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Ownership is an interpretation of the blockchain and therefore still requires someone to interpret it. I'm not sure what you're thinking about domain ownership

Ownership is an interpretation of the blockchain and therefore still requires someone to interpret it. I'm not sure what you're thinking about domain ownership (I'm open if you can explain), but my sense is that contracts of ownership arent suitable for blockchains -- nor indeed, for any presently imaginable computable system. Rights are fundamentally modal, ie., "what ifs". The exercise of a right changes depending on context, and that context includes how a given society inteprets its meaning at any given time. Hence lawyers, judges, etc. Algorithms are fundamentally non-modal constructs, ie., "always if". And whilst "perhaps" (but probably not) reality can be described by an algorithm, it isnt any that is "always if" at the level of social phenomena. Ie., maybe atoms are simply deterministic, but their aggregates (eg., people) are not. And so it is unlikey any finite computable representation of social life will ever, eg., account for "a change of taste in the law". Blockchains are distributed immutable logs which impose massive computation costs on appending to them. They're a niche technology that, does actually, model money. That's about the best use-case as a model for money. But they're terrible at implementing money. Beaten by a simple piece of paper at every turn.

rhn_mk1 4y ago
That's a lot of words to say nothing in particular. Ownership is an interpretation - I agree with that. It may be an interpretation of the blockchain (Namecoin). It may be an interpretation of the land deed (house). It may be an interpretation of records that a registrar stores (DNS) or at RIPE (IP addresses). I don't see any reason blockchain is any different from the others. People either respect the underlying data storage or they don't. Algorithms have nothing to do with it, nor do computational costs. Moving paper isn't cheap either.
- cguess 4y ago
  Either courts recognize it or not, and no court in the world has recognized any blockchain as a valid proof of contract of anything. Nor should they, laws are never immutable and always up for interpretation, which is why courts exist in the first place.
  - rhn_mk1 4y ago
    I'm not sure about courts, but the government over here will definitely recognize that I owned the coins and that I later stopped owning them - by collecting taxes on the transaction. I have't seen anyone trying to push that on to courts, which indicates that the expectation is that courts have the same idea on coin ownership.
    - cguess 4y ago
      I'm talking about the "use blockchain to prove ownership of a domain" or whatever else people are talking about. Money is different as the non-fungible part of money already exists. It's called cash, and even ownership of that is able to be adjudicated. They can sue you for back taxes and you can sue to say you do not own certain taxes.
      - rhn_mk1 4y ago
        In this context, maybe a closer analogy would be information "ownership". While in a typical database, you can order the change of an entry by fiat, you can't do that on blockchain without the crypto key. Revealing a secret cannot be forced by the court, be it a password, or a recipe. Best courts can do it "encourage" one party to do it. Even then it might be in vain, if the information was forgotten. Courts do deal with it somehow, more out of necessity than choice. That would be more similar to getting the keys to a domain or any other blockchain asset.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  If you want to put the text of a legal contract into a blockchain, go ahead. I don't see why. But also that isnt what is meant by using the blockchain for ownership. For this, people are assuming that the verification algorithms of a blockchain "with some extra steps" are somehow supposed to replace contracts and the legal system. That is what my comment targets. This misunderstands contracts, rights and the need for a legal system. If you're just interested in having your legalese registered in public across vast data centres and provably appended to a log, etc. then sure.. that's possible. But incomprehensibly motivated. Since, of course, our current system ("paper") provides vastly more features. Paper has extremely cheap privacy, modification costs, proof of ownership, etc. Features only blockchain tech could dream of...
  - rhn_mk1 4y ago
    In the context of owning a domain, having my legalese registered in the public is precisely what I want. It doesn't even need to add any value over records stored in someone's desk to be a viable option, as long as it can compete on price. Unrelated, but actual paper is not cheap. Storing it, finding, modifying, and synchronizing between parties interested in the data involves people actually going places and moving stacks around. Even if you think about single-owner databases of records, those fail at preserving the proof of ownership. The ownership of the record is clear - it's in the hands of whoever has it. The record itself - the actual proof of ownership - is forgeable unless backed by cryptographic signatures, and easily eraseable unless made public. And to solve both, we gravitate back to blockchain-like tech.
__MatrixMan__ 4y ago
I agree that the ownership perspective is not likely to be very fruitful when paired with blockchains and the abstractions implemented on them. And I'm not all that excited about money. It's just boring. You could build consensus about anything and you choose... account balances? But sometimes you need a log that can't be altered by threatening to fire whoever has write access to the data of record. The strategy of not having any infra worth attacking is valid against some threat models. If I have evidence of wrongdoing by a nation state, I like that I can put a hash of that evidence on a blockchain and no amount of deepfakery to the contrary will allow that state to create evidence that provably preceeds it. If I have the kind of enemies that can dns-poison a whole continent in order to keep my voice from being heard, I like that I can use a crypto domain that I "own" to periodically update the corresponding nft with the merkle root of the latest version of my manifesto blog. This lets me get new versions to readers who have my blog's name without worrying about whether a DNS registrar, certificate authority, or ISP is gonna interfere. The reason that crypto sucks for money is that the value of a token is subjective anyway, so having an indelible record of who has how many tokens of whatever flavor doesn't buy you much since people can turn their backs on the token's value without bothering to attack the recordkeeping behind it. But the fact that anybody with the knowhow and access to the code can participate--you don't need to be buddy-buddy with somebody in a privileged position--that's kind of cool. So if the hype can carry the technology far enough that it's no longer an electricity hog (and it pretty much has) then when everyone's aspirations about using it to get rich fail, it'll still be around and useful for computing in the presence of powerful adversaries without having your own IT department, or for enabling participation in non-money social protocols at scale without having to submit to a gatekeeper. And I think that's pretty cool, even if I can't retire on it.

