Comment by vec | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vec | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I agree. "Bitcoin as anarcho-capitalist proof of concept" does seem to be the correct framework for understanding why it exists, why it works the way it does, and what one might find valuable about it. On that front it's been at least a partial success. I can't buy a cup of coffee with Bitcoin, and I doubt I ever will, but the fact that it works at all is a lot more than I suspected we would see at this point. It's definitely caused me to rethink quite a few of my assumptions about macroeconomics.

That doesn't justify why anyone else should be shoehorning blockchains into their projects.

Earlier today I saw that Kodak is going to be launching KODAKCoin later this month as a mechanism to somehow assist photographers in selling and distributing their work. Presumably Kodak trusts Kodak. Any photographer who wants to use Kodak's tools to control the distribution of their work has to trust Kodak. Kodak has an IT department. They don't need trustless or decentralized. What they need is a boring ol' SQL database.

Maybe cryptocurrencies are a good idea, maybe they're not. That's more of a political and economic question than a technical one. Either way, they clearly do work more or less as advertised. What I'm still waiting to see is someone who is not a libertarian bent on the destruction of the global financial system using the blockchain to successfully solve any other previously intractable problem.

Tracking ownership of some intangible set of rights is actually basically the one thing that BTC/ETH-esque tech is really useful for, so the Kodak thing is far from the craziest coin announced. A sane thing to do would be to piggyback on one the existing blockhains and their pre-existing hashing power. In this scenario, Kodak would create some kind colored-coin or side chain representing ownership of certain photographs and take a cut as basically a notary, providing easy tools to store a [ image_hash, owner_id ] tuple on the blockchain for posterity. This has the advantage of /continuing to exist if Kodak goes away/, which is what you want as a rights holder.

Trouble with that, is that then Kodak doesn't get to issue its own token, and therefore doesn't get to indulge in securities manipulation. It also means they can open themselves up to competition on ease-of-use, since now anybody can run a company doing the same thing.

There is also the VERY BIG question of whether or not such a distributed ledger would ever be accepted in a court as proof of ownership of rights to those photos. If it can't be, there's no point in any of it.

> This has the advantage of /continuing to exist if Kodak goes away/, which is what you want as a rights holder.

If you mean the ecosystem can thrive without Kodak, then it sounds like you don't expect Kodak to add any significant value and I may as well use any immutable public record, of which there are already countless legally tested options.

If you mean that if Kodak goes away then the rights contained in their ledger stick around as a historical document, then it explains why they need a public and immutable ledger (and a decent third-party archival service), but it still doesn't require trustless or decentralized.

A blockchain works, in the same sense that calling a ride sharing service to take me to the coffee shop half a block from my house works. But I can just walk half a block instead. As far as I can tell, the blockchain doesn't allow Kodak to do anything that they couldn't have done 20 years ago if they had wanted, and it's much more complicated (and therefore much more expensive and error prone) than many other data persistence layers.

I'm suggesting your first scenario is the sane one for consumers. Kodak's value-add would be the tools to help you get the hash onto the immutable public record (and giving you control of the private keys that let you reassign ownership of this digital asset), presumably by integrating it into its cameras and photo-processing services, or providing a friendly Kodak-branded web frontend. If they go belly-up, you still have the keys and therefore can still transfer/prove those rights using somebody else's tools. You still want things to be trustless and decentralized because the whole point of such a system is to avoid costly records-digging to prove your rights in court. Unless you can continue to re-assign rights after Kodak gets bored of running its non-distributed, non-trustless sytem, you're back in the dark ages trying to prove things with photocopies of written contracts and so on.

You're right that they wouldn't be adding much value, and therefore couldn't extract much profit. That's why they're not doing that, and are instead issuing tokens.

>>A sane thing to do would be to piggyback on one the existing blockhains and their pre-existing hashing power.

That's what they're doing. They're creating an Ethereum-based ERC20 token and smart contract platform: https://www.bitsonline.com/introducing-kodakcoin-kodak/

Exactly. There have been a bunch of proof on concept websites that have been offering this service for 3-4 years now with very little pick up or interest from creators or consumers. In the end, there’s no reason it couldn’t be a simple open source drag and drop utility, or command line tool. They are offering a complicated solution to a problem that no one seems to think they have.

Bitcoin as anarcho-capitalist proof of concept

It's not conceptually proven, though. As a mechanism of exchange it does work, but that is a very low bar. Many things can be used as a mechanism of exchange (such as Poker chips). But Bitcoin has not yet succeeded as a currency. There's a long way to go before you can safely say the mechanisms powering Bitcoin's blockchain are sustainable and can be stabilized.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com