> None of this requires oracles and exists today.
While I only mentioned oracles specifically, I should have clarified: I'm referring both to oracles (making queries to external data sources and providing the results to the blockchain), and to external code that interprets data stored on the blockchain and acts on it. I'm not sure if there's a name for it in common use (I'd call it something like a "performer"). Either way, the issue is the same as that with oracles; whatever decentralization or smart contract guarantees you had on the blockchain disappear as soon as you have external code interpreting blockchain data to then make decisions in external systems (digital services, site subscriptions, digital assets, in-game items, NFT's, etc). If oracles provide inputs to the blockchain, these non-blockchain pieces of code provide the real-world outputs.
Example: even if somewhere in the blockchain I can prove that I should own something in the real world, it's still up to your site/service/app/whatever to honor that through external code. If it doesn't honor it, I'm stuck relying on traditional legal means to intervene, just as with any other standard contract. That legal system – as flawed as it is – tends to work for contracts written on the back of a napkin, stored in a SQL database, or coded in a smart contract (though that's probably the most questionable at the moment).
If I'm wrong, please correct me, but I've been interested in this stuff for a while, and I haven't found anything that actually solves the fundamental problem of oracles and the interpretation of blockchain data. That problem is important because it undermines many of the primary selling points of smart contracts.
> Your mistake is thinking that just because the base layer is decentralised that we're somehow not allowed to connect to companies we choose to trust
So, honest question: why care about the base layer being decentralized if in the end, you choose to trust those companies? What did the decentralization do for you in that interaction?
No, there's no utility in that, if ultimately enforcement relies on an entity that needs to be trusted and can override the blockchain.
> A centrally managed registry would never be suitable for this task for a multitude of obvious reasons.
Centrally-managed registries are already in use and have been in use for a long time, they exist in every single country, and entire markets depends upon them, but somehow they "would never be suitable for obvious reasons"? They have already been shown to be suitable, what on earth are you talking about?
I'm talking about a global, universal API layer supporting standardised contract enforcement and value transfer between applications. A centralised implementation of this would clearly be a bad idea.
If you don't see utility in this I don't know what to tell you.
What does that even mean? How is a global API going to support the enforcement of a rental agreement? Or of a bond indenture? Who is actually going to enforce the contract? And what is the role of a global API in that? And what do you mean value transfer between applications? You want to transfer "value" (like a bag of rice?) between computer programs??? None of that makes the slightest sense. Meaningless gibberish intended to fool gullible idiots into thinking that blockchains are some kind of disruptive technology that is going to turn everything upside down. Nonsense. It's a pump & dump scheme, and little else.
Value can be transferred between programs through Ethereum. The tokens you mentioned have value, because people are willing to exchange them for money. So it's not an inaccurate statement. Web3 provides the standardised API through which these programs can communicate.
> Whether they have value is irrelevant as far as the technology itself is concerned.
I'd argue that it's not irrelevant. The whole point of the technology is, at risk of more 'marketing buzzwords', a decentralised way of moving value around (moving digitised tokens which have value on the market, around).
I had a look at your post/comment history. It's almost exclusively cryptocurrency focussed. I'm curious why you spend so much time discussing a technology you clearly don't think has a future.
Why are my comments focused on cryptocurrency? Because I like to discuss cryptocurrencies. I have thought a lot about them, and I think it's an interesting phenomenon from an sociological point of view. Plus, I like arguing with people who I think are wrong.
Imagine something like Robocop hooked up to the EVM, if you put your RealID in the escrow contract and then the ubiquitous camera network is unable to verify that you honored the transaction, well then you have 15 seconds to comply…
We're not that far from having a DAO that can bid on zero-days and use them against a list of targets of its choice. If a DAO can make POST requests it can launch exploits. A script kiddie without the kiddie.
You are confusing things here.
With enforcable, what is meant is anything that can be programmed into a contract and be executed will be executed (enforced).
That can as an example be someone raising a million dollars for a crypto game by offering 10000 tokens for 100$ each. The million dollars are going to be unlocked in phases. 50k for proof of concept, 250k for alpha etc. Each phase have to be approved by the toke holders. If they dont agree that the proof of concept is good enough they can vote the unlocking down and there is nothing the game developers can do about that. That is what is meant by enforable.
I can't help you see something you don't want to see.
Because, quite honestly, I don't what your claim is. You're saying that a blockchain can "enforce DIGITAL" which is a meaningless sentence. Are you claiming that you can write a program and execute it on a blockchain? Sure. I can do the same on my computer. This is not an example of enforcing property rights, which was what we were talking about.
