Note: this is my current view of it. If someday it turns out it is useful, I am happy to admit that I was wrong.
I disagree. It's off-topic so I'm not going start an endless discussion about intrinsic value.
> Decentralisation can quickly become federation. Example: a global id system where the "miners" are countries. It removes the need of physical passports and their associated costs and delays.
As long as humans submit the external data to the blockchain someone can cheat with the data. Actually, cheating is a nice feature if you need double passports for diplomats, spies or informants. The result is a blockchain with permanent records with data you can not fully trust because the data did not exist on the blockchain in the first place.
I'm all for a digital solution instead of physical passports but I do believe this can be solved with distributed systems and international standards, instead of permanent records on a decentralized blockchain.
I am glad to see someone else who realizes this point. When people were all excited about supply chain blockchains (for example, a blockchain to verify a piece of fruit is picked in a certain place at a certain time, that the transportation truck maintains a certain temperature) I kept asking what stops someone from lying and putting in bad data or tampering with any sensors along the way? There seemed to be this idea that what was on a blockchain was automatically truth just because it was on a blockchain.
In their case, they limit themselves to verifiable timestamped witness. Someone can still submit bad data, but now you have a log that at time T entity E submitted document D, and if it turns out to be fraudulent you can't backdate or put a different one for it (could be also used to detect tampering with sensors if you receive something that shouldn't pass a sensor that worked correctly yet you obviously have it)
This is all just my theoretical assessment, anyway. And I agree that other standards and toolchain is necessary to add value. Blockchains don't do KYC nor identity verification and a lot of other things.
This also ignores that the costs and delays associated with passports are frequently the point — you can’t have a corrupt official ask for a cash payment to “expedite” your passport / visa application if it’s fast to begin with, and doling out those kinds of patronage positions to the right people is often how you build a winning political coalition domestically.
And yet this happens. Theoretically the blockchain reduces the entry barrier more, while not compromising on compliance and security guarantees.
You're spot on that countries would have to agree, and different blocks could form. It's no different than trade and visa agreements. The blockchain doesn't solve the problem IMO,it just reduces the cost. Trust in institutions will never be replaced by the blockchain.
Politics underpins all of it — a lot of blockchain advocates look at blockchain as a way to sidestep political squabbles, when really the politics exist at a lower level of the stack upon which blockchain governance rules are built. A nation could unilaterally cease participation in any blockchain at any time, and use political pressure in other areas (trade, defense, etc) to get other nations to join them.
To echo the author’s thesis, we’re no longer in the early days of blockchain. We’re over a decade in and nobody has gained traction with a use case that isn’t purely speculative. That in and of itself should say something.
I think the author exaggerates a bit the tone. Sure, 10 years is a lot of Internet time. But the steam engine took 50 years to become viable. Then the industrial revolution was a period of 80 years. Put that into perspective.
I guess, by speculative, you mean the cryptocurrency craze.and I can agree is a speculative bubble, an MLM scheme. But then you also have https://cyber.ee/resources/news/digital-identity-and-blockch... . You'll soon have CDBCs. And when it's here, you'll barely remember what this conversation.
Your bitcoin might be worthless by then.
The technical problems are solvable. The political ones are not.
Can I mine on this blockchain? If not, what stops me? If it's some permission I need, then what's the point of using a blockchain? Why not just have countries issue digital certificates for passports?
It sounds like you're in the "Blockchain not Bitcoin" phase that was all the rage around 2017 or so ("we're going to put cows on the blockchain!"). Most of us either moved on from that to purely on-chain financial chicanery (defi, nft) or became disillusioned with it.
In my country,and I assume in most it's the same, in order for you to sign a buy contract for a house, there has to be a notary involved. The whole process costs a significant percentage of your already heavy purchase.
A blockchain won't solve all the problems here, but it may cut a few middlemen. And it doesn't have to be on ethereum or bitcoin. The Estonian (or is it the Finnish?) Government already uses a blockchain for their digital id system.
As for state IDs... why not just a centralized database with a public API? What does decentralization achieve for a system that is fundamentally centralized. Nobody can issue an ID except the government in this case.
if you trust the court, why not just have them store everything on some mysql database and execute all the ""smart"" contracts as regular java code? blockchains are necessarily orders of magnitude worse in terms of performance. why do you want to use an extremely slow linked list based DB?
