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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

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.

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.