So, by dint of being tokens, accreditation, land deeds, car papers, game items etc etc etc must all be able to be transferred right? Which means they can also be stolen or attributed to the wrong people right? So, if you get hacked and your car registration token gets stolen, or if someone steals your degree and starts walking around pretending to be a doctor using your token, what do you do? In fact, what happens if the University accidentally gives your degree to someone with the same surname as you, and you get a Diploma in Basket Weaving instead of your medical degree and they refuse to give it back? Because these things will happen endlessly.
Well, as always, you'll go to the DMV or the cops or the Uni and they'll.....what exactly? The answer, necessarily, will be to check their master records to see who should have what, and then change it. Which totally obliviates the purpose of the decentralised blockchain.
You can see this in action with that dope who had his cartoon ape NFT stolen. What did he do? Immediately appealed to the closest thing to a centralised authority there is, Twitter and the ape community, and begged them not to buy "his" NFTs. Then contacted the exchanges and begged them not to sell. Then contacted the cops. Then, in a move with a jaw-dropping lack of self awareness said it "didn't matter" that the NFT had been stolen, because he "still owned those apes". So in the space of about ten minutes, he firebombed every core tenet of NFTs, and that was over a cartoon ape in the first moments of NFTs even being a "thing".
What's your solution for the guy who gets his house token stolen?
If you had one and it got stolen, you'd file a court case with your state or local authority. They would then add a record saying that the ownership is disputed. If you won the case, they'd add a new record saying that the house still belongs to you. It turns it from "I'm screwed" to "Ugh, a legal hassle", the exact same as if your paper deed got stolen.
You'll probably say "but why bother then?" The main reason is standardization. I have no idea how to check housing records for other states, let alone other countries. Some shitty broken website created by a lowest bidder contractor? Request a copy by mail that probably costs money because someone has to physically print out a copy themselves? Instead, everybody everywhere can use the same software stack instead of reinventing the wheel N times. Checking the current state of things becomes trivial.
It's also trivial to do private house sales then. One transaction signed by both parties, and you're done.
People get shit stolen in the real world, and in the current implementation of the internet all the time. What happens when your Google account gets fished and someone steals tens of millions of dollars from your company? Do we shut down the internet and call it a day? No, not really. It has no effect on adoption.
The fact is that when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. So it goes with all new technologies, and so it always has. Have we ever simply said, "Welp, there are costs to go along with the benefits of this new tech. Let's just give up here!" Not to my recollection. We simply make the ships more crash-resistant.
The problems with new tech are almost always obvious early on, but the solutions require creativity and frequently result in hugely successful businesses.
Consider early criticisms[0] of the internet from 1995:
> "Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen." True enough. There's a cacophony. So what? The internet survives. Algorithms rank posts and tweets and surface the best insights.
> "How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach." True enough. So what? We got Kindles, and smart phones, and higher-res screens, and people bring laptops to cafes instead of beaches.
> "…the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them…" True enough. So what? A few years later this problem was largely solved by Google, which is now worth a trillion dollars.
> "…who'd prefer cybersex to the real thing?"* Hundreds of millions of people are addicted to porn. Not saying it's a great result, but the fact remains that problems don't stop adoption.
And do you remember how much credit card fraud there was in 90s e-commerce, when security was trash and almost nobody was used to regularly checking their digital bank statements, so it would take weeks or months for people to even notice? Hell, there's still a lot of fraud today. E-commerce still reigns supreme.
Sure, people will get their NFT good stolen. It will happen frequently. It already has happened many times. This will not hurt NFT adoption. It will simply spur innovation in security and defense, which it already has if you actually look into early solutions (e.g. custodians, insurance).
At best, you're simply pointing out problems that people will innovate to solve.
[0] https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...
The University sends your medical degree to someone with the same surname as you by mistake and you get their basket weaving degree. They refuse to return it.
What do you do? You go to the university, and they check their CENTRALISED MASTER RECORD, notice the mistake, and fix it.
So. #1: Why do you need blockchain at all? #2: How can you have your blockchain system WITHOUT also having a centralised database somewhere?
