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Comment by nonameiguess | Hacker News Reader

Why on earth do you want to decentralize personal belongings? I absolutely want my possessions centralized, in storage locations I own. That is the much more obvious solution than putting personal possessions on a blockchain. If you want to store digital tokens for your kids that you can be reasonably assured will still be there when they become adults, use thumb drives. Keep them in a fireproof safe if you're really worried. Somehow, my mom has managed to keep all the videos and photos of key events in my childhood safe and intact for 40 years without having to put them on a public distributed ledger. When betamax went obsolete, she transferred to VHS. When that went away, to DVD.

I really don't understand what this woman thinks she is buying. I guess this is a better storage medium for precious moments and collectibles than sending copies of everything to gmail, but so is almost any other way of storing something.

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> my mom has managed to keep all the videos and photos of key events in my childhood safe and intact for 40 years without having to put them on a public distributed ledger

No offense, but in all likelihood no one is attempting to counterfeit or pirate your Mom's videos and photos of your childhood, and ownership/p2p ownership transfers are not material.

There are almost infinite real world examples were ownership records are benefited by blockchain technologies over centralized services. Take property deeds, usually kept and recorded at the County level, there is almost endless fraud with people filing forged quitclaim deeds on a daily basis. That would be an example of a public record, but their are private record keeping examples such as stock certificates. Usually the "Dole" case is the most famous example, where you have a publicly traded company with all the benefits of corporate record keeping, stock trusts and banks, and centralized stock exchanges, but when the buyer went to take it private low and behold the public company with all the centralized safe guards in the world should have had a total capitalization of 36M shared but somehow had about 49M share issued, it only ended up in $150M in damages, but this could not have happened using blockchain and most agree nearly every publicly traded company likely would have the same inconsistencies.

This is a great idea until you get hit by a bus and now your private keys are gone and your family can no longer recover your estate(house and investments).

Should a mechanism exist in your system wherein-by your family can reclaim ownership without your keys, means that whoever the chain says owns something clearly doesn't actually matter anyways.

Recovery mechanisms can be implemented as smart contracts. For example, you can set up your wallet so that with Key-A can be used to transfer funds/NFTs freely, but Key-B can only transfer to a specific recovery account. Transfers from the recovery account can either be made with Key-B after a certain amount of time has passed, or immediately with Key-A. You keep Key-A, your family gets Key-B. If something happens to you they can get the assets out after a set time using Key-B. If someone tries to abuse Key-B to take the assets while you're still around you just use Key-A to transfer everything to a different account before the waiting period expires.

The unrecoverable private key is just one implementation of blockchain technology, there are various way to implement a blockchain solution to various use cases.

BTW current centralized solutions to estate planning issues are not exactly that great anyway. it is not unusual for family not to know a will, insurance, pensions, and bank accounts even exist for deceased. Just look at the current unclaimed assets for deceased I think its around $2T.

A Google search shows I was way off the amount is $40-60B but I think there are additional sums not accounted for.

> Usually the "Dole" case is the most famous example, where you have a publicly traded company with all the benefits of corporate record keeping, stock trusts and banks, and centralized stock exchanges, but when the buyer went to take it private low and behold the public company with all the centralized safe guards in the world should have had a total capitalization of 36M shared but somehow had about 49M share issued, it only ended up in $150M in damages, but this could not have happened using blockchain and most agree nearly every publicly traded company likely would have the same inconsistencies.

This sounds like a technology problem for which a public blockchain is but one possible solution. Surely other append-only log data structures exist which could step in to fill this void.

AFAICT the main issue with crypto equities — and all other similar constructs — is what happens when a court of law overrides them. If a court says your ex owns half of the shares in $WALLET, but the blockchain doesn’t, and $COMPANY which issued the shares is also subject to the whims of the court, then what are we to do about this?

OTOH maybe this rabbit hole really just never ends until courts are also somehow replaced by a public blockchain, likely at the behest of the very biased investors who stand to disproportionately profit from this game.

>This sounds like a technology problem for which a public blockchain is but one possible solution.

I don't disagree, and "blockchain" as used sort of is misleading because at this point their are many solutions within the blockchain technologies and it is still rapidly evolving.

>If a court says your ex owns half of the shares in $WALLET, but the blockchain doesn’t, and $COMPANY which issued the shares is also subject to the whims of the court, then what are we to do about this?