The Winklevosses came up with an elaborate system to store and secure their own private keys. They cut up printouts of their private keys into pieces and then distributed them in envelopes to safe deposit boxes around the country, so if one envelope were stolen the thief would not have the entire key.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/technology/bitcoin-winkle...
how?
it's all based on cryptographic keys, if I stole the keys, how can blockchain block me, without someone intervening?
This is only a problem if it's in fact enforcable. There are many ways to solve the stealing among others multisig.
the only thing the system can do is ask more and more from their users, but there is no way to know if the transaction is good: if it looks good, it is good.
so it can't enforce anything on its own.
a CC payment can look good, but it can be reversed because there other other channels, outside of the CC circuit, to prove those transactions are to be considered fraudulent.
There is no such mechanism in the crypto space, so basically they are good unless you have an issue that can't be solved by the chain itself.
Because the chain can't enforce anything.
p.s. note that I wrote the keys (plural) not the key (singular)
basically your answer is "have a multifactor authentication" but if that is broken by some malevolent actor, I can go to the police.
There's not true fro Cryptos, if they are stolen they are lost.
nothing you can do about it, except begging
https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7dv4a/hacked-cryptocurrency...
"A CC payment can look good, but it can be reversed because there other other channels, outside of the CC circuit, to prove those transactions are to be considered fraudulent.
There is no such mechanism in the crypto space, so basically they are good unless you have an issue that can't be solved by the chain itself."
This is a feature NOT a bug. It comes with it's own consequences of course but that's exactly what makes it enforceable just like physics enforce its laws.
You are still not understanding what is meant by enforcing.
You seem unable to form coherent ideas.
On the contrary, it's a strong argument for using those methods of establishing and recording ownership that are blessed by the relevant local legal system (or, sure, ultimately by those who control local violence, if you want to go all the way down). It's the reason why you get lawyers still insisting on using faxes rather than emails.
Answer: You have a cause of action for breach of contract. In UK/US/Aus/Canada/etc, you can "call" / take it to a court, and they may grant you the remedy known as specific performance, which is essentially a court order to do the thing that was promised. This remedy is available because the thing to be done was the transfer of property. The remedy is part of the law of Equity, a set of doctrines and principles that has been in development since the 13th century. It got its big break with people complaining to the King of England that "the law is too harsh, it should be fair!!!" and went from there, eventually becoming a huge body of law about exactly what it means to make the law fair, what principles to follow when doing that, and how to deal with the many categories of unfairness that come up regularly.
You might look at the DAO hack in this context and think, the Ethereum folks really threw out the baby with the bathwater when they decided to invent a new financial system that didn't have to play by the existing rules. Many people talk about ICOs etc taking us back to the 19th century and the Wild West, but smart contracts take us back hundreds of years further back, with echoes of literally the first people to complain to the King demanding a writ to remedy the injustice of the Common Law. If since then blockchain enthusiasts have come up with something better than Equity, I would ask that they let us know.
Main message from the people in The System to you: We have thought of all of these problems before, and we have solved them all before, and if ye who have spurned the legal system come running for help, ... we will actually welcome you with open arms, like we aspire to do for everyone else.
A lot of important, trusted systems often don't have particularly sophisticated security in every single layer. Homes and mailboxes have simple locks. Online transactions have fairly basic digital integrity checks (ie. you connected to a bank's server using HTTPS with a secret cookie). Credit card chips and card readers are riddled with vulnerabilities. We still sign legal documents with like, pen and paper and a scribble that even children can forge.
These systems are still trusted because trust isn't established by infallible recordkeeping processes, it's the humans and the organizations and the written/spoken promises we make that matter. A legally recognized scribble is as trustworthy and useful as a foolproof NFT. Crypto's complexity adds very little in practice.
But the point is that the centralized system that managed property deeds does not require an absolutely gargantuan amount of computation to be performed to do a basic transaction. And since I already need the state to enforce property rights, why not have the state also be involved in the recognition of who owns what?
My trust extended only as far as a single interaction/asset. The rest of my wallet and the assets within are completely unaffected. A company might rip me off, and I might have legal recourse, or I might not. Such is life. We won't ever be able to decentralise away all trust. A single entity isn't able to manipulate all my assets, or print more tokens, or confiscate my money. The network is solid even if all the 'performers' are not.
To build a centralised 'universal API' on which applications can communicate and exchange value is a terrible idea. Who would own it? But such an API is surely a useful technology.
We do need reliable oracles for external data feeds- prices, weather, news... can all feed into contracts for extra utility. This is a hard problem being tackled by ChainLink and others.