The answer, as always with blockchain, is "So I can sell you a token." Always.
What NFTs guarantee is that the degree the school gave me is still mine. Without NFTs, they could not only revoke my degree, but also delete it from their database and leave me with no proof I graduated from there whatsoever, since I never really owned the degree as property. But with NFTs, no matter what they change or delete in their centralized database, my degree still exists as my property in my decentralized NFT wallet, and the school can't delete or take that back. Which is how property should work! In the real world, if my alma mater were to revoke my degree, they'd update their databases, but they wouldn't also come to my house, find my paper degree, and rip it up.
Now this is obviously a contrived example, because the entire point of a degree is to say, "Look! <AuthorityX> thinks highly of me!" So of course if the authority changes their mind about that, then your degree is worthless whether you still own it or not.
In a less contrived example, there might be property you own that's valuable regardless of the original owner's opinion of you or any records they keep in their database. For example, if you get a magical sword in World of WarCraft in NFT form, you now own that, and you can use it in other games that choose to recognize and represent that NFT. Even if you get in a fight with Blizzard's CEO, and he orders his minions to delete your account from their servers, you'll still have the NFT, and other games will still respect it.
Whereas in a world without NFTs, the only way for other games to even know you had the sword would be to query Blizzard's servers, so you would be fucked in this scenario, because Blizzard would delete all records, because they owned the records, not you.
So, on to video games. You think it would work that way huh? Your sword would still be worth something if Blizzard revoked it because you "own" it? You are making the mistake of thinking that whatever game you want to use the sword in wouldn't check with Blizzard to find out if you are a douchebag who has been banned or not, before they allowed you to use the sword for something in their game. They'd check, see that Blizzard has no record of it on their database, then decide that you'd either been banned or had stolen it, then block you.
Btw: Even this won't happen. Read what an actual game developer says about it. https://docseuss.medium.com/look-what-you-made-me-do-a-lot-o...
2. Other "real world" use cases abound, especially with intangibles. Degrees, certifications, licenses, tickets, contracts and invoices, perks, discounts, coupons, identifications, you name it. And these are just physical goods becoming NFTs, to say nothing of digital goods. Turning any good into an NFT adds it to a blockchain, which (a) enables ownership, (b) makes it part of a publicly accessible API that unlocks infinite creativity, (c) plugs it into a booming and a liquid market where owners can buy, sell, and trade their goods, and (d) guarantees its existence and accessibility for the long term.
3. I completely disagree with you that most games would check to see if Blizzard has marked you as a douchebag. Why would GameX care if a player broke some arbitrary rule that Blizzard has? They wouldn't.
4. The person who wrote that post barely even understands what an NFT is, and gets a whole bunch wrong. For example, they write that the concept of ownership of NFTs is "unenforceable," as if the blockchain needs some sort of enforcement. I'm not sure you want to get your predictions from somebody who doesn't understand the technology. There are plenty of smarter game developers working on NFT companies and writing much more intelligent posts.
2: All your examples can be done easily without blockchain. Perks, discounts, coupons, tickets etc. We already do all of this just fine.
3: "They wouldn't". Lol. Why not? It takes them zero effort, it would be an automated system, and guess what, it totally destroys your whole assertation. Doesn't it? GameX would check with Blizzard for reason that Blizzard would also check with GameX.
4: Ownership with NFTs is entirely unenforceable. Contrary to your point, you are the one who actually doesn't understand NFTs, nor the real world it seems. You seem to want to turn everything into a bearer bond, when in fact nothing in real life will ever work that way.
ID's? Ok, you have some ID token that "proves" you are 21. Does that mean you are 21? No, the only thing it proves is that you have the token. In any consequential case, the entity wanting to verify your age would have to check back with a central authority to determine if it's valid or not, thereby invalidating the need for the blockchain.
Tickets? You somehow think any ticketing agency on earth will hard over all control to what happens to the tickets they have sold?
Coupons? You've seen all the legalese and prohibitions written on coupons I take it. There are more rules about what you can and can't do with a 10% Off Pizza Hut token than many contracts. Yet you think they'll start putting them on the blockchain?
