6 ms·

I’ll bite. A winery could sell ownership of wine stored or wine yet to be made. The purchaser, if sold via an NFT, could resell that ownership with no interacti

I’ll bite. A winery could sell ownership of wine stored or wine yet to be made. The purchaser, if sold via an NFT, could resell that ownership with no interaction with the winery until claiming the wine at a later date. This means both parties no longer need any relationship between the initial sale and claiming the eventual goods. The winery will simply be able to wait for someone to return with proof of ownership at a later date. If the winery gave out certificates or built some app it would need to verify and maintain that. With an NFT there is very little work on their end. Ultimately this turns these type of products into highly liquid assets. This will greatly increase their value to a potential customer and the initial purchase price. Which will make the winery more money for the wine it sells. This can effectively be done with anything that can be claimed at a later date after initial purchase.

nkuttler 5y ago
If you rely on a trusted entity (winery) you don't need a blockchain to do anything you just described.
- maccolgan 5y ago
  How are you going to transfer the right to have a wine bottle? By continuously signing legal documents?
  - chipotle_coyote 5y ago
    Yes, this is probably what you'd do in this hypothetical case, and it's hardly unheard of for contracts to be written up with transferability clauses. Given that we exist in a world where digital signatures also exist, it's unlikely to be particularly onerous. ("Continuously" is probably not the right word, unless you are envisioning the rather unlikely case of this transfer happening on an annual basis!)
  - lmm 5y ago
    Sure, or if you're willing to trust an electronic database you can put it in an electronic database. How do you think wholesalers buy and sell wine at the moment?
  - amunicio 5y ago
    Stock brokers track perfectly the transfer of people rights to stocks millions of times a day without any decentralized ledger. In fact, a SQL DB has worked quite well for many years now. If the wine cellar wants their customers to trade wine, I'm sure a centralized ledger based on a SQL DB would be much easier and cheaper to implement and scale to millions of transactions.
    - koonsolo 5y ago
      Can I trade my wine in the weekend? Ah no, sorry, stock market is closed then. Can I trade my wine at 5pm? Ah no, European wine stock market is closed then. When you really 'own' the ticket, you can trade it anywhere you want, without being dependent on some exchange that's only open whenever and takes some fixed cut without any competition.
      - lottin 5y ago
        The fact that you can't trade on weekends is not because some technological problem, it's because there's no demand for trading on weekends. Do you think the technology suddenly stops working on weekends?
        koonsolo 5y ago
        I own both stocks and crypto. I would LOVE to trade stocks in weekends!
        peoplefromibiza 5y ago
        people love heroin too. that's why rules around potentially addictive things are needed.
    - maccolgan 5y ago
      Yeah, that's surely trustless. And I totally trust the wine company to perpetually maintain and pay for such a thing, and totally not restrict the secondary market as has happened all the time.
EugeneG 5y ago
The question is can you really make it simultaneously cheap to trade and decentralized and always on. Or is the overhead of all that just make blockchain tech very awkward and suboptimal (especially since ultimately there's a centralized winery that honors the "claim" with actual wine - so no real need for decentralization). Instead why not just have a little centralized company that lets companies create ledgers of asset ownership for $300/month. If it's a real use case, any winery can sign up, etc. Issue is blockchain tech doesn't actually solve anything
- diveanon 5y ago
  Transactions on most L2 chains these days are less than a penny. There are dozens of popular mobile wallets that make viewing, sending, receiving coins / nfts trivial. The problem that it solves is that there is no need for you imaginary ledger company to exist at all in a blockchain model, the winery cuts out a rent seeking service and the user gets a more secure and portable product. Automation isn't just going to hit manual labor, blockchain and web3 will allow for the emergence of fully autonomous "companies" that operate via smart contracts.
derac 5y ago
Excuse my ignorance, how does the buyer of the token know it hasn't been redeemed yet?
- maccolgan 5y ago
  Embedded expiry, it can't be redeemed before the wine is ready anyway.
  - boc 5y ago
    What happens if the wine goes bad? Who/what arbitrates in that scenario? Because from the winery's perspective, whoever currently holds that contract owes them money for the wine at a fixed price that was determined and sold in the past. If I hold that contract and have to take delivery of rancid wine instead of fresh wine like I imagined, what's my recourse? Basically how do you ensure the state of the real-world asset remains fixed throughout the duration of the contract?
    - biztos 5y ago
