<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
<p><br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 1/15/21 12:21 AM, bear wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:7481cbc54499735d7f8fbd8396ca7b55@sonic.net">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
circulation and destroyed. Agreeing about a few hundred
transactions<br>
<blockquote type="cite" style="padding: 0 0.4em; border-left:
#1010ff 2px solid; margin: 0">
<div class="pre" style="margin: 0; padding: 0; font-family:
monospace">
<blockquote type="cite" style="padding: 0 0.4em; border-left:
#1010ff 2px solid; margin: 0"> seems a lot more reasonable
than agreeing about TheWholeDamnUniverseTM.</blockquote>
<br>
To prevent doubles spending, some trusted authority has to
know the current<br>
ownership of each token.</div>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>First of all, no. If no online contact about a token is
available you can refuse it, but if you don't you can still
transfer tokens in the absence of realtime guarantees. If the
transfer is a double spend, or if the token being transferred was
created in a double spend in an earlier transaction, the
inconsistent spend will create a fork in the token's spend chain,
and the fork will (after some indeterminate amount of time) be
discovered revealing the identity of the double spender. At that
point you have the same legal recourse as you have against someone
who's passed a counterfeit physical bill to you - better actually
because you can easily prove in court who created the counterfeit
in the first place.</p>
<p>That said, a realtime guarantee is desirable, and available, and
only an authority that knows the current status of the token can
provide one. One of the design errors of central-blockchain
cryptocurrencies was to suppose that EVERY authority had to know
the current ownership of EVERY token. That isn't true, and no
version of it will ever scale. It suffices that there is SOME
authority that knows the status of ANY token. For each token,
probably a list of 20 or so designated nodes will be charged with
keeping track of it. <br>
</p>
<p>Realize that what you get from an authority in this case isn't
existential. You know that the token has been transferred from
legit certificate holder to legit certificate holder, ending with
the certificate holder that's trying to transfer it to you.
You've got that, already, just by looking at the spend chain
embedded in the token. You may not know which certificate
holders, but you don't need to. What you're checking with the
authority about is the potential for inconsistent additional uses
of the token. If you check with an authority and discover there
was a particular chain height where the authority's chain and the
token's chain show different spends for example, you can figure
out who double spent it, revoke their cert, and sue them for
counterfeiting. But you don't need the authority's help to see
that the record of spends from minting to you is well-formed, and
the double-spend->revoke feature, combined with certs NOT being
freely available, should keep instances of double spending very
rare. <br>
</p>
<p> Bear</p>
<p><br>
</p>
</body>
</html>