I’m all for the central database. To enter data into it the government will appoint an agency which in turn will appoint individuals after they pass exams or get their license. The said individuals will have to fill in regular reports that had to be somehow processed and analyzed. Also each such individual required to keep records in a safe manner, sometimes this means hiring a security and a compliance officer. At this point it is not clear if the cost of maintaining the agency and all that people is less than automating the agency of the blockchain.
the only difference between centralized databases and blockchains is the property of trustlessness. everything else can be done much more efficiently by normal databases. if you dont need trustlessness then you dont need blockchains
This is just one half. The other half is blockchain and smart contracts also replace all the people involved in controlling access to a central database. I can imagine a smart contract that would allow me to transfer ownership of my car to you and get paid in return. I cannot imagine an API to a central database that can do the same. One thing you can do to defeat my point is to show how such an API can be built.
…so you still need a lawyer and nothing has actually changed?
Today the job of a middleman/clerk is to modify a centralized database in a regulated way. They got their licenses, exams, special education and so on. There is a government machinery behind every such database - agencies, controllers, educators, bookkeepers, etc. While you may be paying $4 for a notary signature you might be paying way more from your tax money to keep governing bodies running across the country.
My point is statement that a centralized database is cheap because it is easy to modify simply ignores governance cost which might be huge.
As if laws and regulations just came about by a random process for no reason.
Blockchains can reduce number of middleman we have to deal with. The open question is at what cost.
This is the kind of thing at first glance people say is made for the blockchain, but in reality the incumbent solution is actually pretty reasonable and the actual gains from a new system are negligible.
This is especially true when you learn about the nasty edge cases title insurance helps with. A lot of people trying to drum up buyers for their hashes talk like the value comes from recording the chain of transfers when you're really paying for things like handling cases where, say, a surveyor made a mistake in 1952 and now two landowners have legal ownership of overlapping properties or some mistake in probate three owners ago meant that someone has a claim on 10% of it.
In order to replace title insurance and make it so anybody can verify the state of a property you need to first make all liens ever live on the blockchain. That's the hard part here. If it is possible to have a lien on a home without that appearing on a blockchain then there is still a need for somebody to review the title.
Further, there is no need for decentralization! The state can simply operate a centralized append-only database where transactions are recorded and liens are created and publish that to everybody.
* https://wowa.ca/ontario-housing-market
When purchase through a lawyer, title insurance in Ontario is around $250:
* https://www.getwhatyouwant.ca/what-the-heck-is-title-insuran...
250 / 922000 = 0.000271 or 0.03%. I've had bar tabs larger that $250.
I guess I should have driven to Maine.
if the estonian government is operating and enforcing it, why do you even need the blockchain bit? just put the database onto mysql and and make a website for people to transfer ownership online
You might think this is silly, but fake selling of homes is actually thing that happens! I don't just mean that regulators would do it for gatekeeping purposes, I mean there would be a real need for this. In the bizarre circumstance that this move to the blockchain actually happened for home ownership, the HN gestalt would rapidly be screaming for legislation and regulation around blockchain changes.
Which means, once again, that blockchain is solving a problem that doesn't exist here. The problem with home ownership and the problem notaries are solving was never that the authority was too centralized into the relevant governing bodies.
That's the reason why after 11 years blockchain has exactly one use case, and even that one is dubiously solved IMHO. It brilliantly solves problems we don't actually have.
Compare the example with withdrawing money: you can go to an ATM and withdraw money for no fee, depending of the country. Do it in the bank, there I an associated fee.
The legal system would still have to adopt it though. And it's an industry less prone to digital innovation. And there is no financial incentive, as there is no narrow profit margin you need to optimize. So yes, it may never happen.
Put another way, the first commercial typewriter was sold in 1874 and was an immediate success. By the 1880s, typist was a booming field — especially for women seeking employment outside of the home.
Blockchains have been commercially active for 13 years at this point. If Bitcoin shut off tomorrow, the only reason anyone who isn’t involved in shilling it would know is that all of the speculators would be screaming for government bailouts.
