Turns out that the smart contract is a post-it note stapled to the NFT and the marketplace can just ignore what the post-it note says because it’s not legally binding.
What they can’t do is trade with marketplaces that do enforce the contract. Originally it was enforced because if one marketplace stopped enforcing it the marketplace would be cut off from the Echo system but turns out that the 5 big marketplaces just need to agree to drop it and everything is fine.
There is no good design for this. The only design that works is external regulation and laws wich is why we use that for real things that aren’t scams.
Nah the actual limitation is that providing people a way to transfer the token without paying a royalty is essential if you want to give people the option to freely transfer it between their wallets without selling it and paying a royalty. You could write a smart contract that does enforce this but then you would lose the ability to have that free transfer.
Why? It could be enforced in the same way that a BTC transaction is validated, just adding a rule that a wallet, specified as the author, should get a percentage of the trade.
No see it’s a lot more sophisticated than that. The post-it note is immutable because of maths or something, so what that means is that it’s capital-P Property. And because Property is a magic spell that binds even the old ones, and this spell is unbreakable, I own all these apes.
You have to see it in context and only makes sense for people who don’t wholly trust companies and governments to do the right thing either.
The post-it note is immutable because of maths or something
This is vs. “immutable because it’s in X company’s database”. Neither a database nor a blockchain can themselves enforce contracts.
Okay, I assume this comment is in defense of crypto contracts or whatever? This is solving a problem that doesn’t exist.
I was exposed to many, many litigation cases in my time working in the legal system. The worst ones happen because contracts aren’t made or are sloppily constructed. I have never, ever, in many years of seeing civil cases go through the office, seen a single example where the problem was that someone had falsified a contract or there was disagreement about what a contract actually says. Contracts change all the time, so making them immutable makes them less useful to both parties.
Also big companies break contracts all the time, and they don’t get away with it by lying about the contents of the contract, they get away with it because they have all the money and all the power.
The same thing with money. Counterfeiting is a tiny problem with almost any currency. The real problem is theft, and the lawless, immutable nature of the blockchain renders theft absolute, with no recourse.
This is the problem with the blockchain in general - immutability solves a nonexistent problem and creates a much worse problem. The no-trust basis of the system attracts grifters because there is no way to take back a bad transaction. The only reason people believe it works is because they somehow believe that documenting transactions immutably will make them bind people, just like some sort of magic spell. That’s just not how the world works.
