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Comment by leashless | Hacker News Reader

So I've built a market for physical assets using the Ethereum/IPFS.

The point is that the data about the assets should outlast the interest of the current owner. It should outlast the physical assets themselves.

Hard to get another architecture which can manage data beyond the lifetime of any given market actor.

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How do you ensure the ownership of the physical item is kept in line with the ownership of the NFT? Eg if the physical owner sold or gifted the item or it was stolen? It seems like the NFT is likely to have incorrect information over time.

I agree, you have to pretend NFT really implies ownership. I’d put it in the terms of service :).

The legals took several years to get right. This is, indeed, the hard part.

I was being sarcastic; there is no legal basis for an NFT to be any different than, say, the URL in your browser. You can copy it all you want, but it doesn't convey ownership in any way.

This is not true. For example, ownership of an NFT (and burning it) can constitute payment for an intellectual property license to do something like put music into an advert or use it in a film.

My question remains, how do you ensure the physical item ownership is kept up to date with ownership of the NFT? Even if that is in the terms of service, someone could still steal an item, making the NFT ownership and physical item ownership out of sync.

The first generation of physical assets are vaulted: numbered gold bars, numbered collectibles, fine art.

The application is B2B trading of assets between dealers, so they don't have to mess around with devaulting every time the assets change ownership, introducing risk of fraud every time.

There is also a lot of insurance involved, to answer your probably next question: if the vault loses something or an employee accidentally drives a forklift over it, the NFT holder gets paid.

It works. Pilots right now, but it works.

> the data about the assets should outlast the interest of the current owner. It should outlast the physical assets themselves.

Why? What does this accomplish?

Some of our assets are hundreds of years old already.

One of them is half a million years old, but still made by human(ish) hands.

Preserving the data for future generations is part of the job.

I understand that some things exist longer than their owners do. We already have mechanisms in place to manage the transition of ownership of those things. What is insufficient about those mechanisms? What is accomplished by these properties you say should be true?

Why don't we just buy stuff out of paper catalogues? Why all this Amazon nonsense?

I don't understand the point you're making. Amazon reduced transactional friction. In what way does ensuring metadata about transactions and securities outlive those things themselves relate?

Transactional friction in the fine art world is completely gigantic. Very very little use of tech to help manage asset documentation.

It's a fixable problem.

so 'hard' in fact, that ipfs/ethereum can't do it. Try for instance to discover the replication status of your data on the ipfs 'network'-- or to determine how you're partitioned relative to other actors. Ya can't do it. But hey as long as the cloudflare gateway works, right?

IPFS is one of several storage layers.

(and I should mention we use semantic web tools to describe the physical assets: parametric search)

how do you ensure that someone stores the data for at least as long as the item? are they making regular storage payments?

Including for the physical vaulting of the item, in most cases.

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