The GP pulled one of the cryptobro rhetorical scams: X existing technology took Y years to catch on!
Besides the statements rarely actually being true they're nonsensical. A typewriter (or whatever technology they point out) has obvious utility. No honest assessment of whatever they can bring up will say that X technology is useless. Maybe at the time typewriters we're released fountain pen manufacturers or penmanship clubs said they were useless. But they have a vested interest in the status quo.
I don't think most anyone pointing out flaws in cryptocurrencies have a vested interest in the status quo. I certainly don't. I don't and doubt you have some sort of short against Bitcoin or own a bank full of fiat currency.
The cryptobros can't seem to fathom that they got sold on a bunch of useless shit. When they're not at the top of the Ponzi scheme they can't seem to conceptualize that they've been had. It's kind of sad to see. At the same time it's infuriating because their scam is literally wasting a small country worth of electricity to mint Geoffrey dollars.
I think it’s more that they can’t afford to acknowledge it: the only way cryptocurrency has meaning is if they can line up a buyer, and as soon as you allow that to be questioned those big dreams about becoming as rich as the people selling them on “web3” start to look pretty unlikely. A lot of these people have built their vision of the future on very high returns and the only way that happens is if they donate their time pro bono to the major investors backing these companies.
It's like having access to a completely deregulated bank ran by the mafia that has an API anyone can use. I think there's use cases for that, though maybe not the ones the community usually mentions.
Same with the bank. I don't think I ever had to speak to my bank in the 8 years I've been with them, or even been to their branch for that matter. You do everything online or in the app.
Even the word technophile has positive connotations as opposed to something deviant in our society. We don't even have a word for a deviant technophile , deviant over obsession with nonsense and "the next big thing".
By now you can also do things that benefit from the network effect of crypto enthusiasts, for example, you can sell JPEGs from a no-name artist for significant amounts of money, which would historically be difficult for outsider-art, regardless of the fact that you're not even selling the actual rights to the images. It also proved to be an interesting way to speculate on internet memes.
There's millions of people using this ecosystem, even if it ends up being overall net negative for the world and a temporary technological distraction, I think one should be able to neutrally assess what it's being used for. You may not like it but it's like saying a nuclear bomb has no use. You may not like what it's being used for, and it may be immoral or illegal, but to say there's no uses when clearly millions are engaging with it and doing "stuff", seems short-sighted for the purposes of discussion.
So it's only good for circumventing crippling social phobia? How many people suffer from those? And, hey, I've been using non-Blockchain-based online banking since around the turn of the century; can't recall when I last spoke to a bank teller, but it must have been well over a decade ago[1]. So even that use case is adequately solved without Blockchain.
___
[1]: Except for buying some foreign cash before going on vacation, that may have been in 2012. Do the clerks at Forex count as bank tellers?
I think there are problems that are suited to be solved on the blockchain - like land titles, domain names, etc. But the existing solution to those problems are adequate, and the sudden change is too costly.
I almost paid for something with bitcoin once because they weren't taking anything else. Nothing illegal but also something I wouldn't want the world to know I paid for. I ended up choosing not to because I didn't want that transaction forever stored on the blockchain.
For supply chain issues the Oracle problem is very apparent. How does your smart contract know if the shipment has actually reached its destination?
A digital signature on a blockchain somewhere means nothing. How do you connect it with the real property? All of the other above things go some way to demonstrating a real connection to the property. A block chain does not. It's the same problem all blockchain solutions have: verifying the data at the point of entry to the block chain. If that is distributed and can not be trusted and verified remotely, then the existence of it in a block chain does not help.
I'll create PropertyBlock™ blockchain tomorrow and sign a block with your property address it over to myself. Worthless.
In the UK ownership is determined by a centralised land registry, and it must be registered if ownership is to change hands.
I'm not sold on the idea of a society without a central government, but I think the blockchain would help — or even enable — such an experiment.
Blockchains do nothing at all to help anything about this situation. You could use a blockchain to manage ownership, but it would be far more efficient to use a central database of some kind that is held by whatever organization is responsible for enforcing property rights. In the end you are not going to care how your ownership is managed, you are only going to care that, if someone tries to violate your rights, the police will come and protect you. You need to trust that the enforcement will actually be applied, but what difference does it make if you use a blockchain?
