I've crossed swords with Molly a couple of times. I was the release coordinator for Ethereum, and I've been active in the space a long long time.
Here's what it boils down to: freedom is messy.
The early days of the dotcom space were filled with carnage of a type which makes crypto look pretty normal. Amazon stock dropped >90% and a trillion and a half in value vanished from the market overall. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
And that's in a space whose biggest ambition was to replace catalogue shopping and how hotel reservations are made.
Crypto has bigger goals, and the mess is bigger. But it's the same innovation engine that ran Silicon Valley, the same type of people, it's just now they're less dependent on Goldman Sachs when they want to go to the public and ask for their money. Make no mistake: nothing new, strange or unusual is happening. It's just tech being tech, no cause for alarm.
I doubt most of tech would appreciate being lumped in with crypto, which should be the first sign that your take is a little off.
IE if you think you are just "tech being tech" but lots and lots of tech is like "uh, no, we aren't like you at all, please don't lump us in with you", that should tell you something.
Beyond that, your take seems so divorced from reality i'm not even sure where to begin.
I don't agree at all with your view of crypto's goals being bigger than tech's[1] , and even if i did, that the level of mess is proportionality similar, that this is a normal/good thing, etc.
These are sort of fundamental issues so it's gonna be hard to get somewhere.
I guess i'll just say if this is the best defense you've got of why what's going on is okay and good for the world, then you deserve everything crypto is getting and will get in the future.
[1] Crypto has always been a subset of tech's goals, and is even framed that way 99% of the time in presentations/etc. It's very hard for me to see how you can even argue otherwise.
You are responding to someone who is attempting to replace existing land ownership recording systems with a blockchain based replacement, you aren’t going to persuade them as they are financially and emotionally invested in the success of cryptocurrency.
Here is the thread where they talk about it and reject every single problem that others bring up with their blockchain title system. They also lie extensively about the value of a parcel of land for some odd reason: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33878584
I really don't get how people can believe a single second that this kind of projects can make any sense. What is the purpose of a blockchain for this? You cannot get rid of a central authority, because the transmission of land or really anything that exists outside of the blockchain you're planning to use cannot be transferred by simply writing something on the said blockchain. That only works for crypto-tokens because writing a transaction on their blockchain is performative (the transfer happens because it is written, the writing defines the truth, because those only exist has writing). However, writing anything else than a crypto-tokens transaction on a given blockchain can only guarantee that this something else is written on this given blockchain, and that's it. If you don't have any external authority that can make what you've written true (for example, the justice system to which you can go if the person to whom you have paid for a piece of land do not deliver) it has absolutely no value. That means you're not in a decentralized situation where you cannot trust anyone, which in turn means you don't need a blockchain. You just need a database. You might want that database to be publicly available and auditable and immutable, but even then you don't need a blockchain for that (since there is no need for a consensus mechanism), just a merkle tree structure (just use Git, Git works great).
> I really don't get how people can believe a single second that this kind of projects can make any sense.
I don’t either, given that
> writing anything else on a given blockchain only guarantees that this something else is written on this given blockchain, and if you don't have any external authority that can make it true (for example, the justice system to which you can go if the person to whom you have paid for a piece of land do not deliver) it has absolutely no value.
Thus,
> you don't need a blockchain. You just need a database.
I have come to the same conclusion as you. Perhaps leashless aka ‘once in a generation transformative intelligence guy’ (his own words[0]) can tell us why we’re wrong.
I’m spread thin across a surprising variety of fields working on problems that to most people look disconnected, but to me look like aspects of the same thing.
This is what I wrote the morning we launched Ethereum.
My mind is not particularly deep, but it is exceedingly wide. If you can find my equal in this regard let me know. I should like to meet them.
What I’m putting together is the technology platform to take the edge off the global humanitarian clusterfuck which is coming when the international refugee system collapses under the weight of climate refugees.
* blockchains and legal contracts get us aid transparency - if we can track the underlying physical assets say with 2D barcodes.
* correctly deployed insurance gets us biometrics without centralised databases. (Guptaoption.com/cheapid)
I’m mapping and prototyping the systems for keeping hundreds of millions of people alive when the shit finally hits the fan on climate change.
Two molecules thick over a territory the size of a university.
You either see it or you don’t, but what I’m knitting together here is the only remotely viable global plan for managing the worse aspects of the humanitarian damage we are going to take from climate change.
I didn’t say “once in a generation transformative intelligence” lightly. This is about half of the shit that I’ve done in the last 20 years.
I started working flat out on this knowing it would take 30 years or more to develop in 2002.
Do you remember worrying about climate change in 2003? Do you remember how insignificant it looked? A little respect, please.
No, dude. I’m doing the legal and technical work so that when a piece of real estate is sold as an NFT, the actual ownership of the land changes.
You can actually read the legal contracts which make that happen at mattereum.com/land — go over it with a lawyer, they’ll explain how it works.
It’s straight forward contract law. The property has to be in an SPC (special purpose vehicle) but that’s standard for all commercial real estate and quite a bit of high end residential.
The fundamental issue remains though. It’s all that legal framework off-chain that implements and enforces property rights in the real world.
Having the data on chain doesn’t really help anything. All that matters is who the authority choose to see as the owner. They may as well operate the registry as they can choose to ignore it if they wish.
Read points six through ten here. This is entirely the point: having the data and contracts on chain is hugely important. If you don't understand this, you don't understand critical features about how everything really works.
Believe it or not, people of any stature and role can have terrible ideas. What you're leveraging is a very clear appeal to authority fallacy. Arguments should stand on their own merits and if you evaluate them on their merits, they fall right down.
Judges aren't experts in technology generally speaking, they're not experts in economics generally speaking and they obviously don't know much about blockchains.