rhn_mk1 4y ago

That's a lot of words to say nothing in particular. Ownership is an interpretation - I agree with that. It may be an interpretation of the blockchain (Namecoin). It may be an interpretation of the land deed (house). It may be an interpretation of records that a registrar stores (DNS) or at RIPE (IP addresses). I don't see any reason blockchain is any different from the others. People either respect the underlying data storage or they don't. Algorithms have nothing to do with it, nor do computational costs. Moving paper isn't cheap either.

cguess 4y ago
Either courts recognize it or not, and no court in the world has recognized any blockchain as a valid proof of contract of anything. Nor should they, laws are never immutable and always up for interpretation, which is why courts exist in the first place.
- rhn_mk1 4y ago
  I'm not sure about courts, but the government over here will definitely recognize that I owned the coins and that I later stopped owning them - by collecting taxes on the transaction. I have't seen anyone trying to push that on to courts, which indicates that the expectation is that courts have the same idea on coin ownership.
  - cguess 4y ago
    I'm talking about the "use blockchain to prove ownership of a domain" or whatever else people are talking about. Money is different as the non-fungible part of money already exists. It's called cash, and even ownership of that is able to be adjudicated. They can sue you for back taxes and you can sue to say you do not own certain taxes.
    - rhn_mk1 4y ago
      In this context, maybe a closer analogy would be information "ownership". While in a typical database, you can order the change of an entry by fiat, you can't do that on blockchain without the crypto key. Revealing a secret cannot be forced by the court, be it a password, or a recipe. Best courts can do it "encourage" one party to do it. Even then it might be in vain, if the information was forgotten. Courts do deal with it somehow, more out of necessity than choice. That would be more similar to getting the keys to a domain or any other blockchain asset.
mjburgess 4y ago
If you want to put the text of a legal contract into a blockchain, go ahead. I don't see why. But also that isnt what is meant by using the blockchain for ownership. For this, people are assuming that the verification algorithms of a blockchain "with some extra steps" are somehow supposed to replace contracts and the legal system. That is what my comment targets. This misunderstands contracts, rights and the need for a legal system. If you're just interested in having your legalese registered in public across vast data centres and provably appended to a log, etc. then sure.. that's possible. But incomprehensibly motivated. Since, of course, our current system ("paper") provides vastly more features. Paper has extremely cheap privacy, modification costs, proof of ownership, etc. Features only blockchain tech could dream of...
- rhn_mk1 4y ago
  In the context of owning a domain, having my legalese registered in the public is precisely what I want. It doesn't even need to add any value over records stored in someone's desk to be a viable option, as long as it can compete on price. Unrelated, but actual paper is not cheap. Storing it, finding, modifying, and synchronizing between parties interested in the data involves people actually going places and moving stacks around. Even if you think about single-owner databases of records, those fail at preserving the proof of ownership. The ownership of the record is clear - it's in the hands of whoever has it. The record itself - the actual proof of ownership - is forgeable unless backed by cryptographic signatures, and easily eraseable unless made public. And to solve both, we gravitate back to blockchain-like tech.

__MatrixMan__ 4y ago

I agree that the ownership perspective is not likely to be very fruitful when paired with blockchains and the abstractions implemented on them. And I'm not all that excited about money. It's just boring. You could build consensus about anything and you choose... account balances? But sometimes you need a log that can't be altered by threatening to fire whoever has write access to the data of record. The strategy of not having any infra worth attacking is valid against some threat models. If I have evidence of wrongdoing by a nation state, I like that I can put a hash of that evidence on a blockchain and no amount of deepfakery to the contrary will allow that state to create evidence that provably preceeds it. If I have the kind of enemies that can dns-poison a whole continent in order to keep my voice from being heard, I like that I can use a crypto domain that I "own" to periodically update the corresponding nft with the merkle root of the latest version of my manifesto blog. This lets me get new versions to readers who have my blog's name without worrying about whether a DNS registrar, certificate authority, or ISP is gonna interfere. The reason that crypto sucks for money is that the value of a token is subjective anyway, so having an indelible record of who has how many tokens of whatever flavor doesn't buy you much since people can turn their backs on the token's value without bothering to attack the recordkeeping behind it. But the fact that anybody with the knowhow and access to the code can participate--you don't need to be buddy-buddy with somebody in a privileged position--that's kind of cool. So if the hype can carry the technology far enough that it's no longer an electricity hog (and it pretty much has) then when everyone's aspirations about using it to get rich fail, it'll still be around and useful for computing in the presence of powerful adversaries without having your own IT department, or for enabling participation in non-money social protocols at scale without having to submit to a gatekeeper. And I think that's pretty cool, even if I can't retire on it.