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?
- 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.