I don't care if he's the King of England, the fact remains. Trustlessness is all-or-nothing. If the chain can become out of sync with the real world, and the real world trumps the chain, then you do not have anything other than a slow and annoying database. This is called the oracle problem, and it remains thoroughly unsolved.
Not to mention real estate on the blockchain is one of the absolute dumbest ideas to date. A bearer token representing ownership of your house, lol. You lose your keys and now someone else owns your house?! I can't wait for Kim Jong-Un to own half the midwest through the Lazarus group.
As of now, the only thing you can extend the guarantees of the blockchain to are things that are wholly and completely represented on-chain. That means basically just 'money.' Literally nothing else is a good fit with the model. And that's before touching on its sheer inefficiency.
But let's come at it the other way. If it has so much potential and we've invested billions and billions of dollars in it, why has every company that tried it given up on it? Why is it still the future, 15 years later? Plenty of ideas that first came to market back then are now the present like the iPhone. I think you and the Judge may be the ones missing something, no parent poster and I.
If you actually manage to take to market a better solution to a problem I have leveraging a blockchain, I will be the first to use it. Stop telling me it's the future and make it happen.
Dude, I've already linked you to the full Smarter Contracts report that Sir Vos was referencing and explained to you how much of it isn't even referring to blockchain technology at all. I know you're a VERY busy CEO, but you could at least try and directly address some of that?
I looked at your comments. They read broadly as a total failure of imagination: the kind of thinking that would have looked at email and said "this is not better than a fax machine because I can fax 40 million people, but only email 5000."
If that's how you see the world, me going point by point is not going to change your fundamental "but only 5000 people have email accounts."
Here's 550 pages of the UK Law Commission (govt legal think tank) discussing how to integrate digital assets into UK law.
Why do you think this kind of labour is going into the digital asset space?
Crypto is a massively compelling proposition to working transactional lawyers at all levels of seniority but it's especially compelling to the most senior. They know their business. As do I.
Decades of experience doing real world transactions makes the utility of the blockchain obvious. To people without that experience, maybe the point is harder to see?
But the serious types get it. That's the lived experience in the field.
> Why do you think this kind of labour is going into the digital asset space?
Sunk cost fallacy, libertarian ideology, the fact it's become a cult of prosperity for the tech class and the fact that to argue against it meaningfully you have to have a strong understanding of finance, technology and law. Very few people have enough expertise in all three areas to explain why it's a bad idea.
But let me ask you. Since it's been the 'internet of the early 90s' for 15 years, why isn't it the 'internet of the mid/late 2000s' yet?
"from one of the most senior judges in the UK"
I mean, this is a very subjective judgement.
He's not nothing but it's not like he's one of the top 10 most senior judges in the UK or something.
He also doesn't handle the legal frameworks for trillions of dollars of transactions. I don't even know what you think "handle the legal framework" means, but it's clear you literally don't even understand his job, and you sort of ascribe some weird business structure to it.
The responder to me was right - every time someone points out a problem you make up some ethereal nonsense.
You really seem to think you are doing the right thing, or at least present that as a facade.
But you do in fact come off as a confidence grifter.
Maybe change that if you want anyone to take you seriously, rather than just argue you have a big brain and people should therefore respect you.
It turns out, unsurprisingly, there are lots of big brained people around. The useful parts of what you say are not particularly insightful, and the rest is just crazy.
> blockchains and legal contracts get us aid transparency - if we can track the underlying physical assets say with 2D barcodes.
Have you heard of the oracle problem[1]? How are you planning to solve it for physical goods? A barcode is not the same as the stuff in the box and is trivially copied and transmitted using a smartphone without the goods going anywhere at all. And this is a much bigger issue to reliably delivering anything than which database organizations use to track the goods.
First of all, there's no such thing as "the UK head of civil justice". England & Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland are three separate legal jurisdictions.
Most of the uses of blockchain cited are not Web3, but examples where a private blockchain has been used in place of a traditional database. Notably, there are no examples of 'smart contracts' replacing legal contracts; there are references to e-signatures replacing paper ones, but that's not a blockchain technology.
I've gone through each chapter in the report and looked at three things: one, whether any of the examples cited use blockchain at all; two, whether that blockchain is actually doing something that couldn't be accomplished without blockchain and three, whether it's actually the type of blockchain that is part of the Web3 ecosystem (i.e. permissionless and public). The results do not actually look great for the narrative you're trying to promote, Mr Gupta.
Electronic signatures
This is not a blockchain technology. Next.
Contract automation and management
The chapter summary says: "They may apply blockchain and smart legal contract technology, depending on user requirements." However, not one of the six case studies described in this chapter actually use blockchain. They use electronic signatures on legal documents that are stored in traditional databases. So, while the chapter summary makes a passing mention that some of these platforms can use blockchain if the user requires it for some reason, they haven't been able to find an example where the user actually required blockchain.
Financial services
This chapter looks at the Aurora platform created by Nivaura. A few interesting quotes:
"Nivaura established a digital framework for the use of smart legal contracts in the creation and management of tokenised financial instruments. MIFID and CASS compliance was required to be able to custody money and assets, create stablecoins and tokenised assets, and issue instruments. When conducting these transactions, Nivaura identified that, although the use of blockchain can deliver improvements in respect of clearing and settlement activities, much of the inefficiency in the process occurs before the settlement system is needed - in the structuring and execution of the transactions."
"Nivaura decided to focus on building a foundation within the Aurora platform: developing the technology to generate the documentation and the transaction workflows first, while remaining agnostic to where the instrument is created and managed; in other words, combining traditional methods with the potential use of blockchain technology."