You could hold a non-complying party in jail/contempt of court for one, this happens with real world assets that do not get turned over now.

But again there are implementation of blockchain solutions, where say the Company that issued shares did so on a smart contract and with a Court order they could burn half the tokens/stock in the wallet mint that same number and transfer them to the wife per the Court order.

> You could hold a non-complying party in jail/contempt of court for one, this happens with real world assets that do not get turned over now.

This doesn’t appear to resolve the issue of the blockchain reflecting a different reality than that decided by a court.

> But again there are implementation of blockchain solutions, where say the Company that issued shares did so on a smart contract and with a Court order they could burn half the tokens/stock in the wallet mint that same number and transfer them to the wife per the Court order.

How would this hypothetical court order be verified without the involvement of trusted third parties? Presumably judges in many places could be bribed or coerced into rubber stamping such an order.

This seems ripe for abuse.

>This seems ripe for abuse.

You proposed the hypothetical starting with the Court. If you want blockchain to preempt any court involvement your hypothetical needs to start at that point.

I think it is possible through the prisoners dilemma. Have husband and wife have a joint wallet from the beginning governed by smart contract with agreed upon prenuptial terms. Marital assets could go in and then upon divorce they be equally split, the husband and wife could be required signatures, but if only 1 signs the funds/assets are locked until both sign. Maybe in rare instance you get one partner willing to lockup the funds and sacrifice their own finances, but that the entire point of blockchain/miners and the prisoner's dilemma.

What about people being sued for damages, or creditors laying claim to the assets? There are endless cases where a court can unilaterally decide your assets are not your assets any longer.

Also, your hypothetical solution to the blockchain not reflecting court orders in the narrow case of divorce law is to ensure every married buyer of a crypto equity has a prenuptual agreement in place in their crypto wallet. Can you think of any problems with that plan?

I can think of a problem when someone poses a hypothetical with a given set of facts, you propose one of many potential solutions, then they change the facts of the hypothetical. For example, someone asking about a dissolution of marriage and then complaining the solution was limited to "narrow case of divorce law" and adding in addition 3rd party creditors. Its well beyond the scope of any limited good-faith discussion on this forum but the court does not have jurisdiction and is not concerned about 3rd party creditor rights in a dissolution of marriage action, they may consider the debts themselves, but not the actual interest of the creditors vis-a-vis the marital assets. Though, at least in the US, there are 50 states with 50 different legal standards governing. I am a lawyer, but I am not your lawyer, good luck.

If the blockchain manipulates balances according to the whims of a court, then manipulating the court becomes a potential source of revenue for anyone able to game the system.

But if the blockchain doesn’t manipulate balances according to the court, and the court decides half of your crypto equities in $WALLET now belong to someone else, then at that moment in time the blockchain’s account balances become inaccurate. These types of events happen not infrequently, which creates a problem.

Perhaps blockchain property titles will make my point easier for you to understand. Say you own the house at 187 Blue Kodiak Drive, and the title is an “NFT” recorded on the blockchain. The NFT must be respected (!). Then a court steps in and assigns ownership of 187 Blue Kodiak to a bank, because it turns out you haven’t been paying your mortgage. But wait, the blockchain still says you own the home at 187 Blue Kodiak Drive (!). However, you don’t own it anymore — not legally, not physically.

Now pretend the blockchain on which the 187 Blue Kodiak Drive house title is recorded dutifully obeys the commands of the court which in our previous example allowed the bank to repossess it. In our previous example, that’d be just fine — after all, you haven’t been paying your mortgage. But now the issue changes: The Pink Panther slides his way into the court one day, and one way or another convinces an decision-making authority there that you’ve sold him the home at 187. The Pink Panther is now in possession of the title, and you’re out of luck.

Ultimately, this criticism of smart property has been around for many years now. It wasn’t my intent to “surprise” you with it. However, people invested in tangentially related crypto systems tend to really struggle with this. That’s because public blockchains were never designed to track non-bearer assets which exist in in the real world. Unlike companies built by humans or real estate, the (public) blockchain exists only in cyberspace, and therefore any ownership data of company shares or real estate recorded on the blockchain can only ever be an approximation of the truth. Permissioned blockchains — or simple databases for that matter — tend to be a better fit for situations such as this. The issue with them is they don’t take investors.

I should walk back any negative tone, for the most part I can tell you are interested in a genuine conversation and discussing the merits.