You live in fantasy-land mate. No game company is going to devote a whole bunch of effort and programming time into allowing someone with assets from a competitor to use them in their game.
2. None of these things have digital ownership enabled, none are part of a global publicly accessible API that others can connect to, none are part of a market where they can be bought/sold/traded. So all would be better with NFTs.
3. You haven't given a single reason why GameX would care to ban PlayerA just because Blizzard banned them. We see the opposite online all the time: people getting kicked off of one social network while be allowed to operate on others.
4. All of your examples here once again misunderstand how NFTs and the blockchain work, just like with #1 above. With IDs, the central authority that granted you the "21 years old" NFT would be listed as its origin on the blockchain, which obviates the need to check with them.
Anyway, at this point discussion is futile. You don't understand the technical details of how the blockchain works, and the rest of your points are just negative predictions of the future in the vein of, "This is how things work today, therefore this is how things must always work." It's very similar to people in the 90s claiming that no serious company would ever put anything on the internet.
Come back to these comments in a year or two.
1. You can get around this trivially, by simply either (1) looking at transactions originating from the node that distributes degrees, or (2) looking at the degree directly from a person's wallet. You don't need to use the blockchain for searching. It's not going to replace databases. You can have databases, too. But an NFT degree originating from a school's degree-distributing node is just as good as proof and doesn't require some additional step of contacting the school to find out if it's legit.
2. You've still said zero about the utility of a market where these things can be bought/sold/traded, or the API being publicly accessible, etc.
3. No company was putting their assets on the internet before the adoption of the web started compelling them to.
4. See #3. I'm trying to see your point here, but so far it amounts to, "People are doing X today, so they will always do X," which ignores the fact that technology takes a while to adopt. NFTs are new, and their utility is based on network effects, which means they'll become more useful with more adoption. Of course Apple isn't jumping in to use them right now. That says nothing about the future. That'd be like going back to 2011 and saying, "Nobody is using Zoom yet when they could be." Okay sure, but what does that say about the future? Little to nothing.
Again, of course it's possible that this won't catch on. Likely even. But the reasons you're listing don't seem like deterrents.
Centralized control will always be faster and more efficient and less fragile. Errors can be fixed, fraud can be blocked. Fans of blockchain would be a lot less certain that the tech had value if they were unable to shill a token.
Why isn't Apple jumping in to use them? They could set up their own blockchain right? Well, because the central issuing authority doesn't want to lose control of them. Why aren't ticket resales on the blockchain? Because the central issuing authority doesn't want to lose control of them. And that's what you will run into, every time.
All the things you claim that will be able to be done with the blockchain can already be done. So yeah, I guess we'll wait and see.
That doesn't mean incumbents are powerless. They can resist top-down changes. But they often have trouble resisting technological innovation that spreads bottom-up.
The blockchain is a decentralized protocol that's spreading from the bottom up due to popularity with consumers, similar to the web. Did newspaper companies want to be on the web in the 1990s and early 2000s? No. But they were forced to by new web-based competitors that readers found more convenient. The same pathway is quite possible here. There are already lots of games and apps being funded that support NFTs. Assuming they're any good and consumers like them, what are incumbents to do? Continue making inferior products? They won't win like that in the long run.
And FWIW, Meta already announced it'll be supporting NFTs, and Jack Dorsey from Twitter has been musing about doing the same.
> There is no reason to believe that NFTs will solve what could be solved by open data protocols long ago.
HN has a history of prioritizing technological specifications over real-world adoption and human psychology. The fact of the matter is that NFTs and the blockchain are seeing adoption, whereas the other protocols you're alluding to are not.
I got vaccinated this summer, there is this virus going around, maybe you heard.
The vaccinator gave me a signed digital token (a QR code) which I can carry around (in paper form or digital) to prove that I am vaccinated. No blockchains involved. Why do you use cases need a blockchain at all?
Afair one lunatic bidder for building that signing thing talked about involving 5 (five) blockchains for that thing. Everybody laughed at them.