"integrates seamlessly with other platforms through APIs or decentralised blockchain infrastructure using the open specification Aurora protocol"
"the Aurora platform offers the ability to push the data into a blockchain based infrastructure to execute tokenised transactions both traditionally through the clearing systems, as well as through blockchain infrastructure"
Of the three case studies, only one involves the use of a blockchain. This was Santander's September 2019 issuance of a $20M bond on Ethereum. What the report didn't mention is that this bond was redeemed early in December 2019, and Santander since haven't done anything else on Ethereum. Essentially, it was a proof of concept that they did one time and then didn't touch again.
So Aurora is essentially a 'you can connect it to blockchain if you really want to' platform, but there are scant examples of anyone actually needing or wanting to do so.
Insurance
This chapter concerns parametric insurance contracts. Again, it is mostly not about blockchain, but one bullet point does state: "Blockchain technology may enhance the operations of contracts when buyers, sellers, and other stakeholders seek to share data and computational resources across a distributed network, enabling access to verified data at the same time."
The blockchain in this case would be private, not a permissionless public ledger - so not Web3. And there really is no reason to use blockchain for that kind of distributed network, they can just use a private cloud and digital signatures.
Renewable energy
This chapter opens with: "Blockchain technology-based smart legal contracts underpin ‘microgrids’, which enable peer-to-peer and peer-to-grid trading of small amounts of renewable electricity."
It provides three case studies, each one of which uses a private, permissoned blockchain - so again, not Web3. And again, blockchain isn't even necessary for this use case and I don't see what it adds over just using a traditional database.
Trade
The first part of this chapter looks at electronic trade documents, not a blockchain technology.
The second part looks at supply chains: "Supply chains are one of the most promising use cases for digitalisation and blockchain technology, which are already addressing previously unsolvable problems and are a key component of the future of digital trade"
I'm skeptical of this claim - it just seems like another example of using blockchain for the sake of using blockchain. But regardless, the three examples (TradeLens, Provenance and Chainvine) all use private, permissioned blockchains. So again - not Web3, not Ethereum, not cryptocurrency.
Sale of goods and services
Is this a chapter about cryptocurrency transactions? No, it's about DocuSign CLM. Not a blockchain technology.
Logistics and transportation
This chapter is about Amazon Quantum Ledger Database. A private, permissioned blockchain (although Amazon prefers to call it a 'ledger database' in which 'changes are chained together as blocks' - rather telling that they don't even want to touch the word). So yet again: a database that is part-blockchain, sure... but it's not Web3.
Digital representation and ownership of physical assets
This chapter is about Mattereum, a company that ties NFTs to legal contracts called the Matterium Asset Passport. Essentially, since you can't actually change the legal ownership of physical goods solely by trading NFTs, the sale is instead facilitated by the Matterium Asset Passport, which uses a private dispute resolution mechanism instead of the courts in 170 countries that allow for this. An interesting system... if it weren't BS that nobody needs. Because you could do this with digital signatures on legal contracts without involving NFT marketplaces at all. They've made it possible to do a thing with NFTs that people have been doing without NFTs for decades. Another instance of the technology looking for the use case, rather than the use case requiring the technology.
Sport sponsorship
This chapter describes Hunit, which uses digital legal contracts (not smart contracts) for which the signatures are stored on a private, permissioned ledger. Again, not Web3 (noticing a pattern here?) and again just seems to be another case of using blockchain for the sake of using blockchain.
Home buying and selling
Is this a chapter about selling your home as an NFT? No, it's another chapter about the digitisation of legal contracts and signatures. Again there are a few examples here of a private permissioned blockchain being used for data storage, but yet again in all of these cases any form of secure distributed database could be used and blockchain isn't necessary - and regardless, yet again, it's not the type of blockchain that's Web3.
Digital Company
This chapter looks at The Digital Company project, which is mostly about the digitisation of legal contracts and signatures. As in the previous chapter, a private permissioned blockchain is used in place as a database but yet again it appears to be an example of blockchain being used simply for the sake of using blockchain - and yet again, not the type of blockchain that's Web3.
1) it takes four months on average to transfer real estate in the UK. It’s about the same in most other counties.
2) with our system that is reduced to one KYCAMLCTF/source of funds check, and an atomic swap on Ethereum.
Two days and most, and instant if you pre-clear the money.
3) getter a property legally ready for that transaction takes some time of course, but that work is mostly reused in subsequent transactions.
4) this is of most utility to large property companies not invisible house buyers. Developers and REITs for example.
5) no, you cannot do this with a database, a database can’t clear a $1.2m payment in real-time or create legally binding digital signatures on electronic versions of paper contracts, at least not without a vast amount of middleware. It’s a real blockchain use case.
Right now there is no meaningful electronic trading venue for real estate. The closest you get is listed REIT stock on stock exchanges.
Roughly three trillion of transactions a year for real estate. It’s a worthy market.
Not, I think you’ll find, a solution looking for a problem. A very large market indeed which has so far not found an electronic trading system that suits its operational and commercial needs.
As MICA in the EU and other similar legislation around the world clear out the pirate finance people the blockchain will simply normalise as a standard technology for doing transactions. If we also see central bank digital currency — it seems certain in at least some jurisdictions - that removes another set of uncertainties.
The UK Law Commission recently published a 550 page consultation document on digital assets in the UK. As that rolls into legislation the grey area will evaporate and we would expect mass adoption for B2B use cases to begin.
That’s certainly the government’s intention.
Yes there are a lot of naive grifters in the blockchain space. There are also a lot of world class technologists and lawyers. There are people breaking the law, or breaking laws which should exist! And there are people creating the enabling legislation.
Because you’ve been listening to propaganda not thinking for yourself, you have pre-judged the situation without understanding what the legislative agenda from the larger governments will enable. And I don’t mean USA here, that’s just a mess, but the world is bigger than just America.
