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The problem with most approaches is that they throw out the baby with the bathwater. Sure, you trusting third-parties is shady. Sure, having governments handlin

The problem with most approaches is that they throw out the baby with the bathwater. Sure, you trusting third-parties is shady. Sure, having governments handling over your money is bad. However, having a fully-immutable chain is not the solution. Let's say, you tokenized the ownership of your home but a bad actor from the other side of the globe stole the token. A standard certificate of ownership can still be brought to court in case of fraud, but a token cannot. I mean, you still can bring it to court, have the judge decide in your favor, but the chain is immutable and neither you or the court officials can do anything to revert that. So you'll end-up with a token that does not represent the reality - and that's why standard, traditional certificates exist and are trusted: they represent the rule of the law, something an immutable decentralized chain can't do. Another example is just what is happening to Russia and its oligarchs. Traditional banks can be forced by the rule of the law to impose sanctions; crypto cannot. So they're just evading those sanctions in plain sight by using crypto. You may side with Russia on the current affairs, but this also applies to terrorist groups, gangs, you name it. And it goes on and on... if you're a victim of a phishing attack like the one happened recently at OpenSea[1], but instead of signing with your wallet you filled your credit card data into a shady field, you can still contest the purchase with your bank and have your money back. Even if you authorized a one-way money transfer from your bank account, in some countries you can still contest it and eventually have your money back.[2] None of this is available for the victims of the NFT phishing scam. So, while the technology sure has interesting points, the current use-cases are far from optimal. Society developed trust and trust-chains for a reason. If you're a going to implement this in blockchain, then you'll have to build a non-decentralized* approach from the ground up, that most of the crypto community will bash you for. * To be fair, many consider the proof-of-stake to be a non-decentralized approach departing from the vision of S. Nakamoto. And some will even argue that the current proof-of-work mining concentration is already centralized.[3] [1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/opensea-phishing-scandal-reveals-a-security-need-across-the-nft-landscape https://cointelegraph.com/news/opensea-phishing-scandal-reve... [2] https://www-poder360-com-br.translate.goog/justica/globo-ganha-na-justica-casa-paga-com-pix-errado-de-r-318-mil/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-poder360-com-br.translate.goog/justica/globo-gan... [3] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/03/04/1046636/ethereum-blockchain-proof-of-stake/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/03/04/1046636/ethereum...

logifail 5y ago
> I mean, you still can bring it to court, have the judge decide in your favor, but the chain is immutable and neither you or the court officials can do anything to revert that. That's within a whisker of saying that the entire legal system is subservient to blockchain, and not the other way around. If so it would appear to be the death-knell for all those use-cases for any official/governmental process to use blockchain... ?
- throwaway82652 5y ago
  There never was a chance for them to be used in an official/governmental process because they don't offer anything there. Those processes require a trusted authority to work correctly. Why would they bother "decentralizing" something like this to put it on a blockchain, entrusting it to some unknown third parties to run the network? There's no point to that at all.
saurik 5y ago
> I mean, you still can bring it to court, have the judge decide in your favor, but the chain is immutable and neither you or the court officials can do anything to revert that. So you'll end-up with a token that does not represent the reality - and that's why standard, traditional certificates exist and are trusted: they represent the rule of the law, something an immutable decentralized chain can't do. Unless the token is being used to control some kind of elaborate--and likely magical--boobytrap (to enforce that the owner of the token is the only person who can even step foot on the property), the government would just say that old token was no longer authoritative and that some new token is... which is no different from how a standard title or deed also can't be blindly trusted (as it may have been revoked by the government). And yet, forging your sheets of paper or invalid transfer signatures on the real sheet of paper (how classic titles and deeds work, as in when I signed over ownership of a car once) is way easier than forging this blockchain record, and so this actually still provides a ton of benefit by avoiding cases that might have to go to court in the first place.
- throwaway82652 5y ago
  >And yet, forging your sheets of paper or invalid transfer signatures on the real sheet of paper (how classic titles and deeds work, as in when I signed over ownership of a car once) is way easier than forging this blockchain record, and so this actually still provides a ton of benefit by avoiding cases that might have to go to court in the first place. Even easier is just signing the document using any other digital signature scheme, such as one operated directly by the title office. Blockchains do not benefit this scenario at all, in fact they just make it worse by making it more convoluted.

logifail 5y ago

> I mean, you still can bring it to court, have the judge decide in your favor, but the chain is immutable and neither you or the court officials can do anything to revert that. That's within a whisker of saying that the entire legal system is subservient to blockchain, and not the other way around. If so it would appear to be the death-knell for all those use-cases for any official/governmental process to use blockchain... ?

throwaway82652 5y ago
There never was a chance for them to be used in an official/governmental process because they don't offer anything there. Those processes require a trusted authority to work correctly. Why would they bother "decentralizing" something like this to put it on a blockchain, entrusting it to some unknown third parties to run the network? There's no point to that at all.

saurik 5y ago

> I mean, you still can bring it to court, have the judge decide in your favor, but the chain is immutable and neither you or the court officials can do anything to revert that. So you'll end-up with a token that does not represent the reality - and that's why standard, traditional certificates exist and are trusted: they represent the rule of the law, something an immutable decentralized chain can't do. Unless the token is being used to control some kind of elaborate--and likely magical--boobytrap (to enforce that the owner of the token is the only person who can even step foot on the property), the government would just say that old token was no longer authoritative and that some new token is... which is no different from how a standard title or deed also can't be blindly trusted (as it may have been revoked by the government). And yet, forging your sheets of paper or invalid transfer signatures on the real sheet of paper (how classic titles and deeds work, as in when I signed over ownership of a car once) is way easier than forging this blockchain record, and so this actually still provides a ton of benefit by avoiding cases that might have to go to court in the first place.

throwaway82652 5y ago
>And yet, forging your sheets of paper or invalid transfer signatures on the real sheet of paper (how classic titles and deeds work, as in when I signed over ownership of a car once) is way easier than forging this blockchain record, and so this actually still provides a ton of benefit by avoiding cases that might have to go to court in the first place. Even easier is just signing the document using any other digital signature scheme, such as one operated directly by the title office. Blockchains do not benefit this scenario at all, in fact they just make it worse by making it more convoluted.