
Why Global Trade Will Inevitably Move to the Blockchain - walterbell
https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/why-global-trade-will-inevitably-move-to-the-blockchain-ab3f66bd20f8
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al2o3cr

        Mattereum, my company — my co-founder Rob Knight is over
        there — we are sitting there, doing the dog work of trying
        to figure out exactly how to get control of physical assets
        and intellectual property from a blockchain, so when you
        transfer it a smart contract the court agrees it’s transferred…
    

What about when someone transfers it to a smart contract and then the court
_doesn 't_ agree that it's transferred and orders that it be transferred back?
Either your chain isn't tamper-proof (if admins can override the transfer) and
you're right back to having to trust a centralized authority, or you're stuck
in "anything I can steal I own forever"-land like in the cryptocurrency space
today.

As always, the post reads better if you substitute "slow, expensive databases"
for "blockchain" everywhere.

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rjknight
A blockchain is just a bunch of cryptographically-signed messages chained
together. You can determine the state of the system by taking these messages
and applying their effects in the correct order.

We have lots of names for this pattern because it keeps being reinvented.
Within the last decade we have both "blockchain" and "event sourcing"
describing something very similar, with "blockchain" having the additional
property that the messages are cryptographically signed.

In ordered event-driven systems, you almost never want to tamper with history.
If you need to reconcile the state of the system with some external reality,
you add a new transaction! I'm not sure where the assumption about tampering
comes in.

