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Comment by triceratops | Hacker News Reader

That's a really good question. It might look something like Steam, but with some important additional features.

1. Resales and lending are built into the platform.

2. Some kind of trust or legal framework so that you can't lose access even if the company operating the platform goes bankrupt.

3. Assets are portable between platforms.

4. Strong legal privacy guarantees.

We mostly don't have stock certificates anymore. They're all electronic assets. But you still own your shares and they can't be freely copied or counterfeited. Why can't we do that for digital intellectual property?

Just like financial crimes will always exist[1], it isn't possible to stamp out piracy. That doesn't mean we have to make everything suck for everyone else.

1. https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

(Please, no one say blockchain)

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> Just like financial crimes will always exist[1], it isn't possible to stamp out piracy.

As Gabe Newell said of piracy, "piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem".

By and large, most people want to do the right thing to consume media. If you try to make it really hard to do that to stamp out the pirates, then you're just going to encourage the piracy market. But you can see services like Steam or the various music streaming apps that really did a lot to crush the piracy market just by making legitimate consumption easy. (And you can also see that the attempts by various streaming services to make walled gardens for video stuff that when you make it harder, piracy goes back on the uptick).

I am going to say blockchain. Or, at least a ledger of some type, would be reasonable.

Can we do it without burning the energy of a moderately sized developed nation? BTC used as much power as Greece or Australia by some estimates last year. [0]

[0] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61364#:~:tex...

Yes, proof of stake like Ethereum's blockchain is more energy efficient. However it could potentially be less secure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake

The users of BTC also pay for that electricity consumption, and value is derived from having a ledger that is not controlled by any government. Building out clean energy sources is the real solution like nuclear, deep geothermal, solar, wind, etc.

POS has it's own issues with requiring massive investments to even participate which just further rewards already rich participants more because those are the only people who can afford to lock up nearly 100k in USD to get rewards under POS.

Until we have >100% renewable all the time all the extra energy used by BTC only causes more CO2 positive sources to produce energy, if miners weren't using that electricity we'd be closer to full renewable energy today already.

The actual value of the existence for the sake of having an alternative 'currency' is also highly suspect to me as the deflationary endgame of BTC is very bad for people hwo are day to day spending most of their income. Deflation is great if you got in early and have large reserves you can sit on but for most people who would earn and spend in BTC mostly deflation is terrible. There's good reasons we moved away from the gold standard which BTC tries to recreate in digital form.

A ledger tech would be sufficient, it need not be blockchain.

Yeah the administration is a bit of an issue around that but it's certainly doable without burning ridiculous amounts of energy. I was mostly joking about the propensity to try to solve everything with a new flavor of blockchain and the massive PITA that is with both energy consumption and consumer protections.

> We mostly don't have stock certificates anymore. They're all electronic assets. But you still own your shares and they can't be freely copied or counterfeited. Why can't we do that for digital intellectual property?

I mean, Cede and Company owns most (all?) of my shares[1]. That's a model that could work --- let a specialist company setup accounts to buy games, and then control access to those accounts. If you want to 'buy' a game, you ask your broker to ask Cede and Co to get you an account, and when you want to 'sell' it, you ask your broker to ask Cede and Co to change the password and give it to a new 'buyer'.

You can do it individually, but a steam account per game is cumbersome.

[1] Well, I have vanguard traditional mutual funds, mostly in vanguard traditional accounts... they might keep the records for those directly in their own books.

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