this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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NFT's are a form of ownership (I know, I know, of a JPEG). If we leave out the scammy bullshit that NFT's have been in the past, then there are interesting things you can do with them. One company now is minting NFT plane tickets. The advantage is that if plans change or something you OWN that plane ticket, and could directly sell it on a seconary market or somthing. Another case would be for games. I personally like collector card games, like hearthstone and things like that. However when you play digital card games you never own shit. They could just close ownership down at any point...technically. with a set of NFT cards you 100% own it.
Beyond that, the ownership model in crypto can be empowering to users as well. One insurance company popped up that let you combine your funds with others directly in the form of their risk pools to provide the necessay function that insurance companies currently do and decreasing the amount of liquidity they have to maintain which can lower prices for consumers and provide for growth on your resources.
Not all of these things have succeeded. The main thing is a different take on ownership. Previously it has been that you give money to institutions and it's yours because you trust them. In crypto it's yours because that's how it's coded in the smart contract. I'm not a maximalist, but I think if that change can be capitalized on in certain cases it could work well.
You don't own the plane ticket though, you own a reference to a URL, usually.
Also, your data would be permanently public on the internet.
With NFT cards you own what? Not the cards, you oen a reference to a URL in someone elses database. All they need to do is chance one character, and suddenly you NFT is pointing nowhere. And of course, the company can just stop honoring your NFT any time they want, just like with traditional digital content.
Owning an NFT doesn't guarantee anything.
That's the thing. Crypto doesn't change it. You still have to trust the same institutions.
Exactly right
I don't think that I'll be able to change your mind. I get the bad blood with crypto, really, but I guess I just don't share the absolute conviction that the whole thing is a scam.
The way you're breaking down ownership is true, but it's true about every form or ownership. The deed to your house? You don't own anything, that's just a piece of paper that someone says prooves that you have a right to live there. Whether that's saved in a county records department or a blockchain that doesn't really change. Point taken, but I think it's a broader point than how you were using it.
I'm not really sure what makes saving your deed information on a blockchain less valid than in a county records department though. I mean breaking it down, a blockchain is really just a ledger that keeps track of information in a cryptographically secure way. I think that this has gotten out of hand because of all of the get rich quick schemes, and that's fair. It's happened....a lot. But does that invalidate the whole endeavor?
The current exchange system has rent seeking vultures sitting on top. Visa, MasterCard, these fuckers sit there and take a percentage of every transaction that theY fascilitate. What are they doing? Keeping a ledger. We trust them to do it accurately and pay them steeply to do it. Now we have a self managing ledger that requires no trust from anyone. Can you really tell me there is ZERO use case potential here?
It's not always a scam (just mostly), but it's most certainly not the gigantic shift NFT shills have been suggesting.
Well, for one, not literally everybody on earth with an internet connection can go through my deed and personal information.
Also, if the records get stolen, they can authenticate and give ownership back to me. If the ownership gets stolen from you on the blockchain, you're SIL.
I don't really look forward to ransomware that targets deed and other such information, do you?
And with NFTs, all we'd be doing is add another layer on top of that.
The thing is, they're central authority figures. Which means they're the authority on the ledger.
What happens if your deed gets stolen on the blockchain? Who do you turn to to get it back?
What happens if you lose access to your wallet? If it's a hardware wallet, what happens if it geta stolen. If it's a software wallet, what happens if it's hacked?
Yeah that's true about losing access to your shit for sure. There are options like multisignature accounts that could reduce the possibility of theft, but really the danger in crypto is shooting yourself in the face and losing your keys. Theft comes from bad software around the crypto like browser extensions and shit like that, the blockchain itself though makes theft numerically impossible on timescales like the existance of the universe. But your point stands that it isn't user friendly, which isn't new to emerging technology.
On a personal note, I very much like the model of self custody of assets, and this is coming from someone who almost fucked up and lost their keys. Loss of assets is a possibility and should be in the mind of users, but the tradeoff here is that you always have access to your funds and control over them.
Another commenter stated that crypto is solution in search of a problem, and I don't think that's not necessarily wrong. I see that as optimistic because it's still a solution. It potentially broadens the space of possibilities from our sole option of centralized control by existing wealth/power structures.
Sure, but you NEED software to interact with the blockchain, and that software WILL have bugs. That's just a fact.
Whatever wallet you use will have security vulnerabilities, and if combined with say a windows 0-day, it can cause huge amount of damage.
The theft stuff isn't a user friendlyness issue, it's a built in thing. You can try to prevent it, but it will happen, and when it does, whoever it happens to is in huge trouble.
Depends on what your assets are. As soon as it touches any other system, you lose self custody. And if it doesn't interface with other systems, it will be pretty limited.
So these are the points I can gleam from you.
You can own plane tickets:
No you don't. Airlines own planes and if they want you to be able to sell your plane ticket they will just allow that. People sell and change their plane tickets all the time. What you cant do if you have your ticket on the blockchain is easily change it to another flight because a storm cancelled the first one because allowing the airline to have that control over your ticket breaks the system.
You own things in games:
The company owns the game. if the company restructures at any point and closes down the servers you will find out that you actually don't own a game card. You own a very long string of numbers that are useless without the game and the intellectual property of the game
You don't have to rely on institutions to enforce contracts and ownership:
Nothing makes me sound like an anarchist faster than this kind of bullshit. Contracts are enforced by the dominant state apparatus trough the sanctioned use of violence. No other magic can make you own stuff.
Ownership and contracts as we currently understand them must work like this because most of society is still made out of flesh stone and metal. I don't own my house because I pay money for it. that is part of the deal when I moved in, but the main part of the ownership is that I have a deal with the government that they will send armed men to the building I live in if someone else tries to live in it without my approval. I dare you to name any ownership that doesn't work like that.
Guess you won. I'll just pack up and head out with all my wrongness. 🖖
That's a nice pipedream, but why would airlines move to this system? They seem perfectly happy with the current system where you have to pay to change anything.
And the game thing doesn't make sense. If the game shuts down, where are you going to use your NFT? There's a few crappy crypto games that have tried making it so items are transferable, but for larger games it sounds like a nightmare to implement.
NFTs are like crypto, a solution in search of a problem. I'll be honest, I'm anti-crypto and NFTs, but if a valid usecase presented itself I'd be happy to be wrong. I just haven't seen it yet.
Your second paragraph is where I think the win is. When you have self custody of things, you have more ineroperability and stuff like that. Largely I buy the statement that all this is a solution in search of a problem. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing though. It broadens the possible space of options in the future, which I find to be exciting.
Edit..added the following.shit
There is at least one airline using this NFT model currently, in Argentina I think. It could be that the CEO is using the service because he's just a crypto maximalist but I believe the win from their point of view is that they get a cut of subsequent secondary sales. They've sold the ticket once, maybe you can get a bit more for it.
As far as the card game goes, what your saying, that the game could be shuttered is not different than what we currently have. It's only different in that you're able to own the cards while it's running. Maybe you want to gift your child a good card that you have, you can just send it to them. Impossible currently because you don't control anything in hearthstone except how much money to spend on packs.