[Cryptography] Meet the New Owners (The Dangerous Blockchain)

[Ian g]

On 02/10/2026 16:32, OCTADE via cryptography wrote:

> ** Meet the New Owners (The Dangerous Blockchain) **
>
> by Plain Meaning
>
> [video] https://youtu.be/AAEv0cpZG9k
>
> "Who really owns your property?"


SMTC - Show me the contract - and I'll tell you.

In context of blockchain and wider, all rights are effectively defined 
by the contract. The cryptographic key defines access only. A contract 
states what the rights are for those who hold the key(s).

For example, an NFT: do you have the rights to duplicate, re-sell, 
sub-license, put on a t-shirt, change, build, burn in effigy, 
slice&dice, ignore/deify the owner, ...

The answer is in the contract.

Oops - NFT publishers didn't typically write down what the contract was. 
So the rights were .. what's the phrase? Un-enumerated.

Which means you had diddly squat. You owned .. a key. When the NFT 
seller dropped the URL that was inside, you lost your thing. Which you 
didn't have anyway, bc the contract never gave it to you, only sold you 
a temporary look-see.


The NFT is a singular example, but it is exemplar of the blockchain 
industry, and the wider finance industry.

They're all contract-shy. If you force the contract on them, 
blockchainists sidestep to their next grift, and finance dudes bring in 
a room of lawyers and word it as a flood that only a bigger room of 
lawyers can deal with. Economics of this are .. sucky, which is how they 
like it.


But it didn't have to be this way.

If a blockchain or financial cryptography venture had the balls to go 
win-win and share with its customers, instead of extract from its human 
products, doing a contract is the easiest thing. Some have done this.

A contract is just a document. We know how to do documents, we've like 
50 or 60 years of experience in computer science.

Assume a text document. Then, as most contracts are almost exactly the 
same as their general class, *and* we want the program to understand the 
tiny differences, add some parameters. Line-based reading, things like:

     * number_of_decimals = 2     // dollars and cents

Slap on some PGP-style cleartext sigs and we have a digitally signed, 
digitally readable contract. Hash the result and we have a digitally 
identifiable contract.

This is cryptography, but it's pretty basic, it's all well over 30 years 
old, and intern level for everyone on this group.


It is somewhat disgusting that digitised contracts predate blockchain by 
healthy years, yet few blockchains, regulators, intermediaries, 
investors, banks, whohaveyous, all, do not understand that the contract 
is the basic building block of trade.


> "And what happens when a private company, a blockchain, and
> foreign-connected investors get between you and your deed?"


They hide the contract, and they extract. (Deed? what deed?) This isn't 
a mystery. What is a mystery is why millions keep repeating the same game.

Including regulators & congresscritters, who are supposed to be lawyers, 
and don't know what a contract is.

Anyways, we in cryptography did what we could. It's on a silver platter 
that's coated in 20 years of dust. Anything else is anthropology, 
criminology, society, politics, ...


iang


ps; contracts go back 1000s of years; digitised contracts are like 2004, 
The Ricardian Contract.