That does require that most of the society agrees on some set of principles, but that's true of a centralized government too: most of the society has to agree they are legitimate. Going back to the decentralized society, everyone would agree that the blockchain determines ownership and currency. So, an organization that accept those is viewed as legitimate, one that doesn't is illegitimate. In that scenario, illegitimate organizations would be less stable than legitimate ones.
So, the existence of a system that allows people to all agree in things like currency and ownership without giving that power to one specific organization is a step forward into making decentralized societies possible. Is it sufficient? Most likely not.
Ah yes. Because it's a well-known fact that it's so easy for everyone to agree on something.
What, did you read Snow Crash as u- in stead of dystopian? What's to say they'll all agree?!?
The important point is what happens when two of those organisations disagree. What happens when I have Mr Chen's Robot Dog Republic saying I own a property -- because they have the blockchain to prove it -- and evicting you on my behalf, while you have the Cosa Nostra Pizza Delivery Co. saying you own it -- because they have the blockchain to prove that -- and evicting me on your behalf?
Civil war, that's what happens.
Decentralising stuff that everyone needs to agree on sucks.
Right, gotcha. But doesn't that work just as well with only a centralised government?
Why should my band of armed thugs defer to what it says on the blockchain when they could instead hit you with a $5 wrench until you vacate the premises? https://xkcd.com/538
I may even be inclined to write down some rules and introduce a process to resolve conflicts without unnecessary damage to people and property.
(In this hypothetical scenario any form of land registry is only as valid as I say it is.)
Thereby reinventing the police
> I may even be inclined to write down some rules and introduce a process to resolve conflicts without unnecessary damage to people and property.
and the courts.
But maybe that was your point?
With a big enough population at least one government and a basic bureaucracy will be formed by someone.
A few people in the Blockchain space seem to think that technology can fundamentally change that.
I'm hopeful that when the Ponzi schemes fade away, we'll end up with a slightly more informed populace that has inadvertently received an introduction to political science, state-building, the origins of power, etc. Civics teachers take note! :)
That feels a bit like saying that everyone will pitch in to stop mugging since we all carry physical cash in the same way. Maybe some civilians would intervene some of the time, but most will not risk their own bodily autonomy to defend another's property.
Issuing deeds and currency feels like the easy part of creating an agreed upon land registry or economy. I have a printer and know how to use SQLite, so nothing is stopping me from issuing my own physical currency or deeds today. I could even save paper and put them on my own personal blockchain. Convincing others to honor my currency or deeds sounds like the hard part.
The big thing about blockchains is that it allows people to all agree on a certain asset, without giving control of that asset to a single party. That is big news for anyone group wanting to live in a decentralized society, because it was one of the big problems.
If the local government and population is on your side, then you're fine.
If however you're a minority that's now deemed to be the enemy, then what supposedly belongs to you doesn't matter one bit. You can prove it as mathematically as you want, and you can have your neighbors on your side, but if a bigger army of goons shows up to take your stuff, they'll take it.
Ultimately this is an entirely political problem, and the blockchain will simply be completely ignored if things go to shit.
1. The developers. Somebody has to develop the software, and no matter what, this ends up being a very select group. If you have multiple groups, that's still not a lot of people and they'll have to cooperate somehow, which will result in some sort of system you're not involved with.
2. The miners. They group up into pools, and there's not that many of them that are big enough to matter.
Those two groups are the ones truly in control, and they're unelected, unaccountable, and have their own interests and agendas. If you think the banks are bad, then using a system made of a cabal distributed among the globe is hardly better.
Except for when it breaks spectacularly every now and then.
Log4j and npm are bad enough as they are; who wants them in control of their home and money?
Not in the way needed. You probably means git, which yes, allows for distributed development in that unlike previous systems it doesn't rely on a central server to exchange code.
But that doesn't mean people don't organize. I review people's code. People review mine. There's a list of people that's been agreed that are in control of a project. There's somebody who owns the domain, somebody who builds installers and makes releases, somebody who can say "no" to adding some code.