Riffing with some Web 2.0 perspective on your use cases:
> Let's say Reddit granted you an NFT badge for being a moderator. When you sign up for Hacker News, you could share your digital backpack, and HN could look inside …
Or, you could give HN your reddit username and HN could query the Reddit API if you’re a moderator and by doing the API requests could find out if that privilege is still current and if those subreddit’s stats match HNs criteria for “trust”. Time and trust seem rather relevant to me. Would you want reddit “moderators” like u/violentacrez in perpetuity have privileges on HN and other forums?
> Every time I sign up for a new social network, forum, or dating site, I have to reenter my biographical information from scratch.
You could be identified by the URL of your home page and the new service simply could fetch machine readable information from there. The Indie Web over two decades did multiple stuff in that regard, from OpenID, over OAuth to rel=me and web-sign-in:
In a way individual homepages/profiles and a standardised API solve the N×M problem of APIs and could solve as a digital strongbox for your use cases of common information and other acquired signed trinkets. I don’t really see the need for a distributed ledger which needs computing power just to keep running. In your answer you concentrate on access to tokens but IMHO didn’t really answer the blockchain part.
Your example is one of a physical good. Of course you don't need an NFT to display a card physically. But what if you want to display it digitally? Your best option at this case is to take a photo, upload it to the web, then the consuming websites can hire people to scrutinize a bunch of grainy vaccination card photos from their users. Meh.
On the blockchain, you'd have an NFT representation of your card, and its origin (i.e. which authority gave it to you) could be easily programmatically tracked.
Obviously, vaccination cards aren't the best example, because COVID-19 is a real-world virus, not a computer virus, so it's doubtful that digital applications will care much about your vaccination card. But you get the idea, hopefully.
> Or, you could give HN your reddit username and HN could query the Reddit API if you’re a moderator…
This is the N × M problem.
> …and by doing the API requests could find out if that privilege is still current and if those subreddit’s stats match HNs criteria for “trust”. Time and trust seem rather relevant to me. Would you want reddit “moderators” like u/violentacrez in perpetuity have privileges on HN and other forums?
We solve this in the real world by putting expiration dates on licenses and badges. Is that perfect? No. But the benefit of portable certifications dwarfs the costs of the occasional expired or revoked cert.
In addition, NFTs are just code. You could easily include a URL with each NFT, which would point to some endpoint that responds with "revoked" or "expired" or "active". Best of both worlds.
> In a way individual homepages/profiles and a standardised API solve the N×M problem of APIs and could solve as a digital strongbox for your use cases of common information and other acquired signed trinkets.
Sure, that could work. But that standardized API does not exist, or if it does, it's clearly not being adopted, so it's a moot point. Where is the Indie Web in terms of adoption?
IMO HNers often focus too much on the merits of a particular technology, and not enough on the adoption. Often it's the case that worse technologies win, because they enjoy network effects that allow them to grow quickly and then maintain their lead. Again, look at HTML, CSS, and JavaScript -- hardly the best tools to build the web on, but that's what we've got, regardless of the fact that other tools "could" solve the problem better.
You're also neglecting the fact that blockchains are decentralized, but the web is not. The web is based on renting. Renting hosting from some other company, renting space in some company's database, etc. It's fine for today of course, we all do this and it works well.
But the blockchain and NFTs are about improving digital property, and one major improvement is moving from rental to ownership, as I pointed out in my original comment. No company can delete your "backpack" of NFTs, or shut you down because you're a sex worker and they think that's immoral, or tell you who you can and can't sell your items to. Sure, the authorities can try to track you down and punish you after the fact, but that's how things work in the real world, and getting the digital world to that point is the goal here.
For various reasons, this is catching on with NFTs in a big way that it didn't and won't with the Indie Web and other efforts. Adoption matters.
The same argument could simply made forward: the idealistic hopes of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 of an distributed, interoperable web did not materialise because walled gardens arose which then embraced and extended™ and then sabotaged the open web. Somehow I think Zuckerberg will not build his metaverse on a digital wallet which enables his users to possible leave his walled garden.
Meta wants to build a metaverse, a goal which has no chance of success if they try to wall it off and prevent portability of data and information. If they see the metaverse and decentralized portable goods as an inevitability in the evolution of the web, then their best bet is to play along and find new ways to capture value instead of hoping the old ways will work.
