| > You can create a token which expires, useful for licensing. Can you end the license before expiry? Because if you cannot, then it isn't useful. License holders like to know that they can revoke the license if terms are not met. > You can create a token which pays royalties to an artist with every sale. Can you end the royalties? Who gets the royalty when a dispute arises is frequently decided by the courts. > You can create smart financial instruments which are technically NFTs and which skip the regulation put on the financial industry to perform more risky investments, and even automate functions like profit sharing or paying off a bond. So, enable one to skip the laws? That doesn't sound very much like something society wants. > You'd need to run a bank to get most of that and some of that is illegal on a global level so even as a bank you'd have to dip outside the law. Using a tool or instrument to do something illegal doesn't make it okay to do that thing. |
Of course you can, you just need to specify terms. Terms that can be in some reliable way observed by the blockchain, of course, so you'd need a trustworthy oracle or whatever to actually observe activities outside the state.
> Can you end the royalties? Who gets the royalty when a dispute arises is frequently decided by the courts.
If that's part of the contract, then yes. A smart contract is not necessarily a legally binding contract, it's a computer program which can be or represent some actual legal instrument. Once a contract is written, it cannot be revoked, unless it itself contains code that allows for one or both parties to make it not function. At the moment it is created, it becomes just an entity on the blockchain, linked to the parties by nothing but the fact that under certain conditions it will perform certain actions, which can relate to certain accounts.
> So, enable one to skip the laws?
Yes, this is a fundamental belief that can't really be separated from blockchain technology. All data and all things of value are equal before the law and you can sell illegal bonds as easily as a kid can sell him ms paint art. For several reasons, you can imagine the most reprehensible type of data or instrument one could sell online, and blockchain tech would declare that it deserves to be traded on a public market like any other commodity.
> Using a tool or instrument to do something illegal doesn't make it okay to do that thing.
Something being illegal doesn't mean it's not okay to do. Using a method which makes a law impossible to actually enforce makes that thing effectively not a law, and to do or enable that is to declare to the world that this thing should not be illegal. Fundamental, again, I cannot see a way of separating this from blockchains with arbitrary smart contracts.