We live in an age where we are forced to own nothing and be happy. Bitcoin, Blockchain and crypto solves this.
If you keep cash or gold in a safe place. You are only allowed to keep a certain amount. It can be seized at will.
Your will that declares what assets go to your children. The deed to your home. The lease for your car. Certificates. Art. Tickets. Contracts. Money.
We do not own any of these things without the requirement of having to trust a person, a comp ay or a government.
Blockchain technology allows us to own anything that can be documented on a ledger. Indefinitely. Trustlessly.
With cryptocurrencies, you need to trust:
* The exchanges (and other ramps for getting useful money into the system and out of the system)
* The developers of the chain
* The developers of the smart contracts
* The developers of wallets
* The miners
* The internet providers
* The hardware manufacturers
* The government (yes, they could punish usage of cryptocurrencies hard if they wanted to)
> Your will that declares what assets go to your children. The deed to your home. The lease for your car. Certificates. Art. Tickets. Contracts. Money.
Which can all be lost or stolen easily without a central authority and a judicial system. Do not underestimate the power of phishing, especially if it is directed towards specific people.
Decentralized Finance, Protocols and Apps do not require trust.
The frontend and backend of every protocol you are expected to use is open source. Things can only go wrong, without the fault of your own if you use something closed-source or custodial.
Cryptocurrency allows you to take responsibility.
> Which can all be lost or stolen easily without a central authority and a judicial system. Do not underestimate the power of phishing, especially if it is directed towards specific people.
Blockchain gives the world the ability to not rely on the local central authority. Your data will not be edited, removed, lost, stolen or damaged either.
You can write up a contract, leasing me your land for 99 years, on paper, with a witness and kept a copy with the local central authority. This can go well, until it goes wrong.
In 99 years, my estate may refuse to give the land back to you without proof of the paper it was written on. We could claim the paper is a fake. The local central authority can be bias, corrupt or dissolved. Which many authorities are.
If you used blockchain instead of paper. The contract remains unchanged, and ready to read at any time, until the very last computer on this planet is turned off.
> The frontend and backend of every protocol you are expected to use is open source. Things can only go wrong, without the fault of your own if you use something closed-source or custodial.
Are you seriously claiming that something cannot have bugs because it's open source? That nobody will use an oracle or otherwise have outside dependencies?
In reality, these systems do require trust. Most people do not have the skills to audit everything they use — even if, as we've seen so many times in the cryptocurrency world, they incorrectly believe they do — and the people who do have those skills wouldn't have time to audit everything they touch if these systems ever see widespread adoption. Everyone using them is trusting other parties at multiple levels, and there's no way to avoid that for most transactions.
> Cryptocurrency allows you to take responsibility.
Less misleadingly, cryptocurrency requires you to take responsibility for everything. This is not a feature for the vast majority of people because it's a large amount of highly-skilled work which you're required to do constantly as things update and the failure mode is that you're now penniless.
> Blockchain gives the world the ability to not rely on the local central authority. Your data will not be edited, removed, lost, stolen or damaged either.
This is pure naivety. If the blockchain says I own a house and the men with guns say you do, guess who wins? If your government is corrupt, the blockchain won’t help. If your government is not corrupt, the extra cost and risk from using a blockchain aren’t buying you anything.
At most, this problem needs PKI to register claims but the current system works well and all of the failure modes are things which blockchains either don't help with or make worse (“Someone hacked grandpa's phone. Now they own his house and a bunch of nerds on the internet said it's his fault and there's nothing he can do.”).
A trustless ledger documenting that I own the land my house is on, doesn't make me any safer against a government determined to steal my land.
A car lease ultimately requires me to trust that the leasing company is going to abide by their contractual obligations, just as they are trusting that I will abide by mine, and the contract enumerates what happens if either party fails to uphold their obligations, which is ultimately enforced by the court system. A ledger doesn't really change any of that.
etc.
Also, how can crypto not be seized at will? If they want to take your hardware wallet, they can just keep that just the same. Not to mention getting people to give over the keys if it is kept in a centralized exchange, which a lot of people are.
Wills, deeds, leases etc... are worthless on their own, with or without a blockchain. Sure they can be documented on a blockchain, but the blockchain has no ability to enforce the documents in the real world. If your ownership for somethings is on the blockchain, and someone steals it, then proof of ownership does not matter if there are not government agents with guns willing to enforce your ownership. Libertarians always believe this weird non-aggression principle, as if someone with more guns would respect your rights to property. Civil forfeiture only works because the government has the most guns.
Serious question, what/where does this apply to? I get NFTs for digital authenticity, but PKI solves this too. How does one "own nothing without blockchain" when we have property deeds, automobile titles, jewelry and fine art certificates of authenticity all without blockchain? Your comment comes off as a solution looking for a problem.
When any of these deeds, titles or certificates are lost, burnt or stolen. You have to rely on an outside body to keep a backup safe for you.
Blockchain allows us to be super efficient too. Which is a perk. Rather than the need of waiting for someone to certify, deliver, inspect, notify, return, process. Depending on the industry, this could take years. Blockchain tech allows everyone to see the validity of a claim in real time.
My family sold out family home a few years ago. It took 6 years of unnecessary admin work to get it sold. If we relied on blockchain tech, it would've been processed in a day.
[1] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
There are enough reliable methods to not rely on trusting some random server, but some money hungry developers cannot be asked to implement them.
Similar to how some websites do silly things, like storing plain-text passwords in their databases. People do it, but it doesn't make it right.
Why? This is an unsubstantiated claim. Blockchains still have an outside body that you're required to trust, several in fact. The most prominent one is the miners.
I can't tell what the admin issues with your sale were because you didn't mention them, but it seems like being able to see the validity of the claim wasn't the issue that took 6 years for lawyers to resolve. You can show them the validity in person on the day of the sale.
This phrase pretty much sums up almost everything related to cryptocurrency/blockchain.
The first part is simply not true (ownership isn't exactly uncommon). Can you specify the problem more precisely and explain how blockchains solve this? I've been following the space since the day Satoshi's manifesto hit HN so please include as many details as possible.