1) Did you read the Smarter Contracts report I linked to for yourself? There's a full chapter on how the process of conveyancing will be significantly streamlined by digital ID, digital signatures, automation and interoperability between data stores. No blockchain required.
2) By KYCAMLCTF/source of funds, I'm assuming you're referring to what happens when someone buys ETH on an exchange? The problem is that only covers trading on the exchange. Once it leaves the exchange it leaves that regulatory environment, and it becomes impossible to prevent things like wash trading in NFT marketplaces. Are you really trying to tell me that exposing the property market to that is a good idea?
3) What you're actually saying here is that what Mattereum does isn't actually equivalent to conveyancing. In order to make doing this with NFTs work, you've created an inferior legal framework to actual property law, based solely around contract and arbitration law, that you expect people to use instead. The trade of the NFT is faster than conveyancing, not because it's doing the same thing more efficiently, but because it's not actually doing the same thing at all.
4) Large property companies will want actual conveyancing, not your substitute for it. They also don't want to trade property like NFTs. They'll be pleased about digital contract solutions that streamline the process of actual conveyancing.
5) A database can clear a $1.2m payment in real time. In the UK we have near-instant, free bank transfers with a limit of £1 million per transaction - to send more it can just be split into multiple transactions. Neither a database NOR a blockchain can create legally binding signatures on e-contracts without middleware like DocuSign or Adobe Sign. For electronic conveyancing, the answer is to... just use that middleware, it's fine. Transfer of an NFT does not count as a legally binding signature (isn't that the whole reason Mattereum exists)?
"Right now there is no meaningful electronic trading venue for real estate." Maybe - here's an idea - property shouldn't actually be traded like NFTs are? Maybe property law isn't just useless red tape and it exists for a reason? Maybe high frequency trading of property on a pseudonymous marketplace is actually NOT a good idea?
Speaking of Mattereum, I note the article on your website from April 16 2023 claiming that you have tokenised a "prime beach-front property on England’s south coast". Although the article uses a stock image of a building, the property is actually just a land parcel. Just curious, why was the NFT burned and recreated four months ago? It wasn't because the property sold. Why is it only now possible to buy the NFT by emailing Tokenised Properties to be added to a whitelist? Doesn't that rather defeat the purpose of what you're trying to do?
"DISCLAIMER: The land is sold as is without any planning permission. Images are for reference only for possible uses. Buyers are to make their own investigations and due diligence." Hmm, an empty plot of land with no planning permission... not exactly a house, is it?
"[...] the required searches, title deed and reference media for due diligence are displayed accurately and transparently so that the NFT purchaser can sell on the property without the next purchaser needing to go through the process all over again. What the NFT purchaser gets for their money is an interest in the property. If they wish to take full ownership of the property itself, they simply pay an extra pound, and full legal title is transferred to them, they can then do as they wish with the property and the NFT is burned."
Wait, one moment it's a property, the next it's just an interest in the property? What is your NFT actually adding here? If they take full ownership of the property, say, to build something on the land and sell it on, they're actually going to have to start that whole process over again, right?
I see absolutely no upside to tokenising property interests as NFTs and plenty of downsides, such as the potential for market manipulation, scams and thefts. Which is probably why the Smarter Contracts report focused instead on technological developments to fully digitise the traditional conveyancing process that already exists under property law.
But you've hitched your wagon to public permissionless blockchain ledgers like Ethereum and marketplaces for trading NFTs, so you have a vested interested in convincing us that this is the proper technology for the use case. Yeah, there are a lot of naïve grifters in the blockchain space - and you're one of them.
You are a little behind the times on the status of digital signatures, smart contracts etc.
Our project
The Law Commission was asked by the Lord Chancellor to include work on smart legal contracts as part of our Thirteenth Programme of Law Reform. In November 2019, the UK Jurisdiction Taskforce (“UKJT”) published its legal statement on cryptoassets and smart contracts. The UKJT Legal Statement concluded that, in principle, smart contracts are capable of giving rise to binding legal obligations, enforceable in accordance with their terms.
Following this, the Ministry of Justice asked us to undertake a detailed analysis of the current law as it applies to smart legal contracts, highlighting any uncertainties or gaps, and identifying such further work as may be required now or in the future.
Advice to Government
We published our advice to Government on smart legal contracts on 25 November 2021. It was informed by the detailed responses we received to the call for evidence, published in December 2020.
We have concluded that the current legal framework in England and Wales is clearly able to facilitate and support the use of smart legal contracts, without the need for statutory law reform.
Um, okay? None of that refutes anything I said in my summary of the Smarter Contracts report.
All the Law Commission essentially said is that there doesn't need to be any new legislation created for the courts to be able to deal with what they call 'smart legal contracts'.
In their summary report the Law Commission also said:
"Solely code smart legal contracts are likely to be rare in practice, given that commercial contracts are typically too nuanced to be reduced solely to code."
Their definition of a 'smart legal contract' includes traditional natural language contracts in which the implementation of some of the aspects is automated by code.
Note also that in this context, 'code' is not confined to 'smart contracts' on blockchains. A web server that automates some contractual activities by connecting with an API, for example, would count as part of a 'smart legal contract' by the definition that the Law Commission is using here.
I'm not sure what point you're actually trying to make by linking me to this Law Commission report. Maybe my brain is just not wide enough / too deep to understand? But if you're trying to convince me that the Law Commission said that we're increasingly going to be using blockchain smart contracts for things, you're seriously misrepresenting the conclusions of their paper.
"I see absolutely no upside to tokenising property interests as NFTs and plenty of downsides"
People have said things like this about every new technology -- both the successes and the failures. Will it succeed or fail? We shall see -- I think the former, you think the latter, that's fine: you have no skin in the game and are entitled to your opinion.
But here's the bottom line: there's no electronic trading system for real estate right now, other than things like REIT equity on exchanges.