This means both parties no longer need any relationship between the initial sale and claiming the eventual goods. The winery will simply be able to wait for someone to return with proof of ownership at a later date.
If the winery gave out certificates or built some app it would need to verify and maintain that. With an NFT there is very little work on their end.
Ultimately this turns these type of products into highly liquid assets. This will greatly increase their value to a potential customer and the initial purchase price. Which will make the winery more money for the wine it sells.
This can effectively be done with anything that can be claimed at a later date after initial purchase.
Issue is blockchain tech doesn't actually solve anything
There are dozens of popular mobile wallets that make viewing, sending, receiving coins / nfts trivial.
The problem that it solves is that there is no need for you imaginary ledger company to exist at all in a blockchain model, the winery cuts out a rent seeking service and the user gets a more secure and portable product.
Automation isn't just going to hit manual labor, blockchain and web3 will allow for the emergence of fully autonomous "companies" that operate via smart contracts.
Today the way this works is usually with a ticket or a receipt. The guy with the email receipt on his phone gets the food he ordered. The guy with the ticket gets into the concert.
There IS a secondary market for event tickets. Legitimate transfers frequently happen everywhere else e-commerce happens. Questionable transfers happen on the street in what I assume is low volume.
https://www.winemag.com/2019/10/01/a-beginners-guide-to-wine...
I’m not saying blockchain makes this any better, except in one sense: a lot of people with a lot of money are enthusiastic participants. If I had a winery you bet I’d be selling wine future NFTs, just to try and get the price bid up.
Ah. You mean "a centralized entity creates a centralized way of providing and verifying ownership of wine"?
1. How does blockchain factor into this?
2. As always, descriptions like this betray how little crypto-peddlers know about real world. Buying future wine has been a thing as long as there has been wine https://www.winespectator.com/articles/buying-futures-3495
Of course I could just transfer directly to your Ethereum wallet. But why do that when I could explain you need to sign up to 'winespectator.com', I'll email them to arrange the ownership transfer, and if you're trading that weapon let's both sign up for a pre-agreed escrow service online and pay them a commission to arbitrage. How many forms do we need to fill in, and who is processing that data? I currently own my crate anonymously- only the person who eventually burns the token will need to provide details to the company for delivery.
As always, descriptions like this betray how little engine-peddlers know about horse breeding. Managing a stable has been a thing as long as there's been horses.
You truly believe this can't be done without blockchain?
> You're the 1000th customer to my site.
You truly believe you can't track customers without blockchain?
> Or maybe you want to trade me for that in-game weapon.
You truly believe it's impossible to implement in-game trading without blockchain?
> Of course I could just transfer directly to your Ethereum wallet.
The only thing you could transfer is some meaningless numbers. What makes them meaningful is some central, trusted authority that will accept these numbers as proof of something. But then, since you depend on that authority to verify this... you don't need blockchain.
The anti-blockchain narrative on here is constantly attacking the strawman of "literally everything must be decentralised".
I'm arguing that a decentralised medium of exchange through which separate points of centralisation can interact is still a useful construct.
You're comfortable with your assets being codified in a thousand different databases in a thousand different representations but the concept of having a common database representing them as "meaningless numbers" is suddenly unacceptable.
To reiterate: The only thing you could transfer is some meaningless numbers. What makes them meaningful is some central, trusted authority that will accept these numbers as proof of something. But then, since you depend on that authority to verify this... you don't need blockchain.
It hasn't. It standardised the transfer of otherwise meaningless numbers, that's true.
In order for your winde order to work, a centralised, trusted party has to verify and accept those numbers, and say that, yes, they represent something meaningful to them.
The same goes for every other example. "Want to trade something for an in-game weapon": This only works if that game a) provides means of trading in-game items, b) can verify that a number in the blockchain actually represents an in-game item etc.
Without countless external entities agreeing to and cooperating on the meaning of this data this "standardised transfer" is literally meaningless. And these agreements will go as well as they already do in reality. How does blockchain factor into this?
> if you're trading that weapon let's both sign up for a pre-agreed escrow service online and pay them a commission to arbitrage.
Now who's attacking straw men.
>It hasn't. It standardised the transfer of otherwise meaningless numbers, that's true.
Sure, but that alone can have value. The idea being that people have already built entire trading platforms around tokens, fungible or not. Somebody who wants to enable easy trading of some asset (or futures contract or whatever), hoping for improved liquidity, could see using the platforms built for crypto token trading as much easier than trying to build their own exchange. Especially if it is anticipated that physical settlement demands will not be especially common.
To be more concrete: It might be simpler to get your single-vineyard wine futures up and running on crypto than trying to get it listed as a new contract type in a traditional futures exchange.