I'd compare it to the NYTimes reinventing itself 10 years ago. I'm sure they would've preferred the old world of print media dominance, but the writing was on the wall, and they made bold steps to go fully digital, hire a tech team, and lead the way on paid media subscriptions instead of continuing to rely on print ads and physical distribution.
Also, in most earlier versions of the web, I'd say embrace and extend failed. Incumbents were either disrupted or they adapted. The biggest internet giants today are examples of new disruptors who supplanted incumbents, or the incumbents who adapted. Assuming web3 is a Thing, the same should happen. Some incumbents will die, some incumbents will adapt, and some new players will supplant incumbents. Looks like Meta and Microsoft are attempting to adapt very quickly.
It's a QR code, it's already digital
The goal here is to make your online data portable, so you can take it with you as if you're wearing a backpack. What that looks like in practice is, when you show up to an app/website/game, to tell them the address of your backpack + proof you own it. A QR code could not accomplish this.
https://ec.europa.eu/info/live-work-travel-eu/coronavirus-re...
"Your example is one of a physical good. Of course you don't need an NFT to display a card physically. But what if you want to display it digitally? Your best option at this case is to take a photo, upload it to the web, then the consuming websites can hire people to scrutinize a bunch of grainy vaccination card photos from their users. Meh.
On the blockchain, you'd have an NFT representation of your card, and its origin (i.e. which authority gave it to you) could be easily programmatically tracked."
I'm saying we already have all of that and more without having to complicate it with an NFT that doesn't add anything.
NFTs are stored on blockchains, which are distributed databases, which anyone can read from. Those serve as public APIs, basically. That means anyone can incorporate NFTs into their apps in whatever creative and innovative ways they want to. And since these blockchains are digital, NFTs can easily be accessed, browsed, filtered, and searched. Again, not so with QR codes.
For example, let's say there's a sporting event and the league grants complementary NFTs to fans who buy a ticket. And let's say this particular event goes down in history as being a legendary game. Everyone will now have blockchain-based proof that they were a ticket holder, in NFT form. In fact, anybody can look and see who all the ticket holders were and take action based on that. For example, the league could throw a celebratory 10th anniversary party only original ticket holders are able to attend, or send a memento to everyone who attended, or those tickets could become collectors' items that holders display or sell.
This isn't going to happen with real-world tickets or QR codes, unless every organization that issues them feels like building their own database of people it distributes QR codes to, and making it a publicly-accessible via API. Even then, that would still be worse, because developers would have to find the proprietary API for every distributor of QE codes and then learn how to connect to it. One API > n APIs.
And even then, those databases would lack functionality, because the holders of the tickets wouldn't have control over the data. If the original maintainers disappear and the database is deleted, everyone loses their data. And they can't exactly sell or transfer their data, since they don't own the database row it lives in, unlike with the blockchain.
- NFTs between communities. Your second example illustrates why this is a bad idea. Is the new user that trusted reddit moderator or are they are a spammer, disinfo troll, or bad actor who just bought the NFT off of a trusted reddit mod? And how trusted is the general class of reddit mods anyway? Some of them are probably trustworthy, others are probably less trustworthy by dint of the subreddits they moderate. Still others could just create subreddits to moderate them to get the token to troll your forum.
In your example you'd need to hope that reddit subclasses all of their NFTs in a way that fits your use case and then you'd have to have special cases for all the subclasses. Okay, you moderated a 1k+ sub community that wasn't on the restricted list for more than a year...
It's also possible to do this now and I don't see this kind of thing except in rare circumstances. For example, when you are registering with our forum, if you wanted to claim special privileges, we could give you a GUID and ask you to message us with that GUID in the next 5 minutes on platform X. Then, we use the Platform X API to confirm you have exactly the attributes we want and confer those privileges on you. Nobody is really doing this now (to my knowledge) so it makes me question how useful this would be in our glorious NFT future.