So whoever cracks that wins big. Is that a reasonable risk for a commercial enterprise to take?
Absolutely.
Is the first one done the same as the five thousandth one? No, we'll learn, improve, refine. We'll build commercial infrastructure and commercial partnerships.
But the prize is large enough to do some actual work on, because if we're right, we wind up winning big.
If the legals are a little confusing, I suggest going over it with a lawyer, assuming you aren't one!
"But here's the bottom line: there's no electronic trading system for real estate right now, other than things like REIT equity on exchanges."
Yes, but the reason for this is not because it would be impossible to implement with existing technology. There's absolutely no reason that you couldn't set up a traditional database to do that. The reason for this is that there's actually a lack of demand for a system that would allow individual properties to be day traded like individual stocks.
Seriously, who the fuck looks at day trading and thinks "wouldn't it be great if we could do this with houses?" And on top of that, proposes a system in which it would be totally pseudonymous? lol, lmao.
I suggest that you seriously reassess your business model if you're counting on people using Mattereum for houses.
I'm not a lawyer but I've read the Smarter Contracts report from LawtechUK - you know, the one Sir Vos was citing - and it lays out quite clearly how technology is going to streamline the process of conveyancing. This is what's actually needed, not trading property like NFTs.
"There's absolutely no reason that you couldn't set up a traditional database to do that."
Everything is equivalent to a Turing machine.
The question is costs.
"clearly how technology is going to streamline the process of conveyancing. This is what's actually needed, not trading property like NFTs"
These statements say the same thing: a perfectly efficient conveyancing process is seamless, so the property can change hands like an NFT. An atomic swap with cash in one direction and the title etc. in the other.
I`ve talked to blockchain bro`s since day one about this stuff. "Houses as NFTs" etc etc. It`s a simple grift, an empty scam, substituting a woo-woo-tech "solution" to obscure the fact that the basic idea is houses as bearer bonds.
Transfer the NFT? O.k, what happens if the wrong NFT is transferred and the person refuses to give it back?
What happens if someone hacks your wallet and steals your apes and your house. Do you have to move out?
What happens if the wrong data gets entered and an apartment block has one less floor of apartments than actually exists?
What is your blockchain solution to the boring everyday errors and fraud that occur in real life?
Here`s the problem. My shiftless nephew put a key logger on my computer and transferred my house NFT to his own wallet. Now he`s claiming I gave it to him and is aiming to sell it. Walk me through the process resolving this, step by step. .
No, trading an NFT is not the same as the process of conveyancing.
Conveyancing includes checks to comply with property law. Trading an NFT doesn't.
Have a nice day.
P.S.: You've already admitted on the Mattererum website that the NFT isn't actually legal ownership of the property itself, but an interest in the property, and an extra step is still required to convert that into legal ownership.
If you wanted to build digital a marketplace for property interests to be speculated on like NFTs with a traditional database you could - and no, it wouldn't be more expensive. It's not been done because the demand isn't there.
Man.
Okay.
The parent is right, you are crazier than i gave you credit for.
Okay, I read all of your references, and besides the whole amazing arrogance piece, you fundamentally don't understand land disputes. Also, your references don't support any of your points in a meaningful way. Points 6-9 say nothing other than "blockchain is not immature".
It doesn't say "holy crap the world would be better if land was on blockchain". The referred to report doesn't say it either.
The whole thing reads like a serious case of NPD.
As a lawyer, let me try to help:
Putting land records on blockchain, and even turning land into NFT's that properly transfer when NFT moves is totally meaningless.
Land disputes are, 99.9% of the time, not about a lack of records. They are about a lack of caring about what the records say, and NFT won't fix that.
For example, when US states took land from the indians, it wasn't "hey we have no records that say you own this", in fact, the opposite - not only did they have records, the courts even said "yeah the indians own this, you can't take this".
The result was the state governments saying "yeah, we don't give a crap" and doing it anyway, and marching them out of the state.
This is repeated time and time again. It is incredibly rare to have a land dispute where the issue is "we have no records", or we can't prove anything.
If it was a bunch of NFT's, either it would be simply ignored (which is what happened pre-NFT's), overruled by some other chain that has more central control (IE a dictator creates his own chain and doesn't care about yours, even if everyone else does), or someone would just torture people until they transferred them. Yay, i'm glad you fixed everything.
Even if this was wrong (and it's not), the mechanics say that bona fide purchaser for value without notice take good and valid title, even against the people who had land stolen from them.
This, again, isn't due to lack of records.
The system isn't actually broken, it's behaving exactly as it is supposed to.
It just turns out that having land as NFTs or whatever doesn't change the fact that governments are sovereigns that can do what they want.
Somehow i suspect you think crypto will magically change this too - it will not.
At best, it will only change how formal a government exists, and even that's crazytown. In that world, the people with the most weapons and willingness to use them make the rules. Those are the government, defacto or not.
Yes I do, it is not monetizeable property and has easements across it. How much do you think land that you can’t rent or build on, that also has an easement for a path on it, is worth? You can buy or lease wetlands and desert in the US that have no economic value for very cheap, just like this parcel of land along the sea that has no economic value.
Of course “tech” isn’t a monolith, and neither is “crypto”. Many people into Bitcoin or crypto don’t appreciate being lumped into the very long tail of scams that are an inherent byproduct of permissionless money.
It would be a bit like pre-internet engineers dismissing the internet because it’s the world’s best porn distribution mechanism.
Can these many people in Bitcoin doing legitimate stuff speak up, because I'm yet to see an actual implemented use case that isn't "evade financial regulations and hope governments don't care enough"
> Crypto has always been a subset of tech's goals, and is even framed that way 99% of the time in presentations/etc.
GP is simply saying that making a permissionless financial network a key element of the way value is exchanged across the world is a much more ambitious goal than selling books online.
