Hans Gruber Would Have Loved Web3
Every holiday season, millions upon millions of people share time with their loved ones and the most stylish villain to take Nakatomi Plaza hostage — Hans Gruber. Is it really the holidays until you can quote every line from the holiday classic Die Hard? Is it really the season until Hans Gruber falls off Nakatomi Plaza? Is there anything more comforting that watching Die Hard for the 27th time and remembering — wait, Bruce Willis used to have hair?!
Yet, there’s much more to Hans Gruber than his style, charm, and negotiating skills. Die Hard is unique — not because it’s a festival holiday movie masquerading as an action heist — but because of the object of Hans’ desire. Why would Hans assemble a team of well-trained terrorists to take over Nakatomi Plaza on Christmas Eve? A safe full of gold? Precious diamonds? Access to bank accounts? Ransoming hostages? Cold-hard cash?
Nope. None of them. So what was hiding in the safe of Nakatomi Plaza that kept Hans Gruber so chill you’d think he’d been hanging out with Tommy Chong all afternoon? Bearer bonds. It doesn’t get much sexier than a heist stealing bearer bonds — oh wait, I think I got that wrong — a heist movie about bearer bonds has got to be the least sexy idea ever??? But if anyone can make it look cool, Hans did.
But wait, what are bearer bonds? Let’s start with bonds. A bond is a lot like a loan, you pay X amount to a company, organization, government, etc. and they agree to pay you Y amount at a future date. That future date is known as when the bond “matures”. Y is typically (but not always) greater than X which means the owner of the bond (who is really a lender) will make a profit when the bond fully matures. Since the rate of return is fixed, bonds are lower risk investments but don’t have the upside of potential big returns like rugpulls.
A bearer bond is just a type of bond with one teensy itty bitty caveat — it has no owner. A bearer bond would exist in the form of a physical certificate (an actual piece of paper, probably with some fancy seals and signatures) and the person that “bears” the bond, i.e. physically possesses it, IS the owner. If you physically hold the bearer bond in your hand, you are the owner, no questions asked. As Teddy KGB from Rounders would say, “pay the man his money!”
You might be thinking, why haven’t I ever heard of bearer bonds? For starters, the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 essentially eliminated bearer bonds in the United States. In 2010, more US legislation essentially relieved banks and institutions from the responsibility of redeeming bearer bonds. Why? Well…bearer bonds really have one use case — money laundering. Since a bearer bond has no owner, there is no record of ownership or possession, so it doesn’t matter how you came into possession of the bearer bond including theft at gunpoint — if you physically possess it, it is rightfully YOURS.
If you came here for links to DAOs, rumors of pre-minting NFT collections, and general degenery — good for you for making it this far! Because now, all of this ACTUALLY matters to Web3! Yes! I know! Hans Gruber would have been so excited to learn about your DAO and your unverified smart contracts that deployed your NFT collection! Just don’t tell him your private key like Mr. Takagi…
Crypto wallets use cryptography to create a public/private key pair that generates a wallet (or contract) address. If you possess the private key that matches the public key, you are the rightful owner of that wallet or contract. There is no link to your identity with your wallet. You might have a passphrase but that phrase has nothing to do with your identity. Anyone that possesses the private and public key for a given address IS the owner. No questions asked. It’s a trustless system after all — remember? Your digital assets are NO different from bearer bonds — except that you actually know what your rate of return of a bearer bond will be.
The legal definition of ownership varies but there are two components that are pretty universal — possession and the RIGHT of possession. Possession is pretty simple to understand. The RIGHT of possession requires linking an individual that has that RIGHT to the asset in question. For a digital asset, there is no link to identity — it’s a trustless system. Thus, does possessing a digital asset in your crypto wallet meet the threshold for legal ownership? I’m not an attorney and nor am I aware of laws directly addressing this scenario; but, my suspicion is the answer to this question is NO.
And ownership matters. If you never owned an asset, can someone steal it? You possessed it, and now they possess it. Is that wrong? Illegal? In a trustless system, the system doesn’t care — it just shrugs. The possessor of the public/private key pair IS the “owner”. Just like a bearer bond. I don’t like being a doomsayer, but this is a realistic assessment of the current Web3 world. If you’re a developer, these are scenarios we really want to help you consider. If you don’t own your contract or assets, what happens if someone steals them? What do you tell your employees that depend on the company’s existence to pay their bills? What do you tell your customers who trusted (funny that word “trust” isn’t it?) that their assets would not be lost with no recourse to have them returned? Human relationships are built on trust. Web3 must be as well.
Join Coinmonks Telegram Channel and Youtube Channel learn about crypto trading and investing
