4 ms·

You ask for the counterparty to send it. Historically, the dollar was the ledger and redeemable in gold. Which the USA printed a lot more than it said it did.

• notahacker 4y ago
  The ledger wouldn't stop the abuse at all. USDT is a ledger. The ledger didn't change at all when Binance's public position moved from "every USDT is backed with an actual dollar" to "well we have a reserve of dollars and some... er ... other assets", and nothing about the ledger tells you if Binance ever had the dollars in the first place.
• adhesive_wombat 4y ago
  That would only prove that there's enough gold in a pile to send you some. It doesn't prove the entire ledger is accurate. If you're dealing with physical goods, there's always an analogue hole unless there's a (usually centralised) authority standing by to penalise attempts to subvert the system. One can conceive of "for-now-unforgeable" NFT-isation of physical items, perhaps based on random physical phenomena like metal grain patterns, with the fingerprints stored in the blockchain. But this would be expensive and is a disadvantage compared to the "gold in a pile at least as big as we told you" system. And it's still open to kinds of abuse: e.g. you can secretly melt some coins down and recast them into new ones, as long as you can avoid anyone asking to see the "burned" ones, and you can also file fake fingerprints for coins that don't exist, that no one really owns, in the ledger so they won't need to be proven, but they inflate your ledger's value.