> GP is simply saying that making a permissionless financial network a key element of the way value is exchanged across the world is a much more ambitious goal than selling books online.
They said:
> And that's in a space whose biggest ambition was to replace catalogue shopping and how hotel reservations are made.
Which is an amazingly uncharitable interpretation of "the whole tech industry" in the 90s when the internet was being created, ask people at the time to give their best-foot-forward description of ambitions and you'd probably get something much more like "make all the world's knowledge available to everyone" and "eliminate the tyranny of distance to let human relationships flourish"
Vs, you know, "replace banks and let people transfer money instantly" or "create a new currency" - which sounds an AWFUL lot like a subset of that "connect everything together" original tech goal. Hell, "create a new currency" was even a goal for a lot of players back then, too!
(Interestingly they both share a level of idealism in terms of transcending traditional national borders, whether or not that is practical/achievable/or was achieved fully.)
to maintain a standard of discussion here because it feels like hn bias just hit: there are more applications of a distributed database at 400ms latency than fraud. falling into ad hominem attacks feels immature.
The Web hit the scene in 1991. By 2003 how we shopped, worked, consumed media, communicated with friends and family, and interacted with information was in the process of changing radically. A million "little ambitions" to replace catalogue shopping and how hotel reservations were made were transforming how the world worked.
Bitcoin hit the scene in 2011. By 2023 crypto's mostly a failed get-rich-quick scheme with a couple actual possibly legitimate uses that you can see if you squint just right.
So not only did crypto have much smaller goals than the Dot-Com era, but it failed pretty hard at those goals. And the deep dark secret at the heart of crypto is that — apart from the get-rich-quick stuff — it's neither particularly interesting nor useful. And it takes a lot of set dressing and hand-waving to make it seem like such.
The most "legitimate" use for bitcoin and its friends is transferring funds electronically with people that others don't want you transferring funds with (e.g, avoiding payment processors, laws, etc).
However, it remains to be seen if cryptocurrency could survive doing only that (e.g., without speculators) - because if there's no speculation how do you unload the currency? Only to others wishing to do the same. It's possible, but will it work out?
All the while remembering that all transactions in bitcoin have a permanent ledger - so many friends seemed to think that bitcoin is somehow secret and anonymous - there are ways to make it more so, but by default it is much less anonymous than cold hard cash.
I think you're using legitimate to mean "legal and most reasonable people would be okay with it" whereas the post you're responding to meant "legitimate" to mean an actual real technological advancement that wasn't doable with previous technologies
Exactly. Legitimate can mean "conforming to the laws" in which case law avoidance can't (usually) be legitimate, but I was taking the secondary meaning of "able to be defended with logic or justification" e.g., it allows something that couldn't otherwise be done (currently).
A government that fully supported an actual digital cash that was untraceable (perhaps this is best done with crypto, but you can do it without a blockchain) would serve the same purpose.
> The most "legitimate" use for bitcoin and its friends is transferring funds electronically with people that others don't want you transferring funds with (e.g, avoiding payment processors, laws, etc).
Yes. I way underestimated the size of the money-laundering industry.
> And the deep dark secret at the heart of crypto is that — apart from the get-rich-quick stuff — it's neither particularly interesting nor useful. And it takes a lot of set dressing and hand-waving to make it seem like such.
“You can truly own your IP through the whole thing,” Bayne said, highlighting the advantages that Web3 brings to filmmaking. “Your community can be involved through every step, and you don't necessarily need the studios.”
>“You can truly own your IP through the whole thing,” Bayne said, highlighting the advantages that Web3 brings to filmmaking. “Your community can be involved through every step, and you don't necessarily need the studios.”
i get you have to have types with very active imaginations to evangelize and get a new thing created, but sometimes, that imagination is just so fanciful that it has the same odds as a snow ball in certain locations. it also makes the speaker just sound completely out of touch and delusional. that comment makes me think someone is quite enamored with the sound of their own voice
I don’t think comparing the timelines of vastly different technologies like this is helpful.
Prior to the web, in the 1960s/1970s we had packet-switching networks, such as ARPANET which were the basis of modern computer networking.
The original ARPANET (precursor to the internet)was just used to connect computers at research institutions. I.e it wasn’t used by that many people relatively speaking.
It took another 20 years for the web to come along and more for it gain widespread adoption.
Is Bitcoin, a very low level protocol, more analogous to ARPANET or the web? Even if you dislike crypto, is this comparison really helpful?
All technology is built on the shoulders of previous giants. Building a secure, scalable, sufficiently decentralized distributed computer system is hard. I.e it’s going to take a long ass time. Hence I’m not surprised at how far we have come since BTC was released.
>Is Bitcoin, a very low level protocol, more analogous to ARPANET or the web? Even if you dislike crypto, is this comparison really helpful?
ARPANET knew who it was for and what it was for: for researchers to share data and compute resources that would otherwise be expensive to do across vast distances. Audience and use case. What's the equivalent for cryptocurrency?
>Building a secure, scalable, sufficiently decentralized distributed computer system is hard.
Who actually wants that, and for what practical purpose?
Whilst it's certainly a valid point that different technologies don't have exactly the same adoption curves, we're not talking about decades of behind closed doors innovation to make microcomputers people would want to use packet switching technology to share stuff on, we're talking about adoption curve of the most-hyped thing since the "information superhighway" of the 1990s, something which involves stadium sponsorship deals, Sand Hill Road and more electricity consumption than most countries. And generally the "it's like the early days of the web" stuff is coming from pro-crypto people, usually those who are pretty keen on stressing that their portfolio is not an experiment as doomed to obsolescence as a 1960s comms network (and that POS and faster transaction throughput on different blockchains isn't "better"). The issues the present crypto industry suffer from for the most part aren't scaling or lack of technology, they're philosophical.
