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What technical solution do you have for multiple parties needing to transact where they do not trust each other and cannot depend on a third party or the court

by mike_d 5y ago

What technical solution do you have for multiple parties needing to transact where they do not trust each other and cannot depend on a third party or the court system for dispute resolution? I'll wait.

Ragnarokk 5y ago
When you use bitcoin, you actually rely on a third party to validate your transaction. A banking organisation can also be a third party.
qwytw 5y ago
Don't sell illegal drugs? Sure there are countries with no functioning legal systems and extreme levels of corruption but most people affected by that would probably have a hard time using blockchain technologies directly and would have to rely on 3rd parties anyway.
hurril 5y ago
Why don't you give your answer to these questions first? I'll wait.
- mike_d 5y ago
  Obviously given the context here, various blockchains meet these requirements.
pja 5y ago
If you’re transacting with a bunch of people that you do not trust then the payment rails are the least of your problems. Your comment just feels like typical crypto-booster vague handwaving to me - can you give an actual example of such a situation where the existing third parties that alreayd exist to solve these kind of problems cannot be used? Be concrete.
- mattdesl 5y ago
  I gave an example here[1]. The typical answer is "just trust a third-party service" which side-steps the constraints in the question. FWIW there is a variety of reasons you may not want to use a service like escrow.com — they take a cut of the exchange, operate as a for-profit business in a particular US-based jurisdictions, only operate on a limited set of currencies, request personal/private data sharing, and tend to settle the transaction in days, not seconds or minutes. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31190423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31190423
  - hiq 5y ago
    Your example only works because you're considering an asset that lives in the blockchain itself. So it doesn't apply to anything physical, as in this case, you need a trusted channel to transfer the asset anyway, and a blockchain doesn't solve that. Even considering only these digital assets, you have an implicit notion of trust. The xyz.eth representation on the Ethereum blockchain is considered valuable because most people think it does represent what people expect to find at xyz.eth. But the ICANN can change this at any moment by adding .eth to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains#E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom... and this will all be gone. Humans don't live in a blockchain, and blockchain rules don't apply outside of it, so you can't solve this boundary problem. Or rather, you solve it by trusting whoever's in charge of this boundary.
    - mattdesl 5y ago
      The whole point is peer to peer transfer of digital assets and digital state that is recorded on-chain. The goal is not “how to transfer a physical asset.” These assets do have market value (despite your own personal feeling on what they “should” be worth) and so users do wish to find ways of interacting with and trading them without an intermediary. The TLD/ICANN is irrelevant, as “.eth” is a construct for Ethereum clients, not HTTPS clients. And yes, we build trust of, say, an immutable contract address originated by a human, and continue to trust in it years later because (a) the ledger is incredibly expensive to dismantle and (b) we can cryptographically verify this on our own local node.
- ohthehugemanate 5y ago
  I always thought the grocery supply chain was a good example use case. Multiple parties (seed origin, farmer, fertilizer manufacturer and/or dispenser, pesticide manufacturer and/or crop duster, harvester, transporter(s), grocery association, grocer) who all handle any given tomato, all with incentive and opportunity to lie to some other members along the chain, but not to their immediate neighbors. Plus, even who the members ARE is not necessarily known from the beginning (eg the destination country for produce in the EU is decided based on market conditions when it's already en route). And the end consumer (or their representative in the grocery store) cares about the entire origin chain. (By which definition(s) is this tomato organic? How was this chicken treated? What was this cow fed? What's the real carbon cost? Etc) In order to solve this in a centralized way, you need to sign up and authenticate literally all the farm organizations in Europe, and all the competing grocers and transport companies. They all need to sign that they trust the third party service to be a fair and neutral record keeper... the third party company which has enormous financial incentive to cheat, on behalf of literally all its customers. But with distributed ledgers with attestation, the record is unfalsifiable. Each tomato can have its own blockchain with attested entries from each fertilization, spray, and transporter, all added and attested at the point where lying is hard and the value of the lie is low. You could achieve this with paper and signatures for each tomato, but it would be a lot of paper.
