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> i do not believe this is true. otherwise smart contracts would not work. Smart contracts work because they keep everything on the chain. You're proposing a w

> i do not believe this is true. otherwise smart contracts would not work. Smart contracts work because they keep everything on the chain. You're proposing a weird hybrid model, like "let's tie the legitimate possession of a real-life movie to the state of an item in World of Warcraft". Things work if you're within WoW fully, or dealing with a physical DVD fully. Trying to combine both into a single system is where things get weird. > if i store something on the chain, and accessing it triggers a smart contract, then you should not be able to bypass the contract. This works so long everything you care about is on the chain. But your movie isn't. > i don't know how that works, but if it didn't work then smart contracts would not be enforceable. if that is the case i'd really like to see evidence of that. Try to think of a mechanism that would force me to have a WoW account, and to register my interactions within WoW every time I wanted to watch say, Guardians of the Galaxy. > a watermark only tracks ownership, but it doesn't call home to count how many times the movie has been watched. I think you're not getting that the blockchain and the movie exist separately. For the blockchain to refer to my particular copy of the movie, my copy has to be unique in some way. It has to have an unique SHA256. I'm saying that if my copy is already unique, it's already identifiable as mine, so the blockchain doesn't really add much to solving anything here. Your legal issues are solvable by just "Look, here's a record that I sold this movie to Bob Smith and his copy has SHA256 ABCDEF0123...., and look, here it is on Pirate Bay" > the question here is, can it be addressed or is the whole concept so flawed that this can't be fixed? IMO, it's unfixable. The whole point of blockchains is the lack of a central authority. Your identity on one starts and ends in the possession of a public/private key pair. The second somebody gets their hands on that, as far as the chain is concerned, they're you. At that point they transfer your stuff to their account and you're screwed. There's nobody to appeal to, because the very point of the system is that nobody can override that mechanism.

em-bee 3y ago
if the blockchain can protect access to anything on the chain, should't it be enough to store the key to encrypted data on the chain, without the data itself? sure, once you decrypt it, you can potentially copy it, but that's not a failure of the blockchain, because the same is true without it. the blockchain has other benefits here. your movie becomes unique by encrypting it with with your public key. you can probably keep a watermark in the movie too, but that only makes it harder to share the decrypted movie, not impossible.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  > if the blockchain can protect access to anything on the chain, should't it be enough to store the key to encrypted data on the chain, without the data itself? No, I mean, think of an open source game. You have both the code and the data. Say it's a fighting game. The game only has effective power if your interest lies entirely within the game. If what you want is to beat a friend in a match then you must act within the game's rules -- use the controller, use the provided moves, and win by applying your skill. But if all you want to do is to watch the ending cinematic, then you can escape the game's rules. You can just read the source, find the right file, and decode the ending cinematic. You can skip the requirement to finish the game or to play in hard mode. You have the code and the data, so you can break the rules. Blockchain stuff is like that. So long what you want is within the blockchain and nowhere else, the blockchain has power. You can store encrypted data on the chain. But since the data is public and the code is public, you can always bypass the chain. You can just take the secret, feed it yourself into OpenSSL, apply the decryption key, and bypass whatever stats accounting/etc might be part of the smart contract. > sure, once you decrypt it, you can potentially copy it, but that's not a failure of the blockchain, because the same is true without it. the blockchain has other benefits here. It doesn't have any, it only has weaknesses. A standard webserver would be stronger, because a webserver can work with secrets you can't access. A blockchain is by definition open code, and works with open data. It can't keep any secrets from you, or to reach into any private storage.
  - em-bee 3y ago
    i am just going to leave this here: https://bitsbyblocks.com/how-to-access-private-data-from-a-smart-contract/ https://bitsbyblocks.com/how-to-access-private-data-from-a-s... https://quillaudits.medium.com/accessing-private-data-in-smart-contracts-quillaudits-fe847581ce6d https://quillaudits.medium.com/accessing-private-data-in-sma...
    - dale_glass 3y ago
      Okay? I don't think you're actually reading those. See the conclusion: "Private data in a smart contract is not private as such since we are dealing with public blockchains" Yeah, "private" exists as a language construct, in the way it does in C++. No, it's not actually private from the world though, and so anything you put there is something I can get my hands on trivially.

em-bee 3y ago

if the blockchain can protect access to anything on the chain, should't it be enough to store the key to encrypted data on the chain, without the data itself? sure, once you decrypt it, you can potentially copy it, but that's not a failure of the blockchain, because the same is true without it. the blockchain has other benefits here. your movie becomes unique by encrypting it with with your public key. you can probably keep a watermark in the movie too, but that only makes it harder to share the decrypted movie, not impossible.

dale_glass 3y ago
> if the blockchain can protect access to anything on the chain, should't it be enough to store the key to encrypted data on the chain, without the data itself? No, I mean, think of an open source game. You have both the code and the data. Say it's a fighting game. The game only has effective power if your interest lies entirely within the game. If what you want is to beat a friend in a match then you must act within the game's rules -- use the controller, use the provided moves, and win by applying your skill. But if all you want to do is to watch the ending cinematic, then you can escape the game's rules. You can just read the source, find the right file, and decode the ending cinematic. You can skip the requirement to finish the game or to play in hard mode. You have the code and the data, so you can break the rules. Blockchain stuff is like that. So long what you want is within the blockchain and nowhere else, the blockchain has power. You can store encrypted data on the chain. But since the data is public and the code is public, you can always bypass the chain. You can just take the secret, feed it yourself into OpenSSL, apply the decryption key, and bypass whatever stats accounting/etc might be part of the smart contract. > sure, once you decrypt it, you can potentially copy it, but that's not a failure of the blockchain, because the same is true without it. the blockchain has other benefits here. It doesn't have any, it only has weaknesses. A standard webserver would be stronger, because a webserver can work with secrets you can't access. A blockchain is by definition open code, and works with open data. It can't keep any secrets from you, or to reach into any private storage.
- em-bee 3y ago
  i am just going to leave this here: https://bitsbyblocks.com/how-to-access-private-data-from-a-smart-contract/ https://bitsbyblocks.com/how-to-access-private-data-from-a-s... https://quillaudits.medium.com/accessing-private-data-in-smart-contracts-quillaudits-fe847581ce6d https://quillaudits.medium.com/accessing-private-data-in-sma...
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    Okay? I don't think you're actually reading those. See the conclusion: "Private data in a smart contract is not private as such since we are dealing with public blockchains" Yeah, "private" exists as a language construct, in the way it does in C++. No, it's not actually private from the world though, and so anything you put there is something I can get my hands on trivially.