> Besides, as long as you speak the same protocol and use the same data, lots of people can roll out their own software.
Cryptocurrency is to a huge extent about the contents and management of this data. So nearly anything interesting will need cooperation. This means a small group getting together and figuring out how to change the protocol.
> But indeed, if a small enough percentage of the population control enough of the mining power things could collapse or at least degenerate back to a centralized society.
It already is centralized. The decentralization is more theory than practice.
> It is up to the members of a decentralized society to do their share of mining and be in the lookout for that not to happen.
They already failed, then. And no wonder, because 99.9% of the world is not even capable of having opinions here. Like if you show a random person a diff from the bitcoin git, they couldn't tell you what it does, let alone if it's a good or bad thing.
Even if you can, there's lock-in. If you already put a significant amount of effort and money into say, BTC, there's a cost to pulling out. So a lot of people will stick around even if things aren't exactly to their liking. This means there's a variety of changes that can be made for the worse with impunity on the part of the people in control.
> In order for a society to be decentralized and remain so, a big majority has to want that and hold it as one of their values.
Then it's an outright impossibility. It's the downfall of all libertarian schemes, the idea that everyone is passionate about governance. The vast majority of people want to lounge on the sofa, not to attend regular meetings with their neighbors to discuss a variety of issues like roads and sanitation.
Really, a democracy offers lots of ways of participating that the vast majority doesn't use. I don't see crypto changing that.
Once everyone agrees on anything, they can agree to have a centralised real estate ownership registry. Or a whole centralised government.
Your idea seems to be a thought experiment with weird priors. (Feels like that makes it rather meaningless.)
What measures?
That's beside the point, though. I'm just noting that the possibility of have distributed deeds does make it possible to have some of the benefits of a centralized government: deeds and currency, without having one. That obviously only works if everyone in the society has come to the agreement that those things are valuable (just like in case of central governments too). But the point is just that you don't need a central person with all the power of issuing them.
No - it is the point.
> I'm just noting that the possibility of have distributed deeds does make it possible to have some of the benefits of a centralized government:
No, it doesn’t make anything possible unless there is an enforcement mechanism.
> No, it doesn’t make anything possible unless there is an enforcement mechanism.
I was trying to say it solves some of the problems, though I may have worded it awkwardly.
A Blockchain without the ability to initiate (and complete) such a process is worthless for questions of real world ownership.
Of course a Blockchain could be empowered to do that....through a law.
Gets even more interesting when people can buy puts and calls on someones liquidation via options dex.
A few of the ex-mil people in a DAO i'm apart of are really interested in this space growing for services like that, for obvious reasons.
How does the blockchain know that said access has been secured? Is it up to the original requestor to confirm this? If so, what if they're malicious and don't want to do so as to not give up their collateral? If it's down to a neutral third-party acting as an oracle, what prevents said third-party from being bribed/coerced/hacked into providing false data to the blockchain?
All of this can be solved by the law (eventually escalating to people allowed to use deadly force), but at that point why do you even need a blockchain?
Blockchain only works for assets that live entirely on the blockchain, such as cryptocurrencies. Anything that lives in the real-world is a bad use-case for blockchains as you now need a centralized, trusted third-party to sync the state of the blockchain with the state of the real world, at which point you may just do away with the blockchain entirely and let the third-party run a good old database.
Auger[0] has something like this:
"Reputation (REP) and (REPv2) is a cryptocurrency, used by reporters during market dispute phases of Augur. REP and REPv2 holders must perform work, in the form of staking their REP or REPv2 on correct outcomes, to receive a portion of the markets settlement fees. If you do not report correctly, you do not get the fees. If you report incorrectly, you lose your REP or REPv2. If you don’t participate in a fork (when the network has a very large dispute over an outcome), you permanently lose your ability to migrate your REP or REPv2 to a forked universe, making it functionally useless within the used version of the Augur Protocol, and in theory making it worthless. Passive holders of Reputation (REP or REPv2) that are not using their Reputation (REP or REPv2) within the Augur protocol to stake on disputes and forks are penalized. The treatment of REP and REPv2 within the Augur protocol is governed not by the Forecast Foundation but by the protocols smart contracts as described in the Augur white paper and documentation."
