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2. first: simultaneous atomic execution of a stack of legal contracts (six is the most we have done) as a single atomic unit, with payment and proof of signing

2. first: simultaneous atomic execution of a stack of legal contracts (six is the most we have done) as a single atomic unit, with payment and proof of signing as part of the system. Also there's no other way of doing an e-commerce style purchase for something which is too expensive to pay for using a credit card. You can't buy land using Apple Pay. 1. See the above answer about somebody dying and leaving the NFT behind. Basically the NFT is stripped of its legal meaning, and then a clean NFT is reissued. You need a legal dispute raised before this can be ordered by a court, and that's the only situation under which it occurs.

hiq 4y ago
1. What's the point of using a public blockchain[0] if this decentralized NFT can actually be rendered moot by the legal system and a new one replace it at will? 2. Atomicity is a common property of database transactions, not something unique to Ethereum, so I'm not sure I follow the blockchain requirement for this. You mention e-commerce style purchases but the legal side of things seem to imply that it's still more complicated than buying something on Amazon: the NFT only has the meaning you're willing to give it; if someone sends me an NFT you issued, I still need to check that you didn't revoke it and that it represents what the seller says. Your website also mentions a "Mattereum Asset Passport" which indicates that the NFT doesn't stand on its own. Overall I find it hard to see what the NFT actually brings, especially given your other comment mentioning legal disputes (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33879695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33879695). I don't see why you couldn't replace all of that with: * a database you control * certificates you issue yourself, signed with your own key * provide an interface (web or API) facilitating the transaction of these certificates between users [0]: public blockchain as defined there: https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/02/theres_no_good_reaso.html https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/02/theres_no_g...
- leashless 4y ago
  That's fine - I understand that you don't see why we're doing it this way. But if you actually try to implement a system that does what we do, you'll pretty quickly discover why we do it this way. A lot of your questions here seem to make fundamental assumptions which aren't true: if you're interested in how our tech works, see http://mattereum.com/lp http://mattereum.com/lp which is a paper from a few years ago which outlines the legal/technical strategy in a bit more detail. With that noted: (1) the NFT is a faster, cheaper, easier way of doing the transaction. (2) executing legal contracts in an atomic way is harder than updating databases in an atomic way. Believe me on this. The NFT purchase triggers a set of legal contracts to be executed, and identifies the buyer. Without the legals the NFT does nothing. But with the legals alone you're looking at months of legal paperwork to transfer a property, rather than a single purchase on a site like OpenSea.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - snapcaster 4y ago
    I'm still struggling to understand it. The blockchain in this case _doesn't_ provide a single source of truth. As you yourself said, it can be invalidated or a legal system can override it. So I can't just "check the blockchain" and know the actual ownership. So aren't we just back to where we were but with an extra step of enriching some miners/stakers?
    - leashless 4y ago
      What we're moving around on the blockchain, _fundamentally_ is liability. The blockchain is an accurate register of who's holding precisely which bag if something goes wrong. When money changes hands and the NFT moves, the risks move around - a new person is being protected, the new owner of the NFT. There's a lot more to transacting property than title - condition of the place, planning permission, 50 other factors. All of that is being represented as claims, and liability if those claims are inaccurate. Does that make it clearer?
