Hacker News Reader

Comment by leashless | Hacker News Reader

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.

It’s just a lot of lawyering. It actually works.

View on HN

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.

Having data on chain changes everything.

https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Speech-M... -- head of civil justice for the UK discusses smart contracts and commerce.

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.

6 - 10 don't offer any useful information, except to say "blockchain is hot hot hot". You're only further showing that your grift is confidence.

*from one of the most senior judges in the UK* -- not "hot" but "has a ton of utility in the conduct of real commerce."

It hits different coming from people that handle the legal frameworks for trillions of dollars of transactions, you know?

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.

https://www.lawcom.gov.uk/project/digital-assets/

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?

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.

"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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com