  - q3k 5y ago
    How do you tie real world tomatoes to NFT tomatoes? Who verifies this? How do you tie an NFT of a grassfed chicken to a real world grassfed chicken? Who verifies these chickens are actually grass fed?
    - FabHK 5y ago
      You don't understand. People didn't have tomatoes and grass-fed chicken until Blockchain came along and solved these problems. /s
  - cedilla 5y ago
    This is a very good example of the typical argument that shows the critical flaw. The flaw is that there is never any way to actually tie the real world to the Blockchain. It's literally impossible. You can have all the fancy mathematically proven Blockchain records you like, but it's just impossible to tie that to an actual tomato or actual pesticide. We have track and trace system already for crops and they have the same problem: all the paperwork in the world can't prevent someone from, say, weighing a box of tissues instead of the box of cigars you intend to sell. In the end you need to trust someone.
dmitriid 5y ago
When you rig the questionnaire to arrive at the exact answer you were looking for to begin with...
tirpen 5y ago
My suggestion is: "grow up". All of human society is based on trust, and it works just fine and has for centuries. Who would even want to live in a trust less society? That sounds like hell.
- drdeca 5y ago
  This is not a technical solution.
  - q3k 5y ago
    Growing up is also realizing that some problems require non-technical solutions :).
    - drdeca 5y ago
      Sure, but it also makes it not an answer to the question which was asked. And just because the technical solution to a technical problem might not be (/isn’t) a good/practical solution to the practical problem that the technical problem is inspired by, doesn’t make interest in the technical solution illegitimate.
- magicalhippo 5y ago
  I might trust someone enough to give them $20. I might not trust someone enough to enter my credit card details on their webpage.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    The technical solution to that is temporary CC numbers, not a giant crypto chain.
    - magicalhippo 5y ago
      Sure, that's one technical solution, assuming you can get a card. I was just trying to point out that trust is not binary.
hiq 5y ago
That only holds if you donate your BTC. In practice you want to buy something with it. How do you guarantee that you do receive the thing you're buying once you've given your BTC? You need to trust this other channel through which you're receiving it.
tsimionescu 5y ago
Are you implying that block chains solve this? So, I can buy a car from someone I don't trust by using a blockchain, with no need to rely on courts or other third parties?
- swalsh 5y ago
  A digital car... yeah. The more i've tried to hack with smart contracts for physical stuff, the more I realize that's not what it's good for. But if you stop thinking of the physical world, and only think of the digital world, and you use a modern chain (I use avax). It works pretty good. I think there's a few missing pieces of infrastructure still, but the people who "are in it to build, and not for the money" (I include myself in this) stick around to build what I consider the first purely digital economy.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    Ok, then how can I buy a World of Warcraft mount from another player I don't trust by using my Final Fantasy 14 money and a block chain? Or, if that's too silly, how do I buy a .com domain name in exchange for some ETH, assuming neither I nor the seller of the domain name trust each other? These are all digital goods, so can avax help me do it?
    - swalsh 5y ago
      The games needs to be built to allow this, however here's how it works for games that do implement it. This is using the C-Chain. Most games now would use a subnet (which is like a parallel blockchain integrated with the mainnet, but cheaper transactions) 1. Dev Create an ERC721 contract for WoW items 2. Dev Create an ERC20 contract for Final Fantasy 14 money 3. ANYONE can Create a liquidity pair for the Final Fantasy ERC20 with AVAX in one or more of the numerous dex's (since i'm using avax, probably using Trader Joe's) 4. Players Swap Final Fantasy money for AVAX, use AVAX to purchase WOW NFT at any of the numerous NFT marketplaces.
      - tsimionescu 5y ago
ChrisLomont 5y ago
So you're claiming this is a rare case for which Blockchain is useful, but outside this rare, niche case normal banking is better?