Other protocols may handle things differently.
> All of this can be solved by the law (eventually escalating to people allowed to use deadly force), but at that point why do you even need a blockchain?
Assuming if the law in all jurisdictions around the world were as sufficient for all cases presently and into the future. Also this assumes that its not the enforcers of a particular law aren't also the ones that the on chain claimant wants to take action against (again, the payout would need to be high enough for those to incentivize action against a particular jurisdictions enforcers, which need not necessarily mean engaging on the property, but anything to get the enforcers to back off even going after friends and family and their property in retaliation [which is more doable in jurisdictions who databases with such sensitive information have been compromised])
> Assuming if the law in all jurisdictions around the world were as sufficient for all cases presently and into the future.
Are you saying that there should be one global jurisdiction and law? That is a completely separate can of worms.
At the moment the only law that matters is the law that can be enforced, which is generally the law of the country where you reside or have assets that can be seized, and this system appears to work well enough for everyone involved.
The law can also be changed if needed. I'm not sure how a blockchain can account for all future use-cases without changes either.
Well according to how auger has it, those people will lose their funds they had to put up as collateral to vote on a particular market dispute outcome either through proof of their wrong decision or by a network fork if many people are in disagreement on an outcome and the many people don't bother migrating over to the forks ("you permanently lose your ability to migrate your REP or REPv2 to a forked universe, making it functionally useless within the used version of the Augur Protocol, and in theory making it worthless"). Seems like those people will have to continually pay for tokens that will be worthless as the network keeps forking as other non coerced reporters do not.
> Are you saying that there should be one global jurisdiction and law? That is a completely separate can of worms.
No, many contracts may operate simultaneously, and some even over shared claims in market disputes (at least what i get from how auger describes itself as enabling). I don't dissagree that it can be of worms though, but people can be incentivized during every step of the way in a variety of different ways. I just wanted to point that it is possible now with the tools that are viable that don't need to rely on a particular jurisdictions laws.
> The law can also be changed if needed. I'm not sure how a blockchain can account for all future use-cases without changes either.
The way to change laws may or may not be compatible with someone uploading a new contract and particular protocols users agreeing to abide by it with their assets at stake on market disputes.
> many contracts may operate simultaneously, and some even over shared claims in market disputes
Potentially - I don't disagree that the tech can technically do this, but ultimately it's still down to 1) people choosing to use it (as opposed to traditional contracts enforced by judges & subsequent law enforcement personnel) and 2) that whatever outcome reached by the blockchain can successfully be enforced in the real world - you'd need a government with jurisdiction upon the disputed assets to recognize the blockchain's outcome as legitimate and enforce it. People are unlikely to do "1" if they're not confident that "2" will happen especially if the problem can be solved by existing legal contracts who unlike blockchain-based solutions have a track record of being enforced.
Ultimately I don't think we'll ever reach an agreement here so I think the best course of action is that we stick to our opinions and either of us can tell the other one "told you so" in a decade as we see how the situation evolved.
What if it's a majority that is coerced (or bribed, frightened, etc) into lying? Then it's the truth that will be left behind as "reality" forks in favour of the usurper, isn't it?
Do you think I should risk my life to enforce your property rights? I have two kids and I want to watch them grow up, I can't die because someone with a gun claimed ownership of a stranger's house.
Without an organized government of some kind, society does not scale beyond about 200 people. We just cannot keep track of relationships and trust and whatnot beyond that. I live in metropolitan area with a population of 25 million people; a distributed group of vigilantes enforcing property rights is not even remotely workable here, and this is not even the largest city in the world. My in-laws live in a suburban area with a lower population density -- their town has a population around 20 thousand, and that disorganized group is not going to work there either.
I have no expectations of you personally if you wanted to protect my property rights (if i had claims on such and had a tx posted for someone to secure such), but I cannot control if an address controlled by a multisig of psuedoanons sends a tx to a contract where they provide proof that something has been secured according the rules of decentralized AMM market settlement contract and they get their payout. I cannot also control whether people make leveraged side bets on that happening or not, and I cannot control if those making leveraged side bets try to collude with the multisig that submitted the a tx for settlement.