  - hiq 4y ago
    > (2) executing legal contracts in an atomic way is harder than updating databases in an atomic way. Believe me on this. I believe you, but Ethereum doesn't help you for the legal part, it can only help you with the database part, so it's still unclear why you're using it if you're talking about some legal atomicity, whatever that means. > The NFT purchase triggers a set of legal contracts to be executed, and identifies the buyer. Without the legals the NFT does nothing. But with the legals alone you're looking at months of legal paperwork to transfer a property, rather than a single purchase on a site like OpenSea. If the NFT purchase only "triggers" these legal contracts, what prevents you from triggering it anywhere else? I don't understand how "triggering" these legal contracts the traditional way requires months of paperwork but "triggering" from an NFT wouldn't.
    - leashless 4y ago
- kybernetikos 4y ago
  > I don't see why you couldn't replace all of that with: > * a database you control > * certificates you issue yourself, signed with your own key > * provide an interface (web or API) facilitating the transaction of these certificates between users To me this is like saying 'why do we need a network and a browser? you could just get them to send you a disk with the file you want to look at and install it on your local machine.' You absolutely could do this on a database with a single trusted owner, but the real value is in the ecosystem. A blockchain allows you to atomically transact across multiple instruments and parties. This is not something that can reasonably be done on tradfi, which is why there are products like flashloans that don't exist outside of these systems.
  - hiq 4y ago
    > To me this is like saying 'why do we need a network and a browser? you could just get them to send you a disk with the file you want to look at and install it on your local machine.' I think we disagree of the relative complexity: operating smart contracts is way harder and less proven than what I described, I think the smart contract vulnerabilities described on https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ show that well enough. > A blockchain allows you to atomically transact across multiple instruments and parties. This is not something that can reasonably be done on tradfi I've mostly heard of flash-loans to exploit arbitrage opportunities that shouldn't be there (e.g. oracle bug) or scale up attacks (instead of emptying an address using several transactions, one could be enough). Are you sure there's no equivalent in HFT?
    - kybernetikos 4y ago
      > I think we disagree of the relative complexity: operating smart contracts is way harder and less proven than what I described, I think the smart contract vulnerabilities described on https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ show that well enough. It's not really about the complexity, it's about the fact that finance is about ecosystems. How things integrate. Just like it might not seem that hooking computers together is going to get you that much, in fact it does. By the way, the majority of crypto horror stories at the moment are straightforward fraud and corruption, of exactly the kind of thing that goes on in tradfi the whole time. There are very few that are genuinely about bugs in smart contracts. Flash loans are zero counterparty risk, zero credit risk for the lender - because if the transaction succeeds then the loan was returned, if it wasn't returned then the transaction didn't happen. This would be possible in a closed ecosystem (but much less valuable - limiting what you could do with the borrowed money), but the number of institutions you'd have to get to agree to support a cross institutional transactional API means that it's not practically possible for tradfi to offer an equivalent kind of product.