      In the case of wine, the real-world version of “going bad” is just that it’s not very good. When you bought the future wine, you were betting that it would be very good wine and you could resell it for more. The winery was selling it to you for “cheap(er)” because you assumed that risk. So for actual wine, right now, you have no recourse: you bought the risk. I don’t think this would be any different with NFT-wine. Now and in the NFT case you already paid the winery, you owe them nothing more. Now if they cheat and give you water instead of wine… I guess whatever real-world contract says you can exchange this token for wine would say which wine? Most likely the first N wineries to do this would do it as a publicity stunt, and if it proved useful then there would be some precedent. Much of the wine world operates on reputation and trust. For the vast majority of physical products that are not like wine: you’d need real-world contracts to back your smart contracts and the latter would only be useful for decentralization of the secondary market.
      - boc 5y ago
dmitriid 5y ago
> A winery could sell ownership of wine stored or wine yet to be made. Ah. You mean "a centralized entity creates a centralized way of providing and verifying ownership of wine"? 1. How does blockchain factor into this? 2. As always, descriptions like this betray how little crypto-peddlers know about real world. Buying future wine has been a thing as long as there has been wine https://www.winespectator.com/articles/buying-futures-3495 https://www.winespectator.com/articles/buying-futures-3495
- darkFunction 5y ago
  That's great! Hey look I would like to send you the rights to my crate of wine. You're the 1000th customer to my site. Or maybe you want to trade it for your in-game weapon. Or I just like you and it's a gift, anonymous internet user. Of course I could just transfer directly to your Ethereum wallet. But why do that when I could explain you need to sign up to 'winespectator.com', I'll email them to arrange the ownership transfer, and if you're trading that weapon let's both sign up for a pre-agreed escrow service online and pay them a commission to arbitrage. How many forms do we need to fill in, and who is processing that data? I currently own my crate anonymously- only the person who eventually burns the token will need to provide details to the company for delivery. As always, descriptions like this betray how little engine-peddlers know about horse breeding. Managing a stable has been a thing as long as there's been horses.
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    > Hey look I would like to send you the rights to my crate of wine. You truly believe this can't be done without blockchain? > You're the 1000th customer to my site. You truly believe you can't track customers without blockchain? > Or maybe you want to trade me for that in-game weapon. You truly believe it's impossible to implement in-game trading without blockchain? > Of course I could just transfer directly to your Ethereum wallet. The only thing you could transfer is some meaningless numbers. What makes them meaningful is some central, trusted authority that will accept these numbers as proof of something. But then, since you depend on that authority to verify this... you don't need blockchain.
cyounkins 5y ago
Is this secondary market of goods yet to be produced something that people actually want to have? Today the way this works is usually with a ticket or a receipt. The guy with the email receipt on his phone gets the food he ordered. The guy with the ticket gets into the concert. There IS a secondary market for event tickets. Legitimate transfers frequently happen everywhere else e-commerce happens. Questionable transfers happen on the street in what I assume is low volume.
- biztos 5y ago
  People buy unbottled wine all the time, so maybe? https://www.winemag.com/2019/10/01/a-beginners-guide-to-wine-futures-and-en-primeur/ https://www.winemag.com/2019/10/01/a-beginners-guide-to-wine... I’m not saying blockchain makes this any better, except in one sense: a lot of people with a lot of money are enthusiastic participants. If I had a winery you bet I’d be selling wine future NFTs, just to try and get the price bid up.
lottin 5y ago
Are you seriously claiming Ethereum has invented futures contracts? Futures contracts have been around for decades, maybe even centuries.
CJefferson 5y ago
The problem with this type of thing (to me) is always what happens when reality meets the blockchain? What is someone steals my NFT? I would expect a court would say the wine is still mine, so the NFT doesn't represent ownership any more. What is someone loses the private key to their NFT? Do we just throw the wine down the drain? Again no.
- biztos 5y ago
  The NFT is supposed to work like a bearer bond. You have to trust the issuing entity to honor it, but beyond that, possession is 10 tenths of the law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bearer_bond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bearer_bond IIRC with wine futures you have to either collect your wine or pay for its storage, if you abandon it then at some point (per the contract) it belongs to the winery. At least with wine I think there is a lot of precedent here, there are norms you’d want to fit your crypto doings around.
  - CJefferson 5y ago
    Thanks, that's a solid reply. Personally, I don't want the world to go back to "Bearer Bonds", and given they were banned I'm guessing the US government (and I imagine other countries) doesn't either. However, I'm glad to hear a basis for NFTs.