> I live in metropolitan area with a population of 25 million people; a distributed group of vigilantes enforcing property rights is not even remotely workable here, and this is not even the largest city in the world. My in-laws live in a suburban area with a lower population density -- their town has a population around 20 thousand, and that disorganized group is not going to work there either.
I'm pretty sure that if they pay is high enough for the people that controls the multisig, and they have the skills and resources to execute, they can get where they need to be, and be gone when its finished, while accepting some risk that who they are up against may be prepared for it.
You could get a credit card, and then it’s not even your money that you are spending! or your money that you lost to fraud.
I can see both of these existing in the crypto world in some form, the same way they exist in the fiat world
as for the banks and institutions and companies losing all of their money? that’s a new blockchain problem for sure
No, that used to be a real-world problem for banks until laws were passed that more tightly regulated financial institutions...
e.g. in the US, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat_banking
Replacing databases which afaik have never been manipulated anywhere in the world (despite representing legal ownership of high value assets) with tokens similar to those people lose access to or are duped out of on a daily basis is very Web3
https://news.coincu.com/56415-citydao-hacked-discord-95000-d...
It doesn’t sound like an actual problem to me.
You could get a credit card, too, and then it’s not even your money that you are spending! or your money that you lost to fraud.
I can see both of these existing in the crypto world in some form, the same way they exist in the fiat world
as for the banks and institutions and companies losing all of their money? that’s a new blockchain problem for sure
Why take such a naive blockchain as example? You could very well have a proof of authority blockchain so that 3 notary have to sign a car transaction.
You could also very well have revocation lists published on the blockchain by a further authority if keys are stolen.
There are hundreds of ways to make this work.
At the very least, that would allow me to know that I'm not buying a stolen car.
Why do you need a decentralized blockchain with tokens to solve that problem? If not for the tokens, what incentive have people to keep running and protect the blockchain against attacks? The oracle problem: how do you prevent someone from pushing false or duplicate data to the blockchain?
Then tell me, where is this wonderful centralized database that tells me who owns which car?
Blockchains are not just about decentralization, it's also about publishing the actual databases in the wild for everyone to see, because you have the guarantee that no-one can fake it.
Sure, a lot of the use cases could be done with centralized databases, but that's the model we had for decades now, and I don't see any effort to make these centralized databases accessible to everyone.
Uhm, here in UK DVLA holds it? Anyone can access it too, you can just check the entire car history including its tax payments as well as technical inspections online. No Blockchain needed.
>>because you have the guarantee that no-one can fake it
I'd like you to explain why you think that's true. If you assume an external authority is entering details into the blockchain, how is that different to the exact same authority entering details into the systems that we have currently?
Instead of this I could have pay to a smart contract and get my car ownership record in exchange. No clerks or lawyers involved. I cannot imagine how you implement this scenario as an API on top of a centralized database.
B) So how many people would it take in your blockchain scenario -- why wouldn't there have to be just as many to enter the change of ownership with the "special road police department" etc?
C) How would you know that your "smart contract" couldn't do the exact same bullshit, transfer it to the dealer or whoever he has fencing his hot cars for him? If it did, wouldn't you have to go to the police just like I would?
D) "Lawyers"?!? Where the fuck do you live; in North Korea or something?
1) So you do live in North Korea! Or, well (Heh), Russia -- who cares, what's the diff?
2) So the weirdly-specific link to British vehicle registration procedures is... Because you're one of Kim Jong-Un's -- eh, I mean that other Über- kleotocrat, Putin's -- coterie, and keep your money and your children there?
3) Your whole argument is as stupid as that other guy's who claimed that "Bitcoin is needed to transfer money abroad". No, countries with dysfunctional systems -- be it for international money transfers or vehicle registration -- would need to uproot and rebuild their systems anyway, to base them on Bitcoin in stead of what they have now. But if they're uprooting and rebuilding anyway, then they can just rebuild to use the same systems that already work elsewhere -- without the whole blockchain mumbo-jumbo.