I disagree, I don’t think this is just about adoption curves and hype cycles.
I think fundamentally the infrastructure required to build decentralized applications is hard and has pushed the limits of computer science (zero knowledge proofs etc).
I think people have inflated expectations about how long it will take this technology to mature. Today it’s still very technically hard to build a scalable dapp that’s easy to use. Assuming this is something consumers actually want as opposed to a solution in search of a problem, this will take more time to solve.
Sometimes greed makes people think a technology is a lot further along than it actually is.
> Building a secure, scalable, sufficiently decentralized distributed computer system is hard.
Yep. This blockchain/PoW/PoS way they’ve come up with to do it, with a built in cryptocurrency, doesn’t really cut it.
The trade offs to be “sufficiently decentralized” make it slow, expensive and unscalable. Making it effectively useless for real-world applications. The whole of Ethereum has as much power as a raspberry pi.
> Even if you dislike crypto, is this comparison really helpful?
AFAICT the comparison is only made because, faced with a decade and a bit of failure to deliver, cryptocurrency and blockchain proponents need an argument as to why it's still going to be HUGE, and is still a case of "just you wait, you'll see", rather than admitting it's not looking very hopeful.
> Bitcoin hit the scene in 2011. By 2023 crypto's mostly a failed get-rich-quick scheme with a couple actual possibly legitimate uses that you can see if you squint just right.
You forgot that already by 2022, you were able to use multiple slurp juices on a single ape!
I really don't see any reason why someone working in cryptocurrency, but clear eyed about the possibility of down sides would "cross swords with Molly". She is an incredible source, as far as I can tell the *best* at finding and highlighting what's going wrong. That's incredibly valuable.
rekt.news is also quite good, but skewed towards less reporting but more in depth.
IMO Molly should be getting public good funding from the ETH ecosystem for being such a good & reliable source, regardless of if there's a difference in belief of whether crypto is eventually worth it, if you want to build for the long term you must know what is going wrong.
I do not think "crossing swords" is necessarily something aggressive, it could have been debate. I am quiet the blockchain-believer and follow and read Molly's twitter. Yet I do not think she should be unopposed in her views, on the contrary I want her to be challenged, it just comes with making a name for yourself as being anything-skeptic.
> IMO Molly should be getting public good funding from the ETH ecosystem for being such a good & reliable source
It's a generous thought, but it's very bad optics to take a bunch of money from someone that you report on. Yes I know this happens all the time in bigger media circles, but they're big enough that it's either not going to be a dominant revenue stream or the appearance of integrity is irrelevant (the ur-example being Fox News and their claims of being "entertainment")
But the biggest scandals had nothing to do with the "tech" - the tech at its core is exceedingly simple and the idea has been around forever. This isn't just "tech being tech," this is tech mixing with unregulated finance + hucksters. This isn't just some overvalued tech stock going to zero, its people losing their entire livelihoods and capital based on blatantly false or misleading promises.
Similarly, it's frustrating for many of us in crypto that things like the SBF/FTX meltdown is counted as a failure of crypto, when it was just a centralized traditional platform.
It's hard for me to have too much sympathy for people that were parking a large amount of money at that place and trusting them with it. Who cares what "promises" they were making?
"messy" meaning like, oh people try business ideas and they fail, or "messy" as in many people are actively scamming other people with no intent of actually providing value?
But it's the same innovation engine that ran Silicon Valley, the same type of people, it's just now they're less dependent on Goldman Sachs...
If this is true it's the biggest indictment of Silicon Valley ever. The goal was always to pump and dump on retail but finally they got to take the mask off? Fuck that forever.
> The early days of the dotcom space were filled with carnage of a type which makes crypto look pretty normal.
Carnage, yes. I ran "downside.com" back then. (It's still up, but I stopped updating it around 2006.). In the first dot-com boom, everybody went public. So you could track their numbers from SEC filings. I just took their cash flow numbers and computed when the cash would run out as the "death date". That was surprisingly accurate.
But not as many out and out scams as in crypto. Most of the original dot-coms actually did something real. It might not have been profitable, but there was some utility. You could order from Webvan and the stuff would show up.
The scams were dressed as massively inflated IPOs for companies that absolutely never stood a chance.
They needed Goldman or somebody like it in on the deal. Everybody had to put on a suit. It was industrial.
Now it’s a cottage industry of petty grifters exiled from multi level marketing, plus a few big Silicon Valley institutions that turned to the dark side: A16Z springs to mind.
Not much has changed, only the direct to consumer nature of the scams without needing an investment bank in the mix.
I think the most generous summary of these interactions would be that leashless is solidly convinced of two things: blockchains are the answer to pressing world problems, and skeptics are simply not on his intellectual and moral level.
The home page of Mattereum appears to be a pitch to create one NFT per physical item and then make transactions about it on the blockchain. I confess I am also unsure of how this technology adds value to e-commerce. Nor does this scheme seem to be sufficient to bring about such levels of transparency that it could meaningfully combat slavery, or address issues of climate justice. I hope that leashless is correct about all of that.
On the modern slavery front have a read of the transcript of the podcast from our modern slavery expert discussing how all this fits together.
Serious policy people who are worthy of respect are doing this thing. Molly can snark all the likes but all that she’s demonstrated is arrogance, poor judgement, an unwillingness to admit when she is out of her depth on real world issues like modern slavery, and a willingness to use lynch mobs to defend her point of view rather than to discuss the actual topic. The world is filled with people who point and laugh for a hobby, but once it becomes a living all intellectual honesty goes straight out the window.
If you want to understand what we really do, read on.
“You just have to do more research to understand” is the crypto founder’s refuge from all criticism.
You have not demonstrated that your claim is worthy of investigation.