nkuttler 5y ago

If you rely on a trusted entity (winery) you don't need a blockchain to do anything you just described.

maccolgan 5y ago
How are you going to transfer the right to have a wine bottle? By continuously signing legal documents?
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  Yes, this is probably what you'd do in this hypothetical case, and it's hardly unheard of for contracts to be written up with transferability clauses. Given that we exist in a world where digital signatures also exist, it's unlikely to be particularly onerous. ("Continuously" is probably not the right word, unless you are envisioning the rather unlikely case of this transfer happening on an annual basis!)
- lmm 5y ago
  Sure, or if you're willing to trust an electronic database you can put it in an electronic database. How do you think wholesalers buy and sell wine at the moment?
- amunicio 5y ago
  Stock brokers track perfectly the transfer of people rights to stocks millions of times a day without any decentralized ledger. In fact, a SQL DB has worked quite well for many years now. If the wine cellar wants their customers to trade wine, I'm sure a centralized ledger based on a SQL DB would be much easier and cheaper to implement and scale to millions of transactions.
  - koonsolo 5y ago
    Can I trade my wine in the weekend? Ah no, sorry, stock market is closed then. Can I trade my wine at 5pm? Ah no, European wine stock market is closed then. When you really 'own' the ticket, you can trade it anywhere you want, without being dependent on some exchange that's only open whenever and takes some fixed cut without any competition.
    - lottin 5y ago
      The fact that you can't trade on weekends is not because some technological problem, it's because there's no demand for trading on weekends. Do you think the technology suddenly stops working on weekends?
      - koonsolo 5y ago
        I own both stocks and crypto. I would LOVE to trade stocks in weekends!
        peoplefromibiza 5y ago
        people love heroin too. that's why rules around potentially addictive things are needed.
  - maccolgan 5y ago
    Yeah, that's surely trustless. And I totally trust the wine company to perpetually maintain and pay for such a thing, and totally not restrict the secondary market as has happened all the time.

EugeneG 5y ago

The question is can you really make it simultaneously cheap to trade and decentralized and always on. Or is the overhead of all that just make blockchain tech very awkward and suboptimal (especially since ultimately there's a centralized winery that honors the "claim" with actual wine - so no real need for decentralization). Instead why not just have a little centralized company that lets companies create ledgers of asset ownership for $300/month. If it's a real use case, any winery can sign up, etc. Issue is blockchain tech doesn't actually solve anything

diveanon 5y ago
Transactions on most L2 chains these days are less than a penny. There are dozens of popular mobile wallets that make viewing, sending, receiving coins / nfts trivial. The problem that it solves is that there is no need for you imaginary ledger company to exist at all in a blockchain model, the winery cuts out a rent seeking service and the user gets a more secure and portable product. Automation isn't just going to hit manual labor, blockchain and web3 will allow for the emergence of fully autonomous "companies" that operate via smart contracts.

derac 5y ago

Excuse my ignorance, how does the buyer of the token know it hasn't been redeemed yet?

maccolgan 5y ago
Embedded expiry, it can't be redeemed before the wine is ready anyway.
- boc 5y ago
  What happens if the wine goes bad? Who/what arbitrates in that scenario? Because from the winery's perspective, whoever currently holds that contract owes them money for the wine at a fixed price that was determined and sold in the past. If I hold that contract and have to take delivery of rancid wine instead of fresh wine like I imagined, what's my recourse? Basically how do you ensure the state of the real-world asset remains fixed throughout the duration of the contract?
  - biztos 5y ago
    In the case of wine, the real-world version of “going bad” is just that it’s not very good. When you bought the future wine, you were betting that it would be very good wine and you could resell it for more. The winery was selling it to you for “cheap(er)” because you assumed that risk. So for actual wine, right now, you have no recourse: you bought the risk. I don’t think this would be any different with NFT-wine. Now and in the NFT case you already paid the winery, you owe them nothing more. Now if they cheat and give you water instead of wine… I guess whatever real-world contract says you can exchange this token for wine would say which wine? Most likely the first N wineries to do this would do it as a publicity stunt, and if it proved useful then there would be some precedent. Much of the wine world operates on reputation and trust. For the vast majority of physical products that are not like wine: you’d need real-world contracts to back your smart contracts and the latter would only be useful for decentralization of the secondary market.
    - boc 5y ago