Now sure, nothing about getting your weird futures contract into some form of widely used exchange requires blockchain technology. It is merely leveraging the existing infrastructure others have already built around crypto.
This is not too dissimilar from the various ways people have found to get say precious metals as listed items on stock exchanges, despite traditional commodity exchanges or brokered OTC trades also existing. Obviously nothing about speculating on (or maintaining market liquidity for) precious metals requires a stock exchange, since we have those other ways of trading. However people have found getting access to the stock trading market to be worthwhile.
Obviously settlement for physical goods is a centralized processes (or possibly a somewhat decentralized process relying on courts and contracts). This is equally true for any exchange, crypto-based or not. The actual order matching process somewhat separate from the settlement process in traditional exchanges too.
I certainly would not argue that similar platforms could be set up not reliant on crypto in any way, and those could be superior (although network effect problem tend to plague attempts to set such things up if any sort of scale is desired). Most crypto stuff is still extremely overhyped, and a lot of interest in crypto seems to stem from crazy speculation, or people trying to avoid their government in some manner. (The latter is not just things like drugs, arm sales, or money laundering. It also includes more innocent reasons like people in countries with failing economies being terrified that their government can just seize the contents of forex accounts, stock exchanges etc, making their attempts to hedge against local economic collapse potentially futile. But governments cannot readily seize crypto wallets the same way, at least not unless you leave your holdings at some exchange.)
Yes. It may have perceived value. I mean, people spend money on useless skins in games, and perceive those as having value.
> Especially if it is anticipated that physical settlement demands will not be especially common.
Of course, you're buying wine futures and you're hoping that no one will demand the actual physical settlement of, you know, delivering you the actual wine. Sure. That's what NFT scam is all about.
> It might be simpler to get your single-vineyard wine futures up and running on crypto than trying to get it listed as a new contract type in a traditional futures exchange.
Call me when
1. might becomes is, and
2. it actually requires blockchain, and
3. has any applicability on the real world (like enforcement of contracts)
> Obviously settlement for physical goods is a centralized processes (or possibly a somewhat decentralized process relying on courts and contracts). This is equally true for any exchange, crypto-based or not.
Your so close to getting it.
> like people in countries with failing economies
I wish crypto-peddlers would stop pushing this extremely stupid narrative.
Ah yes. The market of on-chain assets. Self-reinforcing, self-congratulatory mass speculation and scams. There's an abyss between this, and even wine futures.
The interesting thing is that if you can sell the futures as (for example) NFTs then you put them into this Wild West of crypto enthusiasts where
1) All kinds of unpredictable things might happen to the token between sale and redemption! And
2) The culture of crypto enthusiasts might very well lead to much higher prices for your wine than people who actually know about wine think it’s worth, cf. Beeple.
Either or both of these things might motivate a winery to give it a shot, tokenize a few thousand future cases of their weakest plonk, and see what happens.
Just because your market works fine without the blockchain doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be gained by trying.
On the other hand, it might be illegal because: alcohol.
What's the wine equivalent of apes and punks? :)
I used to survive without a cellphone. It wasn't hard. You just called your friends when you and they were at home.
The popularity of centralised exchanges vis-a-vis blockchain wallets suggests the opposite is true.
In which shape, way, or form is it more practical with a blockchain?
If the wine cellar wants their customers to trade wine, I'm sure a centralized ledger based on a SQL DB would be much easier and cheaper to implement and scale to millions of transactions.
When you allow people to write their own smart contracts, bugs will happen. This can't be fixed, only dampened with a weakened interface to the blockchain.
When a bug in a smart contract happens you may now have a dispute, across borders, over the intent of the smart contract and the actual behavior.
Who handles this situation?
Can I trade my wine at 5pm? Ah no, European wine stock market is closed then.
When you really 'own' the ticket, you can trade it anywhere you want, without being dependent on some exchange that's only open whenever and takes some fixed cut without any competition.
that's why rules around potentially addictive things are needed.
("Continuously" is probably not the right word, unless you are envisioning the rather unlikely case of this transfer happening on an annual basis!)
If I hold that contract and have to take delivery of rancid wine instead of fresh wine like I imagined, what's my recourse?
Basically how do you ensure the state of the real-world asset remains fixed throughout the duration of the contract?
So for actual wine, right now, you have no recourse: you bought the risk. I don’t think this would be any different with NFT-wine. Now and in the NFT case you already paid the winery, you owe them nothing more.
Now if they cheat and give you water instead of wine… I guess whatever real-world contract says you can exchange this token for wine would say which wine?
