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Comment by skywhopper | Hacker News Reader

This has gone beyond silly and into irresponsible territory. Not only is this a tremendous amount of overhead to build on top of already extremely wasteful blockchain systems, but building a legal-trust-based distributed-transaction network on top of multiple blockchain systems would just immediately discard what actual benefits there are to using a blockchain. And if you do work hard and come up with a metablockchain system to record your cross-blockchain transactions, you still have to interact with the real world at some point, and that will always be the weak link. Building layers on layers of provable tech doesn't solve the real world problem of "how do you trust your business partners?" We have centuries of governmental and legal infrastructure built to solve that problem, and you will never be able to replace that layer so long as humans and human concerns are involved.

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Not sure I understand your point.

The resilience, usefulness, and value of a system often isn' its elegance but its adaption. A decentralized trust system IS immensely valuable if it can be done because it allows for a lot of transactions that right now falls between chairs in the digital space.

A lot of the critique of the blockchain is based on the belief that digital allows for abundance (copy paste) and that that is the value of digital. But the reality is that there is plenty of value in scarcity ESPECIALLY in the digital space as it opens up for establishing a unique digital footprint which itself has a lot of value.

As an example, you can't easily exchange a piece of music with a game asset. Or an ebook with a digital pokemon card as there is no medium for the transaction. In other words, a decentralized trust-based system allows, for example, for a second-hand market for among other things digital assets. Or put another way a decentralized blockchain based trust system allows for more fluidity in the market and allow for an ever-increasing level of sophisticated trades.

Our legal infrastructure is built for a non-digital reality, even governments would be interested in adopting the blockchain to allow them to implement regulation in the digital space too.

So I don't think it's silly at all, in fact, it feels a little bit like we are reliving the birth of the internet again when it comes to peoples opinions about it.

> there is no medium for the transaction

Yes there is. They're called Dollars.

Thats not a medium but an asset and that asset requires a centralized system to be recognized. I want to be able to exchange non-monetary digital assets. The coming generations will adopt it without these discussions so i am glad someone is laying the groundwork.

> I want to be able to exchange non-monetary digital assets

Why?

Look in the other comment.

> In other words, a decentralized trust-based system allows, for example, for a second-hand market for among other things digital assets.

This sounds like you're trying to use blockchain to invent artificial scarcity for "digital goods." The only possible benefit I see from that is letting copyright owners preserve their current business models rather than adapt to the reality that bits are freely and easily copyable.

Why would we want that?

Because it allow for value creation in s digital space. If i spend two months in a game getting some asset i would like that to be recognized so that i could sell or buy that unique item.

Its not about copyright as much as its about trust in the transaction between two seemingly unrelated digital assets. It allows me to trust that i am getting what i actually paid for and not a knockoff.

Watching something like fortnite makes it obvious that there is value in digital scarcity.

The Chainlink project addresses many of these issues. https://link.smartcontract.com/whitepaper

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