Nick Szabo  🔑

Agreed, and from the compliance corner even just this improvement will streamline regulatory reporting, forensics, predictive analytics, fraud detection, and more. (Yep, it's the boring stuff and I understand completely how few people care, but for us, it has a big impact.)

Except that the regulations probably ban it, even though it would improve compliance and enforcement.

Even this seems a stretch. I have no idea how a decentralized database somehow makes compliance easier than a simple query of a mysql database.

It makes for more reliable evidence in court, and if done on a public blockchain controls the burden of lawsuit and changes the means of enforcement.

Hmm, I hear you but seems like a marginal improvement. Tampering with title databases is already illegal, that seems like a pretty strong incentive to not do so (and strong reasoning to assume no tampering by default).

For existing securities quite true. The main thing trust-minimized tokens have given (to scammers or to a new generation of global entrepreneurs, take your pick) is simply the ability to cut the Gordian knot and route around the whole very bureaucratic and restrictive mess.

cc: @APompliano

Tanks can kill people whether they posses a paper certificate or the keys to a token — with a token it’s much harder for a 3rd party to sieze.

Not at all physically harder to seize, but possibly harder to defend the seizure if hauled into court, assuming court grants some authority (or at least some evidentiary weight) to the token record.

In short, tokenized off-chain things are radically different, and radically weaker, and far more dependent on legal and political winds, than on-chain cryptocurrency.

Nick, this is what my company is doing: the nasty legal/technical leg work to get those physical assets titles to be secure. http://mattereum.com  it's the @iang_fc (our chief scientist) Ricardian model with close attention to asset locks and creation of new kinds of property.

It’s not solving for that. It’s solving for making assets much easier to move and control. Right now it takes 2-3 weeks to move stocks between brokers - a tokenized asset can be moved in minutes.

Move title to yes, otherwise control no (at least, not without quite a bit of additional trust-minimized code, including code I have been designed and have had a team work on).

If the ownership of your car is registered on a blockchain, but you loose your private key, you don't lose your car. And none else can claim it. Selling it becomes a problem though, since you cannot prove that you own it. Very big issue for most potential use cases.

Transfer of title as a tokenized asset would mean that titles become bearer instruments and that seems extremely risky. What happens to the real estate when the private keys are lost or stolen? I think it's a can of worms on its own.