- Lyft NFTs for benefits. Here similar objections apply. It's possible to make such perks transferable without a blockchain. That seems like a pretty simple feature to implement. Presumably, Lyft does not do this because first, they expect less than one hundred percent utilization of the benefit so it won't cost them quite as much as 400 X number of employees, but more importantly because they want their employees to use their service. The NFT would work against them because it would encourage employees to sell the perk which Lyft doesn't want them to do.
If you think about the problem of abuse, e.g. a Lyft driver buys the free rides NFT and does 400 dollars worth of rides with himself every month to get driver bonuses and extra cash, then Lyft would probably want to be able to disable those NFTs to stop people using the program when Lyft would prefer they not. And Lyft would have this capability! You notice that NFT X is being used in an abusive pattern, so you add X to a blocklist and now the app doesn't respect its free rides anymore. Uh oh, it looks like we had the appearance of decentralization, but actually full control over the valuable part of this rested in Lyft's hands the whole time. How is this ultimately any different from Lyft implementing the feature themselves - which they don't seem to want to do?
- Items that transfer between games. Again, this is possible now and doesn't happen. In order for your NFT sword to come from game1 and get imported to game2 we need g1 to mint NFTs. In modern day g1 could just expose an API that would let us query game object ownership and we could accomplish the same thing.
Maybe NFTs make this a bit easier or standardize it, but the fact that this is possible now and doesn't happen makes me think it's unlikely to happen in the NFT future either. My guess is that it's not worth the headache to add cross-game balance issues and the hard part of adding more content is not checking ownership but creating the assets and determining how that content should behave in your game.
Furthermore, what if g1 gets hacked or someone duplicates items or g1 becomes pay to play and users buy the powerful sword in a way that upsets g2 players? Either g2 accepts the damage to their game and continues to respect the NFTs, or g2 just makes an update and stops respecting the problematic NFTs. In this case, same as with the Lyft example, we see that things aren't really decentralized, it's the g2 servers deciding the reality of game2. Just, for a while they decided to respect the output of g1 servers.
- etc. I agree that it's impossible to know what these things will be used for in the future. To me it doesn't seem like they add any new capability and are basically just used as a Ponzi Scheme.
The reason I could see this working is because being allowed to sell your used goods, even digital ones, is already the law in many countries. But so far it has just been utterly impractical. NFTs provide the framework in which this could work. It would also be a good way to break up monopolies, as it would make switching between services much easier and companies would have to compete on the actual services they offer, instead of just relying on the lock-in to keep the competition away.
Now getting companies to join in on NFT-based license management ain't going to be easy. But due to there already being laws that regulate the sale of used copies, there might be a way to force them to.
Epic Games is currently having a lot of lawsuits around App stores and is talking about having an universal app store that works across different platforms. Maybe something will grow out of that.
A useful example of what this would likely look like is Movies Anywhere. That was created by the big studios to limit the tech companies’ control, and it limits transfers to the stores they trust.
I think a key question for NFT licensing would be how it would get the power to force something different, especially when that costs more.
Furthermore you have to consider the long game here, what happens if the company you bought the good from goes under? Stops running the service, etc.? With NFTs that is in theory a complete non-issue, you can just go to your next library, show them your NFT and they give you a copy of the movie. NFTs basically allow you to ignore copyright, as the NFT proves that no "copy" in the traditional sense took place, as you already owned the content. So you no longer are required to get your movie from the rights holder, you can get it from anybody that has a copy. If you own the NFT you are allowed to get a copy of the movie. And the NFT can be found on a used market if the company no longer sells it themselves.
As for companies not joining in, that's not for them to decide. You are already allowed by law to sell your goods. That's existing law. It's just difficult to enforce when there is no system in place that allows selling used digital good. NFTs could provide the foundation for such a system.
I think this is the core misunderstanding which makes NFTs appear useful. NFTs in fact do not allow you to ignore copyright and NFTs do not show ownership unless there's a separate contract conveying legal rights to the current NFT holder. That's why the entire scenario outlined doesn't work: if Amazon goes out of business, I can show Apple my receipts (PKI signed or not) but whether Apple will grant me the ability to get a copy comes down to the legal terms under which I licensed a copy from Amazon and what Apple has negotiated with the actual owner.