Your issue is with the Court, all the way up to bribery, which would exist with or without blockchain. Your concern is not without merit I suppose, but in my opinion is an extreme edge case against blockchain to suggest the legacy system is a better solution, when the very edge case you describe exists in the legacy system. Thus, it over looks the benefits the blockchain solution would have.

Again "blockchain" is a bit of a misnomer in the sense it suggests blockchain is a single tech solution, when there are many existing implementations from multi-party signatures to smart contracts - yes controlled by a 3rd party - when say an NFT ownership record could be burned and/or reminted.

I am also not entirely sure about this point:

>The issue with them is they don’t take investors.

Almost every legacy system I am aware of that is utilized by the Courts are money making machines that have investors and/or are publicly traded companies. I am sure you could find one or a database that doesn't have investors, but the money is certainly there for software solutions used by the Courts.

What happens when the blockchain does not reflect the actual legal situation of ownership? For example, assuming a classic blockchain model where my property deed is given to me as a private key, and I have to sign the transaction to transfer the property, what happens when I lose the key and yet the city has expropriated my lot to build a park? This seems to require the authorities to have some kind of master key or ability to retroactively edit the blockchain. Which negates much of the security advantage of a blockchain model?

I suppose the answer to that would be to treat blockchain as the record of truth.

Kind of how if you have properly motorized property papers (I have no idea how this works in US), and find your land was inappropriately allocated by county without your knowledge you get to sue them, just with block chain record instead of paper.

But what if the key is lost? No one could update the blockchain. The property would become impossible to own.

> this could not have happened using blockchain

Why couldn't this happen on blockchain? It really assumes everyone is using that same blockchain network, which is not a guarantee. Were the stock certificates released on Ethereum? On WAX? Are you sure you checked all of the networks?

The "Dole" case you're talking about was not actually how you describe it. This will shock no-one who is used to "blockchain" fans trying to bamboozle them.

[Edited to add: The court case that makes this happen isn't related to the share records, it's just the routine shadiness of business owners trying to pay less than something is worth, the discrepancy is noted after the court case is done when trying to reconcile the people who have proof they owned shares, and thus are entitled to a settlement versus how many shares existed]

The record keeping worked exactly as intended but it isn't how people tend to imagine, and this is the difference you've tried to portray as somehow being solved by a blockchain when in fact it would not be.

Specifically, those millions of "extra" shares are because of short selling.

Some of the people who had good reason to believe they'd owned Dole shares, had in fact bought from short sellers who'd sold shares they didn't yet have. If Dole had not gone private, the short seller buys those shares (maybe for a lot more but they hope for a lot less) and passes them on. But it did go private, so the short seller is responsible for paying up what the private buyer agreed to pay for these shares. This part all worked, all those shareholders got their money.

But the court case changes how much money they were entitled to, years later - and since the court isn't in the business of doing complicated financial paperwork it just told the businesses which implement all this it's their problem and wished them luck. Most of these owners will be huge institutions and will have an existing relationship with an equally huge broker and that relationship will have likely determined what happened next (e.g. this loss from hard-to-trace shorts isn't worth it, just give them their money in full and write it off).

The blockchain could have exactly reproduced this outcome, but it would not have improved upon it at all.

Brasil solves the problem of land titles with a central land ownership database feed by private local notaries under jurisdiction of the department of justice. In some remote locations there are still fraud, but because the local notaries are corrupt. Not a problem that a distributed database would solve. A blockchain only gives a certain guarantee that the records haven’t been altered, but not that the information was input correctly in the first place.

It doesn't sound much different from the US, but we don't feed the local recordings to a national database (I would like that). As it is each local government can have different systems, not even all of them have digital systems yet, some are still all hard copies. So uniformity at the local levels would also be nice, or at least some minimal standards.

We suffer from the same problem where nothing stops errors in the recorded documents. But most of the intentional fraud is as simple as: You own Property A and I file a Quit Claim Deed transferring Property A from You (the lawful owner) to myself. As far as I know all the local levels do require these documents to be notarized, but we too suffer from bribery or just simply corruption where a notary may either be part of the fraud or just helping a friend/family member commit the fraud.

If the transfer required signature by private key it would help curb this type of fraud, but there would need to be additional safeguards and there are many other types of fraud and unintentional errors that exist. A system like Git might actually help with some of the errors as it would highlight changes from a current recording to a past records and even incorporate the official land records of the local governments.

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