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Comment by DennisP | Hacker News Reader

Mattereum is doing something interesting. Each NFT references a physical item they keep in a vault, and if you want you can redeem it and take delivery. They have professional curators and legal contracts.

It's not all that different from what rich people do with vaulted art and registries. Just more available to regular people.

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Why not use a database? If I hold an Matterum NFT, I'm trusting Matterum to make good on the deal, so it's not like the trustlessness of the blockchain actually comes into play. It seems like using a blockchain in this case just adds transaction costs.

I just glanced at their white paper and it refers to multiple registrars, so stuff might not be just at Mattereum.[1]

Besides that, I think an immutable public record of ownership is worthwhile. It's something you can use as evidence in court. If it were just their database and they changed it, what recourse would you have?

[1] https://mattereum.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/mattereum-s...

The same one you'd have with any proof of ownership in a society with laws.

Meaning on good ole' paper, or in a government database somewhere that you have no visibility or access to. Is this preferable to an ownership record that you, the gov, or anyone else can verify from your phone?

Things like deeds and titles aren't necessarily locked away without visibility but are necessary to prove ownership in a court of law, the venue where doing that is most consequential. Technologically, it's redundant and unecessary to maintain shared ownership records of everyone else's assets. Practically, if you don't trust the state / your representative government to maintain & adjudicate property ownership rights or contract law disputes, it's a little silly to think conveniences like checking ubiquitous apps on mobiles or the internet itself will still work and that we won't be experiencing the complete breakdown of society by that point.

We're not talking about replacing the register of deeds here, and the government isn't going to maintain ownership records of random collectibles.

We trust online brokerages to maintain our ownership on securities with databases alone, but those are heavily regulated. The government isn't likely to enact regulation on baseball cards and action figures either.

So for safety we're pretty much down to paper documentation and a cumbersome sale process. That's slow and expensive, which is why rich people do it and regular people don't. Until now.

I don't see why people think blockchains have to exclusively do new and unprecedented things. It's productive to do old things more efficiently.

It's not really physical collectibles that need this, it's digital ones. (Physical collectibles have popularly accepted professional grading services that authenticate and certify) So then I guess the question is why isn't a central database maintained by a trusted authority (ies) just as good as a blockchain maintained by everyone?

So, how do you know when the NFT is invalid? Can Mattereum just freeze any token at any time? If I transfer my token back to them and they don’t give me my thing, how do we all know? What if the thing is damaged? What if my country holds it up at customs?

I don't know but since they spent a lot of time developing real-world legal contracts, I suspect there are decent answers.

Art vaults/registries have similar issues and work fine for much more valuable items, so Mattereum isn't breaking completely new ground here. They just have a more convenient way to transfer ownership.

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