hiq 4y ago

1. What's the point of using a public blockchain[0] if this decentralized NFT can actually be rendered moot by the legal system and a new one replace it at will? 2. Atomicity is a common property of database transactions, not something unique to Ethereum, so I'm not sure I follow the blockchain requirement for this. You mention e-commerce style purchases but the legal side of things seem to imply that it's still more complicated than buying something on Amazon: the NFT only has the meaning you're willing to give it; if someone sends me an NFT you issued, I still need to check that you didn't revoke it and that it represents what the seller says. Your website also mentions a "Mattereum Asset Passport" which indicates that the NFT doesn't stand on its own. Overall I find it hard to see what the NFT actually brings, especially given your other comment mentioning legal disputes (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33879695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33879695). I don't see why you couldn't replace all of that with: * a database you control * certificates you issue yourself, signed with your own key * provide an interface (web or API) facilitating the transaction of these certificates between users [0]: public blockchain as defined there: https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/02/theres_no_good_reaso.html https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/02/theres_no_g...

leashless 4y ago
That's fine - I understand that you don't see why we're doing it this way. But if you actually try to implement a system that does what we do, you'll pretty quickly discover why we do it this way. A lot of your questions here seem to make fundamental assumptions which aren't true: if you're interested in how our tech works, see http://mattereum.com/lp http://mattereum.com/lp which is a paper from a few years ago which outlines the legal/technical strategy in a bit more detail. With that noted: (1) the NFT is a faster, cheaper, easier way of doing the transaction. (2) executing legal contracts in an atomic way is harder than updating databases in an atomic way. Believe me on this. The NFT purchase triggers a set of legal contracts to be executed, and identifies the buyer. Without the legals the NFT does nothing. But with the legals alone you're looking at months of legal paperwork to transfer a property, rather than a single purchase on a site like OpenSea.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- snapcaster 4y ago
  I'm still struggling to understand it. The blockchain in this case _doesn't_ provide a single source of truth. As you yourself said, it can be invalidated or a legal system can override it. So I can't just "check the blockchain" and know the actual ownership. So aren't we just back to where we were but with an extra step of enriching some miners/stakers?
  - leashless 4y ago
    What we're moving around on the blockchain, _fundamentally_ is liability. The blockchain is an accurate register of who's holding precisely which bag if something goes wrong. When money changes hands and the NFT moves, the risks move around - a new person is being protected, the new owner of the NFT. There's a lot more to transacting property than title - condition of the place, planning permission, 50 other factors. All of that is being represented as claims, and liability if those claims are inaccurate. Does that make it clearer?
- hiq 4y ago
  > (2) executing legal contracts in an atomic way is harder than updating databases in an atomic way. Believe me on this. I believe you, but Ethereum doesn't help you for the legal part, it can only help you with the database part, so it's still unclear why you're using it if you're talking about some legal atomicity, whatever that means. > The NFT purchase triggers a set of legal contracts to be executed, and identifies the buyer. Without the legals the NFT does nothing. But with the legals alone you're looking at months of legal paperwork to transfer a property, rather than a single purchase on a site like OpenSea. If the NFT purchase only "triggers" these legal contracts, what prevents you from triggering it anywhere else? I don't understand how "triggering" these legal contracts the traditional way requires months of paperwork but "triggering" from an NFT wouldn't.
  - leashless 4y ago
kybernetikos 4y ago
> I don't see why you couldn't replace all of that with: > * a database you control > * certificates you issue yourself, signed with your own key > * provide an interface (web or API) facilitating the transaction of these certificates between users To me this is like saying 'why do we need a network and a browser? you could just get them to send you a disk with the file you want to look at and install it on your local machine.' You absolutely could do this on a database with a single trusted owner, but the real value is in the ecosystem. A blockchain allows you to atomically transact across multiple instruments and parties. This is not something that can reasonably be done on tradfi, which is why there are products like flashloans that don't exist outside of these systems.
- hiq 4y ago
  > To me this is like saying 'why do we need a network and a browser? you could just get them to send you a disk with the file you want to look at and install it on your local machine.' I think we disagree of the relative complexity: operating smart contracts is way harder and less proven than what I described, I think the smart contract vulnerabilities described on https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ show that well enough. > A blockchain allows you to atomically transact across multiple instruments and parties. This is not something that can reasonably be done on tradfi I've mostly heard of flash-loans to exploit arbitrage opportunities that shouldn't be there (e.g. oracle bug) or scale up attacks (instead of emptying an address using several transactions, one could be enough). Are you sure there's no equivalent in HFT?
  - kybernetikos 4y ago
    > I think we disagree of the relative complexity: operating smart contracts is way harder and less proven than what I described, I think the smart contract vulnerabilities described on https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ show that well enough. It's not really about the complexity, it's about the fact that finance is about ecosystems. How things integrate. Just like it might not seem that hooking computers together is going to get you that much, in fact it does. By the way, the majority of crypto horror stories at the moment are straightforward fraud and corruption, of exactly the kind of thing that goes on in tradfi the whole time. There are very few that are genuinely about bugs in smart contracts. Flash loans are zero counterparty risk, zero credit risk for the lender - because if the transaction succeeds then the loan was returned, if it wasn't returned then the transaction didn't happen. This would be possible in a closed ecosystem (but much less valuable - limiting what you could do with the borrowed money), but the number of institutions you'd have to get to agree to support a cross institutional transactional API means that it's not practically possible for tradfi to offer an equivalent kind of product.