[teux]

Disclaimer: this is not my domain.

But wouldn’t the blockchain give a decentralised record of ownership that was protected from corruption? If a single entity owns this database, how does it fare against attacks/bad actors, or highly capitalists companies like EA going in and editing it in their best interests.

You need a truly good organisation to host that single DB and I’m not sure I tryst any of them at the moment.

(Also thought I have a cursory knowledge of blockchain technology, so please correct me if I’m off.)

[jakelazaroff]

This isn’t really a technology problem.

Let’s say such a blockchain did exist. You buy Battlefield or some other game, years pass and EA bans your account. You want to download the game again. How are you going to do that? Sure, the blockchain is public, but EA can just maintain their own list of people to ban.

Okay, so maybe we pass a law that says that if you have a record on that blockchain companies must let you access your digital goods. You take EA to court for banning you despite having purchased the game. What’s the advantage over a database run by the government? The court trusts the government database, since they are the government, and you and EA have no choice but to listen to the court — they’re the ultimate trusted third party.

[kmonsen]

The issue is that you need to talk to EA servers to play the game, or whatever the movie is hosted etc, and at that time they can choose to accept whatever token you have. Or they can reject it. So unless the content is also decentralized you are not better off.

Easy example is that nft tokens are decentralized, but the servers hosting the actual pictures are not. So you own the token but the picture itself can go missing.

[mattdesl]

Not the case with an on-chain game! See Dark Forest.

Also not really the case with on-chain NFTs or those hosted by IPFS (where as long as 1 user has the file on disk it can be recovered and re-seeded).

[vineyardmike]

Yes, but unless the blockchain stores the actual content, you’re still at the whims of the content provider to serve the content.

[jonathanyc]

After the Ethereum DAO exploit, the result was two blockchains: Ethereum Classic and Ethereum. Was that better protection against database manipulation than the existing legal system provides?

[mattdesl]

Yes, it’s much more democratic than the status quo in traditional online payment and digital asset systems. Users forked and had the choice to follow the DAO-revert chain. Another hard fork happened recently: PoS. There is still a PoW chain, for the small minority that wants to use it.