While I am not the most intelligent person you have met, I am a very smart person. Someone who claims that the CAP theorem proves the inevitability of blockchains has understood neither, or is perhaps deliberately using words to bamboozle mildly technical people. But perhaps you are ahead of your time and merely look like a scammer. Nevertheless, if you are unable to explain the idea to others who are not as smart as you, at minimum you are incompetent as a visionary or founder. Educating is your job, not mine.
Bitcoin is 14 years old at this point. We are _not_ early. Surely if blockchains are as great as their proponents claim, at least one clever company would have done something unquestionably impressive with them? But maybe I'm the crazy one here.
(For context the time between the launch of Sputnik and the first commercial communications satellite, Intelsat I, was 8 years)
You can find a ton of material here about exactly why tagging one NFT per object is worth doing. It’s a possible pretty decent fix for many of the problems continuing to run consumer capitalism in the current mode. Basically it gives a place for wear and use data to accumulate.
The wear and use data is accurate and trustworthy because it’s presented in a legal framework which provides real accountability for the people involved in the transaction.
We don’t know if consumers will accept it or not, but we do know that it works legally and technically. Early stage research.
What the crypto promoters continue to fail to understand is that ownership ultimately is enforced by the state and its laws, not by code. This will never change. Given that reality, centralized ledgers will always be cheaper for every use case than decentralized trustless ledgers.
It can not be anything else. It never was and for the foreseeable future it will not be anything else because as long as there are transaction fees it's a negative sum game. (And no, cash, stocks and golds are each not such.)
Everything else is just talk trying to cover this. The very nature of a negative sum game requires you to talk up the game. Talking of freedom, big goals etc. that's just required by any scam of this sort.
I think most of crypto is a scam, but I can see the upside in a few things like ENS where a distributed consensus might be better than a centralized authority.
However, the tax implications are insane for me in Canada. I won't touch anything where I have to pay in crypto because it creates a huge burden when it comes to doing my taxes at the end of the year. How does crypto solve that? IMO, they've already been regulated to a place where they can't compete.
I also feel like proof of stake is literally the code-is-law version of "the rich get richer". If the injection point for newly minted ETH is the rich that already own the majority of the existing ETH, how is that any different than the government printing FIAT and the rich that already own the majority of the FIAT being the injection point? For me, it's all the same because I don't see how anything changes for me (besides more complex taxes).
I see lots of gambling, lots of scams, and very little actual use outside the "classical" use cases that existed at the very beginning. These are wire transfer and black/grey market commerce.
Hello, as part of the bigger goals of the crypto space, I was wondering if you'd care to follow up on this generous $10k charity bet you proposed a few month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33893333
If @phphphphp isn't available or doesn't want to continue, I'd be willing to wager $10k on the same terms that he offered.
For all your word salad, you cant hide the fact that your description is so inspirational, potential and unrealized that it sounds more like a scam than what the silicon valley ever did to deserve its name.
You re not on an innovation engine, you re selling a dream, and the moment it would come true, its actual realization would be so disappointing that its value would crater.
The only "goal" of crypto is to make money. Anything else is just worn as a mask for promotion because, "Lie, cheat, steal" isn't a great set of principles for a new economic universal ledger.
What crypto has become has showed just how wrong Satoshi was about people. Crypto COULD have been everything he hoped for. It could have been a system where everyone participated, with millions of nodes. Instead it became something no one understood, operated by a few mega pools, all who are trying to fleece people who don't understand or care but just want to make money. Crypto is now an economic matchmaking system that matches the desperate and greedy with those who would take advantage of them. It's a free market system that matches predator with prey. It's doing what almost all banking regulation tries to mitigate.
Capitalism consumed crypto in a second. I'd go as far as to say that the two are actually incompatible at a fundamental level.
> The only "goal" of crypto is to make money. Anything else is just worn as a mask for promotion because, "Lie, cheat, steal" isn't a great set of principles for a new economic universal ledger.
This is exactly why generalizing doesn't work.
The most visible parts of the crypto space (exchanges, VC-funded blockchain, etc...) are there simply to make money. If you meet some of the longer-term devs, you'll see a completely different side of it.
How can someone think that Vitalik is in this space for money when he gives so much of it away and has been known to question whether the price matches the value of Ethereum (meaning that Eth was priced too high)? He can also walk away and retire at any time, but chooses to keep working on Ethereum and helping other chains when needed.
It's not just Vitalik either. There are many people in this space who value decentralization, personal freedom, financial inclusion, etc... but you dont read news articles about them because they aren't trying to get your attention or money, they're trying to make something that's meaningful to them that they think will make the world a better place.
Vitalik is not motivated by money. He decided to create a supra-national computer system no government can touch when “Blizzard removed the damage component from his beloved warlock’s Siphon Life spell.”
Once you get the money, then you want the power. I suppose you’re right in that respect. He’s chooses to keep working because he’s dedicated to the scam.
None of the people in crypto are trying to make the world a better place. The harm done outweighs the benefits by such a ridiculous ratio it’s really not worth it to even trying to compute. I mean, that's what Molly White is trying to do here but it's just not necessary. We all know. Doubly so for the advocates.
Here's what it boils down to: freedom is messy.
The early days of the dotcom space were filled with carnage of a type which makes crypto look pretty normal. Amazon stock dropped >90% and a trillion and a half in value vanished from the market overall. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
And that's in a space whose biggest ambition was to replace catalogue shopping and how hotel reservations are made.
Crypto has bigger goals, and the mess is bigger. But it's the same innovation engine that ran Silicon Valley, the same type of people, it's just now they're less dependent on Goldman Sachs when they want to go to the public and ask for their money. Make no mistake: nothing new, strange or unusual is happening. It's just tech being tech, no cause for alarm.