People have been doing that for ages without a blockchain!
Thirty-three years ago, when I started out as a mathematics undergraduate at Cambridge University, I met a second year physics student at a formal dinner.
"What if the speed of light in a vacuum wasn't constant?" I asked him.
"It is though," he replied.
"Yeah, but what if it wasn't? What if it decreased or increased over time. Or went up and down cyclically? What effect would that have?"
He frowned. "But it doesn't. The speed of light is constant." And then he turned away from me and started talking to the person on his other side.
I was surprised and disappointed. I wasn't claiming that the speed of light was variable. I was just asking what the implications of it being so would be. And here I was, in one of the top universities in the United Kingdom, surrounded by intelligent people, and this presumably intelligent yet highly unimaginative chap was here too.
With that kind of thinking we wouldn't even have Newtonian mechanics, let alone Relativity or Quantum Mechanics.
Fractional NFTs
Today I had a short discussion with Sara Adami-Johnson about what fractionalized NFTs might be, and then posted a brief description of how they work and where they might be useful. The post was meant to illustrate how an NFT could be split among people, and what use that could be put to, in a simple and concise way.
I was especially happy that I got to slip in the idea of a rudimentary Decentralized Autonomous Organization, or DAO, in the description as well.
To provide a concrete example (because in my experience people generally don't get new concepts unless you can pin them onto something familiar), I used the idea of an apartment block owned by a group and rented out to a set of tenants,
Most of the comments were supportive, a few were interesting, and then there were a surprising number that were completely and utterly dismissive.
The dismissive comments fell into three broad categories:
I will now go through those in turn:
Practical Issues
Yes, I didn't take into account building maintenance issues, management, insurance, liabilities, housing law, dispute resolution, late payments, or any other of the mundane humdrum issues that have to be address if you are running a standard housing corporation.
It was a 400 word LinkedIn post explaining fractionalized NFTs and basic DAOs. Not a two hundred page business proposal to be used to back up a pitch to a Venture Capitalist for ten million dollars in funding.
If you spend your life saying, "Ah, but it's much more complicated than that!" you will never learn anything.
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Legal Issues
Yes, I didn't take into account that the current legal framework in most (if not all) countries does not take into consideration the possibility of a housing cooperative in which ownership is indicated by control of a token on a blockchain, and in which payments are made through an automated (or at least semi-automated) system implemented through a smart contract.
In 1995 the legal systems didn't properly take into account the flood of copyright infringement that was about to start due to the World Wide Web, or the arguments that were going to take place over the meaning of "owning a URL", and things like that. Innovation happened anyway, and eventually the Law caught up.
And in any case, I am not about to launch a blockchain-based rental management service. It's a thought experiment and an illustration of what is possible, or at least might be in the future. Plus I did mention in the last line that you're definitely going to need a lawyer if you do want to implement it.
Things Already Work As They Are
This one just seems plain stupid to me.
Filing cabinets worked just fine for storing and retrieving data too. So did horses for transportation, singing mythology chants for transmitting information to the next generation, and hunter-gather clans as a basis for societal survival.
If you give up on a new idea because the old one works, nothing changes. And speaking of filing cabinets...
Potassium Cyanide
One of my first ever summer jobs was in 1987 at my father's workplace - a mineralogy research laboratory. A junior manager with an eye for up-and-coming technology was put in charge of me, and decided that the best thing for a sixteen year old with an interest in computers and chemistry to do was to:
(I really liked that computer, probably because it had the same identifier as my favorite album at the time by Van Halen).
My manager's manager - let's call him Wim - thought this was a waste of time. The cupboards were fine, the card index worked fine, and my pseudo-database was not particularly easy to use or reliable, although it did work.
Wim changed his mind when one morning I found bottles of potassium cyanide, Clerici's solution (thallium formate and malonate), and a few dusty liter containers of mercury in the back of the cupboard, none of which were in the card index.
When I say he changed his mind, what I mean is that he decided that a) searching through and categorizing the content of the cupboards was a very good task, and b) it wasn't a good task for a sixteen year old. He still thought the database was a waste of time, but that's what I spent the rest of my vacation job working on.
And yes, my database was a complete disaster, and commercial databases were too expensive and complicated for a small mineralogy laboratory in the eighties.
But if that lab still exists today, I bet they keep track of their stock with a bar-code scanner or RFID tags, possibly ID badges for people to unlock the cupboards and check out what they're using ... and of course a database.
Not a card index. Which if he's still alive, is probably what Wim still wishes they were using.
And I bet he hates blockchain too.
Keir here are my few takeaways and thoughts: 1. 5150: got that Van Halen (ehm, Van Hagar lol) album on viny still, played it recently. 2. first thing that came to my mind when you described fractional NFT ownership and how it relates to fractional ownership in real-estate was ... hmm, wouldn’t we want to do this via something like a multisig wallet / contract, but then realized, it is the same thing. 3. Though I think the journey to fractional ownership of real-estate via NFTs leads there via tokenizing the ownership of assets (regarless of whether physical or logical), or if you want, moving away from bored apes gifs to something of more of a use-case of the NFT technology. Second step would be solving the fractional ownership via NFTs, maybe instead of owning a fraction of an NFT, the original NFT representing 100% of the pie would split into smaller chunks representing the actual shares of ownership, recording this event in the chain (closest analogy that pops on my mind is in the stock market when stock-split happens, but I would need to think about it a bit more) Probably a topic for a video in a few days to explore these points a bit further.
Blockchain is really a governance technology (retired)
2 年Some, maybe most, folks will only embrace change when the pain of doing nothing is greater than the pain of trying something new. Others can't resist trying something new as soon as they can. I am in the latter rather than the former.
Imagination serving people and strategy, by creating awareness of possibilities
2 年Lieven Scheire, not sure you are willing to take up the gauntlet on Keir's variable speed of light question, but just in case ??
MIMPER & EMLIFE
2 年As Marshall Rosemberg said; Within each NO or criticism, there is a need that is not covered. As Marchal McLuhan said "The medium is the message"; there are means that lead the receiver of the contents to passivity, to non-interaction, to non-participation. When a person does not understand the message, what he hears generates dissatisfaction and sometimes that individual responds from a feeling where our needs are not satisfied, disconnection, confusion, envy, anger, longing, etc. Deep down, every human being has the same needs for connection, security, integrity, autonomy, etc. If blockchain is the medium, the message covers all these needs that humanity needs to create a chain of trust and become awareness of it.
Entrepreneurship is so hard I only recommend it to my enemies.
2 年Uh...still think you're missing the point. Fractionalizing ownership means nothing without crowdfunding. It's like cutting up a ?? but not being able to sell the slices. The act of cutting up (fractionalizing) the pie isn't what creates value. What creates value is being able to sell (offer to the general public) the slices. So...you should probably lead with "Fractionalizing real estate works best when you offer fractions retail investors can afford and offer attractive investment terms in your investment crowdfunding scheme." Otherwise, you're just cutting up pies that no one know they can buy or why they should. I'm a peach cobbler or apple pie kinda person, in case you're offering pie pie.