this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
576 points (95.4% liked)

Technology

59575 readers
4036 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

The way I read the article, the "worth millions" is the sum of the ransom demand.

The funny part is that the exploit is in the "smart" contract, ya know the thing that the blockchain keeps secure by forbidding any updates or patches.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] stoy@lemmy.zip 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

How would that work in reality, how would the lock know that the NFT in question is the actual legal ownership of the house?

The only way to guarantee that is to change the law that deeds of houses can only be an NFT.

Otherwise someone could sell a house on paper, but retain the NFT to have access to the house.

An NFT lock would also have the following problems, excluding the trust of ownership in the real world.

Power to the lock is required, if your backup battery is dead then you might be locked out during a power cut.

Internet access is required, during a powercut your router will probably die as well, so even if a battery backup is working, you'd still be locked out.

Your ISP could have service interruptions, no internet, no access to the latest blockchain updates, meaning that the lock can't trust that you actually have ownership/access, that would be an insanely easy way to hack the lock.

[–] shortwavesurfer@monero.town -3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I can't really address the first part about selling the house on paper and not transferring the NFT.

I figure this thing would have cellular access as well as Wi-Fi. So if your Wi-Fi was to go down, then the cell network would be used instead. And those generally use different ISPs for fiber and often get restored first or dont go down at all since they are commercial contracts. In the event of a total internet cut, it is well known that a house does not change ownership very often, so the lock could be programmed to not accept any new keys for a period like a day. The lock would accept only the old key during that time like a cooldown period

[–] stoy@lemmy.zip 3 points 11 months ago

Ok, lets disregard the regulatory issues, are you really asking people to sign up for a completely different ISP just to unlock their house with an NFT key?

As for a delay to update ownership, fine that would add some leniency and is not an unresonable feature.

But I just can't see what problem an NFT key would solve, we don't usually lock/unlock our front door with the deed of the home, what would the advantage be of doing that?