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Comment by easymodex | Hacker News Reader

Say you initiate a contract to sell a yacht for 1 million $. You and your buyer go to a notary where all 3 of you sign the contract and all the proper procedures. You give the buyer the yacht and he says he will transfer you the money tomorrow. Meanwhile the buyer and the notary strike a shady deal to screw you over and make new contracts that say you sold it for 1k$. It's 2 against 1 and you will lose a costly court battle and your yacht and so on.

Solution: blockchain smart contracts where code is law, more secure, trustworthy and transparent than any individual, bank, government or company.

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But code isn't law. You would have to rewrite parts of the legal system to support blockchain tokens as representing actual ownership, and there's strong reasons why you would never want to, such as loss of private keys, forgetting of passwords, or security vulnerabilities, or user error leading to complete asset loss.

Otherwise you have a synchronization problem between the upcoming blockchain token system and the existing government deed registry, and of course the government registry would take preference, and has a history of working just fine for lower cost.

This video is an excellent overview of this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxmXIgLEAIE

I haven't seen blockchain systems as being more secure or more trustworthy. I see them being overhyped, subject to lax and magical thinking, and full of theft of coins due to hacks and scams.

"and has a history of working just fine for lower cost." Citation needed.

Also we are just talking opinions here, a lot of things seem impossible until they are actually here and in our everyday lives.

Maybe you should try watching the video I already cited, specifically this part: https://youtu.be/YxmXIgLEAIE?t=1404

You might learn something.

You are trying to solve a problem with a blockchain that does not exist. Also, exactly how does your blockchain even know "this yacht now belongs to this person"?

It doesn't. You go to court like normal people.

Exactly. How does the real world's state get accurately put into a blockchain? My big beef with all the blockchain hype is that this doesn't seem to be addressed. They say "trustless" and "secure" and "transparent" all the time, but those assurances only exist within the very limited confines of the data structure itself. As soon as you hook it into real-world data, then those assurances only guarantee that fraud is accurately carried out.

How is this not a problem if the court system is filled to the brim with situation that could have been solved with smart contracts in place.

As for the yacht it's easy, the ownership is transfered from your address to the buyers address on the government's blockchain. :)

hey everyone lets record every transaction from everyone on a big government database so we can solve trade disputes if someone steals my yacht and crashes it.

Let's say I'm the buyer and this happens. There's now a record on the government blockchain that says I own a yacht. Does that mean I physically have possession of the yacht now? How do we assure that what's in the blockchain is an accurate reflection of who actually has physical possession of the boat?

> blockchain smart contracts where code is law, more secure, trustworthy and transparent than any individual, bank, government or company.

The DAO issue [0] clearly showed that "code is law" doesn't really work. It's people writing cryptocurrency software and running the nodes that are "the law".

[0]: https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-executes-blockchain-hard-f...

If you and the buyer already have physical contact, you don't need a trustless system, you take him to court or vice versa if one party is unhappy with the transaction.

The blockchain can't (or at the very least shouldn't) overwrite legal infrastructure.

But you still lose your yacht because it's not in the blockchain.

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