by mike_d 5y ago

Ragnarokk 5y ago

When you use bitcoin, you actually rely on a third party to validate your transaction. A banking organisation can also be a third party.

qwytw 5y ago

Don't sell illegal drugs? Sure there are countries with no functioning legal systems and extreme levels of corruption but most people affected by that would probably have a hard time using blockchain technologies directly and would have to rely on 3rd parties anyway.

hurril 5y ago

Why don't you give your answer to these questions first? I'll wait.

mike_d 5y ago
Obviously given the context here, various blockchains meet these requirements.

pja 5y ago

If you’re transacting with a bunch of people that you do not trust then the payment rails are the least of your problems. Your comment just feels like typical crypto-booster vague handwaving to me - can you give an actual example of such a situation where the existing third parties that alreayd exist to solve these kind of problems cannot be used? Be concrete.

mattdesl 5y ago
I gave an example here[1]. The typical answer is "just trust a third-party service" which side-steps the constraints in the question. FWIW there is a variety of reasons you may not want to use a service like escrow.com — they take a cut of the exchange, operate as a for-profit business in a particular US-based jurisdictions, only operate on a limited set of currencies, request personal/private data sharing, and tend to settle the transaction in days, not seconds or minutes. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31190423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31190423
- hiq 5y ago
  Your example only works because you're considering an asset that lives in the blockchain itself. So it doesn't apply to anything physical, as in this case, you need a trusted channel to transfer the asset anyway, and a blockchain doesn't solve that. Even considering only these digital assets, you have an implicit notion of trust. The xyz.eth representation on the Ethereum blockchain is considered valuable because most people think it does represent what people expect to find at xyz.eth. But the ICANN can change this at any moment by adding .eth to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains#E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom... and this will all be gone. Humans don't live in a blockchain, and blockchain rules don't apply outside of it, so you can't solve this boundary problem. Or rather, you solve it by trusting whoever's in charge of this boundary.
  - mattdesl 5y ago
    The whole point is peer to peer transfer of digital assets and digital state that is recorded on-chain. The goal is not “how to transfer a physical asset.” These assets do have market value (despite your own personal feeling on what they “should” be worth) and so users do wish to find ways of interacting with and trading them without an intermediary. The TLD/ICANN is irrelevant, as “.eth” is a construct for Ethereum clients, not HTTPS clients. And yes, we build trust of, say, an immutable contract address originated by a human, and continue to trust in it years later because (a) the ledger is incredibly expensive to dismantle and (b) we can cryptographically verify this on our own local node.
ohthehugemanate 5y ago
I always thought the grocery supply chain was a good example use case. Multiple parties (seed origin, farmer, fertilizer manufacturer and/or dispenser, pesticide manufacturer and/or crop duster, harvester, transporter(s), grocery association, grocer) who all handle any given tomato, all with incentive and opportunity to lie to some other members along the chain, but not to their immediate neighbors. Plus, even who the members ARE is not necessarily known from the beginning (eg the destination country for produce in the EU is decided based on market conditions when it's already en route). And the end consumer (or their representative in the grocery store) cares about the entire origin chain. (By which definition(s) is this tomato organic? How was this chicken treated? What was this cow fed? What's the real carbon cost? Etc) In order to solve this in a centralized way, you need to sign up and authenticate literally all the farm organizations in Europe, and all the competing grocers and transport companies. They all need to sign that they trust the third party service to be a fair and neutral record keeper... the third party company which has enormous financial incentive to cheat, on behalf of literally all its customers. But with distributed ledgers with attestation, the record is unfalsifiable. Each tomato can have its own blockchain with attested entries from each fertilization, spray, and transporter, all added and attested at the point where lying is hard and the value of the lie is low. You could achieve this with paper and signatures for each tomato, but it would be a lot of paper.
- q3k 5y ago
  How do you tie real world tomatoes to NFT tomatoes? Who verifies this? How do you tie an NFT of a grassfed chicken to a real world grassfed chicken? Who verifies these chickens are actually grass fed?
  - FabHK 5y ago
    You don't understand. People didn't have tomatoes and grass-fed chicken until Blockchain came along and solved these problems. /s
- cedilla 5y ago
  This is a very good example of the typical argument that shows the critical flaw. The flaw is that there is never any way to actually tie the real world to the Blockchain. It's literally impossible. You can have all the fancy mathematically proven Blockchain records you like, but it's just impossible to tie that to an actual tomato or actual pesticide. We have track and trace system already for crops and they have the same problem: all the paperwork in the world can't prevent someone from, say, weighing a box of tissues instead of the box of cigars you intend to sell. In the end you need to trust someone.

dmitriid 5y ago

When you rig the questionnaire to arrive at the exact answer you were looking for to begin with...

tirpen 5y ago

My suggestion is: "grow up". All of human society is based on trust, and it works just fine and has for centuries. Who would even want to live in a trust less society? That sounds like hell.

drdeca 5y ago
This is not a technical solution.
- q3k 5y ago
  Growing up is also realizing that some problems require non-technical solutions :).
  - drdeca 5y ago
    Sure, but it also makes it not an answer to the question which was asked. And just because the technical solution to a technical problem might not be (/isn’t) a good/practical solution to the practical problem that the technical problem is inspired by, doesn’t make interest in the technical solution illegitimate.
magicalhippo 5y ago
I might trust someone enough to give them $20. I might not trust someone enough to enter my credit card details on their webpage.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  The technical solution to that is temporary CC numbers, not a giant crypto chain.
  - magicalhippo 5y ago
    Sure, that's one technical solution, assuming you can get a card. I was just trying to point out that trust is not binary.

hiq 5y ago

That only holds if you donate your BTC. In practice you want to buy something with it. How do you guarantee that you do receive the thing you're buying once you've given your BTC? You need to trust this other channel through which you're receiving it.

tsimionescu 5y ago

Are you implying that block chains solve this? So, I can buy a car from someone I don't trust by using a blockchain, with no need to rely on courts or other third parties?

swalsh 5y ago
A digital car... yeah. The more i've tried to hack with smart contracts for physical stuff, the more I realize that's not what it's good for. But if you stop thinking of the physical world, and only think of the digital world, and you use a modern chain (I use avax). It works pretty good. I think there's a few missing pieces of infrastructure still, but the people who "are in it to build, and not for the money" (I include myself in this) stick around to build what I consider the first purely digital economy.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  Ok, then how can I buy a World of Warcraft mount from another player I don't trust by using my Final Fantasy 14 money and a block chain? Or, if that's too silly, how do I buy a .com domain name in exchange for some ETH, assuming neither I nor the seller of the domain name trust each other? These are all digital goods, so can avax help me do it?
  - swalsh 5y ago
    The games needs to be built to allow this, however here's how it works for games that do implement it. This is using the C-Chain. Most games now would use a subnet (which is like a parallel blockchain integrated with the mainnet, but cheaper transactions) 1. Dev Create an ERC721 contract for WoW items 2. Dev Create an ERC20 contract for Final Fantasy 14 money 3. ANYONE can Create a liquidity pair for the Final Fantasy ERC20 with AVAX in one or more of the numerous dex's (since i'm using avax, probably using Trader Joe's) 4. Players Swap Final Fantasy money for AVAX, use AVAX to purchase WOW NFT at any of the numerous NFT marketplaces.
    - tsimionescu 5y ago

ChrisLomont 5y ago

So you're claiming this is a rare case for which Blockchain is useful, but outside this rare, niche case normal banking is better?