About Asset and Stream

Question

Anyone can explain when to use Asset and when to use Stream for MultiChain Project?

Answer 1

An asset is a representation of a scarce item of value, which can be transferred or exchanged between blockchain participants.

A stream provides a mechanism for general data storage and retrieval, and does not represent something whose ownership can change hands.

Comments

so that if I want to develop a blockchain based system, for example: maybe a Certificate or license for some valuables products, just record the product selling information and its history, I need to use stream is enough?  or we need to combine an Asset with data to complete the whole thing?

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That depends on whether you want the blockchain to enable transfers of ownership and to track them.

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What if transfer of ownership was represented in the stream like a normal database model?

Better question...
Is there any technical overhead to having assets created as opposed to k/v records in a stream?

If I anticipate many thousands of licenses to be created, would a stream record be any more efficient than a new asset for each license?

I am thinking of a case where a license might start off as a stream record and even can change ownership using that stream under certain conditions (i.e. the new owner is on same chain/network and/or license is "given" not sold) but then the license may get converted to an asset under different conditions (i.e. the new owner is on a different chain/network and/or license is sold/resold).

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The only efficiency issue with assets would be if a single node held units of 10000s+ of different assets in its wallet, in separate unspent transaction outputs, and this could slow down coin selection for generating new transactions. In general I would say that if you want to model something scarce which can be owned, you should use assets. It saves having to create your own database layer to track stream items that would represent transfers of ownership.

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Thanks for the response.