

In Getting Work by Ella Frost, We Ate Our Own Dog Food - trentmc
http://blog.ascribe.io/we-just-ate-our-own-dog-food/

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abcd_f
I understand what this does (basically, decentralized verification of the
ownership), but I'm not sure what is the real-world compelling reason for
using it.

I mean this solves an issue of verifying the legitimacy of the ownership,
correct? For the initial (creator -> 1st customer) transfers, the only party
interested in this is the original creator, but I don't see how this is better
than keeping a simple list of transfers in whatever form the creator wants. I
guess the customer may also find it useful for audit purposes or something,
but again, this doesn't seem that much more useful than a conventional
papertrail.

Secondly, it looks like this can be used to enable the resale of the rights.
But then it means that you have a situation with a party that is willing to
pay for the work, but this money is guaranteed NOT to go to the creator. So
it's not in creator's best interest to have their work "ascribed".

Unless I am missing something, what's the reason for a creator to participate
in this?

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atmosx
Say Gottfried and Isaac are disputing over the creation of a mathematical
method to solve problems.

Now if Isaac writes a cryptic paper that non one understands (but Gottfried)
and doesn't publish these finds on a 'well known Journal' it's very hard for
him to take credit for his work. If however, if publish his paper in the
blockchain, then there is a proof that he actually FOUND at THAT point in time
what he claims to.

The good thing is that, it's there for all to see and cannot be tampered.
That's all Isaac will need in court to win his case over Gottfried.

~~~
tezza
Could you not simply tweet a hash of a document that has the secret IP in it?

Then should the case come to court, you link to the Twitter tweet to show the
submitted date, and produce the document for the court. The court hashes the
document, does a comparison... The court accepts your argument

No need for anything more complex. There are hashes out there with few
collisions

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Two9A
You could, sure, but that depends on Twitter still being around if/when the
case comes to court. The blockchain, being independently held and cross-
verified at every node of the network, is more reliable in this regard.

~~~
e12e
Maybe just publish a sha512 hash of the document in a newspaper classifieds
section... If the goal was to have recorded evidence for posterity.

I wonder what the odds are that the current block-chains will be active in 70
years? Probably lower than the likelihood that all public tweets are recorded
in the library of congress or some similar institution.

Does a 60 year old archive of a block-chain that "lived" for 15 years of any
value? It could probably be "faked" with a cluster of machines and some time?

At any rate for things like a paper, we already have the ability to go and get
a document notarized somewhere -- and that has much more legal precedent than
some clever mathematical hack.

Would be interesting to see law firms offer "adding to and helping maintain" a
block chain as a supplement to regular notary service though.

[ed: Ah, contributing to the slashdotifization of hn. I see that the article
is about a company that tries to do this. I still wonder about what happens
if/when "everyone" moves away from (the current) bitcoin (chain) to a new
protocol. I suppose it could be "easy" to log the current state of the old
chain, in a new chain. Would make verification more complicated though?].

~~~
gus_massa
I Agree. But I guess that the Library of Congress (and archive.com and Google
Blockchains) will also save a copy of the major blockchais, but not of every
obscure altcoin. Some anthropologists and economists may find them
interesting. But then you will have to thrust again a central authority, and
the magic of the totally decentralized blockchain will be lost.

Another possibility when it's clear that another coin is surpassing Bitcoin is
to "register" the Bitcoin blockchain in the new blockchain, just store into
the new blockchain a copy of the current sha1. (Or a harder hash of all the
blockchain, to eliminate the possibility of collisions found with faster
machines.)

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iliketosleep
To me, this kind of usage of blockchain technology shows its true potential.
I'm not sure about the future of actual cryptocurrencies per se, but the
underlying concept of a distributed public ledger of "transactions" is
unstoppable. I think we're going to see countless use cases of blockchain-like
tech beyond cryptocurrency, and this kind of thing is just the beginning.

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e28eta
What prevents a malicious actor from scraping the Flickr new photos feed (for
example) of someone else, and registering & selling that other person's
copyrighted work?

Or a malicious actor posting their own photo to Flickr, then registering it on
ascribe, selling it through ascribe, and then repudiating the transaction,
claiming they weren't the ascribe user?

Unless ascribe.io is the _first_ place something is ever published, or they
have some way to verify initial ownership (not just possession), I don't see
how this works.

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terhechte
Interesting, I like the idea. I'd find it tedious, though, to manually upload
a file in a browser each time I have something digital I'd like to register.
Do you happen to have an API? Or are you planning to build one?

~~~
bpon
Yes, the API is ready and will soon be available at
[https://github.com/ascribe0](https://github.com/ascribe0)

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nissimk
Coupon payments for bonds, dividend patients for stocks. Disintermediation of
banking entities currently tracking holdings.

This has a lot of potential.

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dshankar
Very interesting use case.

Do you plan to add escrow functionality?

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Maken
So, this is basically a online copyright office?