4) Two people who have actually used working online systems -- that British car owner and I -- have told you that such systems exist and work. But you seem to be just simply refusing to believe us, insisting that no such system could work without your blockchain mumbo-jumbo. One would think that residents of, and owners of cars registered in, Britain and Finland would know more about the car registration systems in Britain and Finland than a Russian. (Except, see #2 above?) So, besides your obvious violation of the "assume good faith" site guidelines in calling us liars, consider which of the two alternatives
a) You are right, and know more about the car registration systems in our countries than we do; we, OTOH, are either outright lying, or have deluded ourselves into thinking we got our cars registered in a much easier way than you know to be possible. (Or perhaps we both got incredibly lucky and got it done much easier than actually is possible.)
or
b) We are telling the truth, in our countries it is possible to easily get your car registered online without any blockchain mumbo-jumbo; and you, OTOH, are either misinformed, mistaken, or just plain obstinate (or deluded) --
-- which alternative would seem most reasonable under Occam's Razor?
[Edit: Tpyo.]
When you buy a car it's just registered online, takes 5 minutes to do. No actual in-person anything involved. You get a PDF confirming your registration, the dealership prints the plate for you right there and then, nearly every garage has a machine for priniting them. You stick it on your car, drive off, done. The registration document arrives in post 1-2 weeks later, but you don't really need it for much as it's not proof of ownership anyway, it's just for your records.
Literally nothing about buying a car involves actual people reviewing anything. It's all automated, it's all online.
So I'd still like you to explain how exactly are you going to get rid of 99% of DVLA's staff and what algorithm exactly allows for that when using NFTs/blockchain.
>>First of all I need a contract with a dealership, so there is a lawyer involved
Why? I bought several new cars in the past, you read the documents, sign them, the car is yours. Why involve a lawyer? What for?
> Literally nothing about buying a car involves actual people reviewing anything. It's all automated, it's all online.
Who gives dealer access and rights to update government database? I would not be surprised if the dealer does not have access but update their own system and then submit documents to an agency which checks them and modifies the database. DVLA API is documented online and unless they have another undocumented endpoints I don’t see any way to register a vehicle with it.
Car registration process is documented here - https://www.gov.uk/vehicle-registration/new-registrations
This source suggests registration forms have to be sent by mail! https://dvlacheck.uk/online-forms/
> Although you can download some forms online, you will still need to return them via post. This is because the forms may ask for sensitive information or require that a passport photo be affixed to the application.
Summing up - it seems what you experienced at the dealer is a sugarcoating for the same old paper based registration process that requires countless clerks.
Weird to see privacy go completely out the window in all of these discussions.
If you've lived under the misapprehension that what you do with a multi-ton piece of lethal equipment hurtling through traffic belongs to your sphere of privacy, it's high time to snap out of it.
(Fortunately, of course, no blockchain silliness is needed for this; I can look up a license plate on the centralised car registry DB any time.)
> ... by a further authority if keys ...
As soon as your blockchain solution requires proof of authority, your trustless solution starts requiring trust in some form of central governance. At that point, what utility does your blockchain solution provide that the DMV database does not?
If one or a few, I can set up a corrupt notary (or several) to notarize my fake deal with you.
If many, I can't get rid of the corrupt notary (or notaries) you have set up to notarize your fake deal with me.
Is either of these particularly great?
I claim that blockchain solves Byzantine generals problem (BGP) in a scalable way and no other such solution exists. I also claim that this very problem (BGP) is being solved right now in multiple instances by using a trusted middleman, usually appointed, controlled and often funded by the government. I also claim that maintaining trust is not free and often paid from tax money (as in DVLA example). And my last claim that partial or full automation of a middleman function with blockchain is cheaper than running it traditional way (considering all costs involved).
Potentially unexpected corollary from the first and second claims - a software without blockchain cannot automate a trusted middleman function because of trust issues.
Feel free to attack any of the claims.
Anything that does not exist natively on the blockchain doesn't need a blockchain at all.
If a token on the blockchain would represent you as the owner of a car and one day someone steals your private key which represents your car ownership, that person is now the owner of your car. Still, the car keys are located in your house, the license plate is registered on your name and address, the insurance is on your name.
I guess I don't need to explain further how ridiculous that idea is that a token would officially represent you as the car owner.