dmitriid 5y ago

> A winery could sell ownership of wine stored or wine yet to be made. Ah. You mean "a centralized entity creates a centralized way of providing and verifying ownership of wine"? 1. How does blockchain factor into this? 2. As always, descriptions like this betray how little crypto-peddlers know about real world. Buying future wine has been a thing as long as there has been wine https://www.winespectator.com/articles/buying-futures-3495 https://www.winespectator.com/articles/buying-futures-3495

darkFunction 5y ago
That's great! Hey look I would like to send you the rights to my crate of wine. You're the 1000th customer to my site. Or maybe you want to trade it for your in-game weapon. Or I just like you and it's a gift, anonymous internet user. Of course I could just transfer directly to your Ethereum wallet. But why do that when I could explain you need to sign up to 'winespectator.com', I'll email them to arrange the ownership transfer, and if you're trading that weapon let's both sign up for a pre-agreed escrow service online and pay them a commission to arbitrage. How many forms do we need to fill in, and who is processing that data? I currently own my crate anonymously- only the person who eventually burns the token will need to provide details to the company for delivery. As always, descriptions like this betray how little engine-peddlers know about horse breeding. Managing a stable has been a thing as long as there's been horses.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  > Hey look I would like to send you the rights to my crate of wine. You truly believe this can't be done without blockchain? > You're the 1000th customer to my site. You truly believe you can't track customers without blockchain? > Or maybe you want to trade me for that in-game weapon. You truly believe it's impossible to implement in-game trading without blockchain? > Of course I could just transfer directly to your Ethereum wallet. The only thing you could transfer is some meaningless numbers. What makes them meaningful is some central, trusted authority that will accept these numbers as proof of something. But then, since you depend on that authority to verify this... you don't need blockchain.

cyounkins 5y ago

Is this secondary market of goods yet to be produced something that people actually want to have? Today the way this works is usually with a ticket or a receipt. The guy with the email receipt on his phone gets the food he ordered. The guy with the ticket gets into the concert. There IS a secondary market for event tickets. Legitimate transfers frequently happen everywhere else e-commerce happens. Questionable transfers happen on the street in what I assume is low volume.

biztos 5y ago
People buy unbottled wine all the time, so maybe? https://www.winemag.com/2019/10/01/a-beginners-guide-to-wine-futures-and-en-primeur/ https://www.winemag.com/2019/10/01/a-beginners-guide-to-wine... I’m not saying blockchain makes this any better, except in one sense: a lot of people with a lot of money are enthusiastic participants. If I had a winery you bet I’d be selling wine future NFTs, just to try and get the price bid up.

lottin 5y ago

Are you seriously claiming Ethereum has invented futures contracts? Futures contracts have been around for decades, maybe even centuries.

CJefferson 5y ago

The problem with this type of thing (to me) is always what happens when reality meets the blockchain? What is someone steals my NFT? I would expect a court would say the wine is still mine, so the NFT doesn't represent ownership any more. What is someone loses the private key to their NFT? Do we just throw the wine down the drain? Again no.

biztos 5y ago
The NFT is supposed to work like a bearer bond. You have to trust the issuing entity to honor it, but beyond that, possession is 10 tenths of the law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bearer_bond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bearer_bond IIRC with wine futures you have to either collect your wine or pay for its storage, if you abandon it then at some point (per the contract) it belongs to the winery. At least with wine I think there is a lot of precedent here, there are norms you’d want to fit your crypto doings around.
- CJefferson 5y ago
  Thanks, that's a solid reply. Personally, I don't want the world to go back to "Bearer Bonds", and given they were banned I'm guessing the US government (and I imagine other countries) doesn't either. However, I'm glad to hear a basis for NFTs.