If those parties want to allow me to do this — as, for example, they did with Movies Anywhere — they don't need a blockchain because the key legal requirement is Amazon originally saying they sold me a license.
If the owner doesn't want to add a transfer clause which wasn't already there, or allows Apple to charge me a transfer fee, an NFT again does nothing to change the situation because legally I do not have any right to the content: what I bought was permission to use Amazon's service to display it.
NFTs provide a way out of this, as the rights holder is no longer the one who completely controls the content. Once they sold a copy, it can circulate in the used market, completely outside their control. This also makes it much easier for new players to enter the market, as they do not need to Disney's permission to resell used copies.
The only real option is to stridently reject the false premise of "copyright". Otherwise, you're playing a sucker's game where the mouse always wins.
- With the Reddit example, you're pointing out how NFTs and digital property shines in comparison to physical property. Specifically, you can trace the history of any NFT or token on the blockchain. HN could choose to only trust NFT holders who are one hop away from the origin, i.e. NFTs that were directly granted by Reddit. HN would thus be ignoring any moderator NFT that's been transferred or sold.
As for whether or not Reddit mods are trustworthy, that's a moot point, as it's just a contrived example. There are infinite possibilities, and it's doubtful that I'm going to think of a the best use cases, just as it was doubtful that an internet pundit in 1993 was going to think up the best websites. But a better example might be, let's say FAANG companies grant NFTs to senior engineers. Perhaps StackOverflow might want to show that status as a badge next to user accounts.
Yes, it's possible to do this now, but there is little incentive to, because these digital goods suck for the most part. Because digital goods aren't portable, they require the development of N × M propriety API calls for anyone apps or services to use them. Or in your case, HN mods would have to create a Reddit account and monitor it for messages. Total pain in the ass. We do see APIs used often regardless, despite the pain. It's hard not to imagine that use cases and creativity increase as a result of the tech getting easier.
- If Lyft wanted to allow employees to trade or sell perks, they'd have to create a marketplace for this, build features to support all of it, all for users to register accounts, etc. It'd be a lot of work. And it likely wouldn't do well, because it'd be a small silo'd market. So it's not worth the effort.
If Lyft instead distributed perks as NFTs, that's it. That's all they'd have to do. The blockchain would take care of the rest, as NFTs are automatically portable and sellable and tradable to anyone on the internet, without Lyft needing to lift a finger build some proprietary market connected to its databases.
Just because Lyft retains control of who does and doesn't get the perk doesn't affect much re:decentralization. The point of decentralization is to allow us to own our digital property that we control rather than that companies control, not to force companies and apps to lose all power in every other respect. Lyft can't delete your NFT or stop you from selling/trading it, and that's it. That's the goal. The rest is fine. It's the same in the real world: if I buy a ticket to a sporting event, it doesn't mean the stadium can't deny me entry or throw me out if I get drunk.
- Yes, games don't tend to share digital goods today, for the same reason websites don't: There's little consumer demand, because digital goods aren't useful, because they require N × M API requests to achieve portability + because there's no true consumer ownership.
And again, it doesn't matter if g1 or g2 want to make their own rules and changes. That's perfectly fine, and doesn't make digital property useless. It happens with real-world property, too. I had a Google Glass early on, and at first everyone loved it, but after a few weeks bars and restaurants banned me from coming in with them on. No big deal.
What you're pointing out are indeed problems, but they aren't problems that are going to stop proliferation and adoption of this new technology. It's similar to when the web was new, and pundits criticized it for being a hodgepodge of mediocre information that was difficult to sort through. Okay sure, that was true and it was a problem. But it didn't stop the web from spreading. It just resulted in the birth of Google, a $2T company that solve this problem. And social networks, which let you sort information by the people who you know/follow based on your personal connections or their popularity.
- You could argue that the most popular current use case (speculating on art and collectibles) are a Ponzi scheme I suppose. But the other use cases I proposed seem quite useful despite the minor problems pointed out, and it's hard not to imagine there will be many creative use cases in the future. Again, who could've predicted Airbnb or Uber or TikTok in 1995?
