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.
> 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?