches, but the fact that a land right is not registered does not make that right unenforceable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recording_(real_estate) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recording_(real_estate)