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Comment by leashless | Hacker News Reader

In all these instances, the answer is litigation under the terms of service which are associated with the NFT or the warranty contracts which guarantee the status of the property.

You bring a case under those terms: "I am the legal owner of this land and I want the NFT which was owned by the deceased to be reissued to me". The legal binding on the original NFT is broken, and a new NFT is issued.

There's also provision under the UK Jurisdiction Taskforce digital dispute resolution rules https://lawtechuk.io/explore/ukjt-digital-disputes-rules to have an arbitrator use a judicial back door in the NFT contract to transfer ownership of the NFT if the contract has those affordances.

We feel that's very powerful.

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> The legal binding on the original NFT is broken, and a new NFT is issued.

oooooooof. Centralization removes what modest benefits there were in the first place.

Not from where we are standing.

For us, the critical features of the blockchain are:

1) simultaneous execution of a substantial number of legal contracts between different counter-parties as a single atomic transaction

2) non-repudiatable payments going to all of those contract counter-parties

3) single source of truth on a publicly visible resource so all parties can see what's going on at all times

4) "litigation-ready" record keeping about who did what when

And so on: it's a better way of doing certain legal processes not some kind of magic pixie dust.

That's a pretty different take from the general blockchain rhetoric, but this represents the UK legal consensus on the blockchain. It's a tool, not a jurisdiction.

It's not a single fucking source of truth since you need an oracle to go between the blockchain and the actual legal authorities to register ownership. You just have an entry in a ledger that says "X owns Y" with zero legal backing. I can take your money and give you a receipt but that doesn't mean anything if I don't have the authority to sell the thing.

It's a company with some REAL contracts to pretend that the stupid database is authoritative, as if judges love stupid law games like that.

A blockchain adds nothing to this, as it is merely an extremely stupid and expensive database.

The point is to cash in on crypto hype.

This is just being an escrow company. No blockchain necessary.

> In all these instances, the answer is litigation under the terms of service which are associated with the NFT or the warranty contracts which guarantee the status of the property.

Terms of what service? Who's providing it? Why would anybody downstream from the first buyer be held to them?

What if a third party uses an exploit to transfer the NFT from the original owner to me, a randomly picked and non-participating address? How can I be bound to any terms of service or contract by just receiving a random NFT?

> You bring a case under those terms: "I am the legal owner of this land and I want the NFT which was owned by the deceased to be reissued to me". The legal binding on the original NFT is broken, and a new NFT is issued.

What if the issuer no longer exists?

> We feel that's very powerful.

I take this message is an implicit "No, it hasn't been tested legally". You might hope it works, but who in their right mind would spent more than a million to find out for sure?

Terms of service and legal warranties are executed on each transfer of the NFT otherwise the NFT buyer has only statutory legal rights. Those people are being paid by the new buyer of the NFT specifically to give them some real confidence in what they are buying, because the Certifiers are putting their assets on the line to back the promises made to the NFT purchaser.

If the issuer no longer exists you wind up in court claiming title to the land by virtue of having paid for it - and you'd be dealing (likely) with receivers or other people involved in bankruptcy proceedings. These are anticipated contingencies in the contracts we use.

Tested only occurs when a litigation happens. If the system is smooth and reliable, we could see 200 transactions before litigation. However, good lawyers read the contracts, make a risk assessment, and decide whether or not to proceed.

The contracts we use do pass review with good lawyers. These systems are fit for purpose, and a close legal review will satisfy most prospective purchasers of that fact.

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