Most likely the first N wineries to do this would do it as a publicity stunt, and if it proved useful then there would be some precedent. Much of the wine world operates on reputation and trust.
For the vast majority of physical products that are not like wine: you’d need real-world contracts to back your smart contracts and the latter would only be useful for decentralization of the secondary market.
What are we actually inventing here?
What is someone steals my NFT? I would expect a court would say the wine is still mine, so the NFT doesn't represent ownership any more.
What is someone loses the private key to their NFT? Do we just throw the wine down the drain? Again no.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bearer_bond
IIRC with wine futures you have to either collect your wine or pay for its storage, if you abandon it then at some point (per the contract) it belongs to the winery. At least with wine I think there is a lot of precedent here, there are norms you’d want to fit your crypto doings around.
Personally, I don't want the world to go back to "Bearer Bonds", and given they were banned I'm guessing the US government (and I imagine other countries) doesn't either. However, I'm glad to hear a basis for NFTs.
Ethereum would give it another payment option for customers. But also another payment option for suppliers. Could open a new hidden supply chain where a middlemen is not required.
It doesn't solve physically shipping but it does resolve one problem. Prompt payment resolution. A check can take 7 years to bounce.
The longer I live the more insane the current system feels. I really don't understand why we put up with this stuff.
Admittedly, there is little to program, but we can imagine all sorts of auctions, games (tokens becoming playable items in a virtual world, but still exchangeable for real bottles), etc., around those tokens.
The key feature of cryto is around connecting trustless entities. Once you centralize on a physical product stored in a trusted location by a trusted party you lose point involving cryto. Who cares how secure the token is when the winery can switch labels?
That’s a little like saying “why would the winery need Apple to make computers for them, the winery could just develop their own computer hardware and software.” It doesn’t make sense for most wineries to develop its own online exchange system, and the fact that it’s technically possible for a winery to develop its own exchange system doesn’t mean that all existing exchange systems are pointless.
If the central party charges 1% transaction fee, it's a 1% transaction fee. If they only open on weekdays, you can't trade in the weekend, etc.
When it's your token, you can trade it wherever you want.
- first, the token has to be usable by any exchange it's traded on. Different blockchain technologies may not be compatible. (For instance, you can't move an NBA Top Shot NFT from Flow to Ethereum.) This is a solvable problem from a technical standpoint, but given how fiercely ideological different blockchains are, there may be non-technical stumbling blocks that arise here.
- second, there has to be an "off-the-blockchain" legal connection between the token and the object the token represents, something that's recognized legally as a "bill of sale." This isn't a huge hurdle and I'd assume the purchase of the token includes language that covers this, but that legal language might include arbitrary limitations, such as stipulating that if you don't use their preferred exchange they'll charge you extra fees, or even restricting the token to specific exchanges entirely.
This is an issue that I think a lot of "smart contract" proponents just haven't come to grips with yet: when you read "contract" in terms of a blockchain, think "API contract" rather than "legal contract". A cursory search suggests there are Flow to Ethereum NFT converters out there, but if you run your NBA Top Shot NFT through one, does the NBA still consider it valid?
- third, this example is specifically tying the token to a physical object, which adds other complications. You may be able to successfully trade your token on Sunday, but the wine store may still only be open on weekdays.
HN users earn their living by being the best at what they do and choosing the best tech stack is a part of it, which is why they don’t understand blockchain. It’s an inferior tech stack, but it beats every other stack on game theory, which is not the usual purview of the average developer. Hence they reject it as “inefficient” because they keep looking at it through the prism of tech instead of society.
For society trustless distributed systems are better, but if you keep looking at it from a tech/throughout perspective, you’ll never get it.
All the arguments here are tech stack obsessions instead of looking at real world use.
Input: User identity, money.
Output: Digital services, site subscriptions, digital assets, in-game items, NFT's representing real world assets held by trusted companies (wine, event tickets, tokenized securities).
None of this requires oracles and exists today.
Your mistake is thinking that just because the base layer is decentralised that we're somehow not allowed to connect to companies we choose to trust, just like we all already do.
Then it becomes interesting because there's a programmable market for these assets/services that didn't previously exist because the underlying value was not represented in an exchangable form. The outputs are also inputs.
Ethereum is the trustless, standardised substrate on which trusting parties can interact.
HackerNews will continue to fail to see the utility of this system for years to come until it's mature and undeniable. It will be an interesting case study into how experts missed the potential of emergent technology in the same way we look back on yesterday's commentators not realising the disruption of Amazon or the internet.
As to your second point, it's unlikely the end user will ever want to transact on layer 1. Layer 2 technology is making steady progress. See l2beat.com for examples.