I'll bite.
Currently, digital goods are relatively useless, which disincentivizes their creation and usage. NFTs change this, by making digital goods far more useful, which will encourage the creation of innovative digital goods we've never seen before, and add useful new functionality to apps/websites/games.
What's a digital good? It's basically any data stored in a database: tweets, forum posts, upvotes, badges, items in video games, etc. These goods aren't very useful for numerous reasons. For example, they're typically leased rather than owned. If Twitter were to close its doors tomorrow, you would quickly find out that "your" tweets are really their tweets, and they can delete them from their database if they want to. Also, digital goods aren't portable. There's no real way for you to take your HN points with you to another website. Instead, that website would have to ping HN's API (if it even has one) with your credentials to ask how many points you have.
Imagine if the real world worked this way. If you went to buy alcohol from a restaurant or a store, you wouldn't actually own a driver's license that you could carry around with you. Instead, each establishment you patronize would have to call up the DMV and ask them to check their database to see if they have your license on file and if you're above the legal age to drink. This would obviously be a shitty way for goods to behave. But that's how they work online.
By making use of the blockchain, NFTs are a decentralized way to track ownership of digital goods. In essence, your crypto wallet(s) can serve as a "digital backpack" for you to store digital goods (NFTs) that you've acquired from apps, games, websites, or other people. That means real ownership -- none of your goods disappear just because the entity that gave them to you disappeared, nor can anyone tell you what you can and can't do with your goods. It also means portability. Today when you show up to a new app/website, they have no idea who you are. In the future, you'll show up with your digital backpacks in tow, and you can reveal their contents to the service you're using, and they can see what you have and react accordingly. That's what portability means, and it's obviously quite useful.
For example:
- Let's say Reddit granted you an NFT badge for being a moderator. When you sign up for Hacker News, you could share your digital backpack, and HN could look inside and see the moderator badge NFT you got from Reddit, and decide you're worth trusting more than the average Joe. Maybe HN would give you downvote privileges without making you earn the points first? Who knows. But one could imagine lots of trust-based use cases like this. What if colleges gave students NFT-representations of their degrees?
- I believe Lyft employees get $400 in free rides every month. Imagine if that was handled via an NFT: new employees get an NFT, and Lyft gives anyone who owns that NFT the free rides. Most would just keep it. But some employees might choose to sell, trade, or give it away. After all, it's their NFT that they own, not just some row in Lyft's database. You could apply this to other perks and awards as well. Suddenly, perks are granular and portable.
- What if games give you NFT representations of the items you earn? Then other games can see that you earned those items, and if their developers choose to, they can represent the items in their games, too. Perhaps if I get an NFT showing that I'm a grandmaster in StarCraft 2, some other game can skip me ahead in the ladder so I don't have to grind my way up. Or if I earn a magical sword in World of WarCraft, another game might give me their version of that sword just because they know I'll think it's cool.
- Every time I sign up for a new social network, forum, or dating site, I have to reenter my biographical information from scratch. This is tedious. What if I could just write down my bio and keep it in one of my backpacks as an NFT? Now every time I sign up for a website, I can show them my backpack, and they can autofill my bio.
- etc. If this technology becomes ubiquitous, it's difficult to imagine what types of digital goods will be created 5 or 10 years from now, just like nobody imagined Airbnb or Uber back in 1993 when the web was new.
What this essentially does is transform the internet into a metaverse. Instead of a bunch of silo'd apps that store all their data in silo'd databases, we as individuals own and control our own data, that we take with us from place to place. Instead of apps having to make NxM API calls to interact, there's one global API (the blockchain) that every app can write to and read from. Suddenly, everything on the internet is interoperable.
> What problem does it solve that no other distributed system does as well, if not better? I've yet to see the answer.
This doesn't matter that much. Is HTML the best technology imaginable to build web apps front ends? Certainly not. But it's the one that won, so that's what we have.
Similarly, blockchains are winning handily. For various reasons, they're gaining mass adoption. It's quite likely that the internet of the future will be built on top of blockchains. In fact it's already happening.