> NFTs are scarce by design and useless.

That's rich

> NFTs are scarce by design and useless.

So, I know of one real-world usecase that's not useless: Some startups have begun legally selling properties (homes, ranches, plots) via NFTs.

Oh fun, which startups are those?

Real estate on the blockchain is my favourite bad blockchain idea because if someone loses access to their wallet they presumably lose the ability to ever sell their house.

Nah, it just becomes one of those impediments to sale that you wave aside during purchase and earns lawyers a few bucks.

There are a few of these in England, Chancel Repair Liability is the most famous. In theory you could be forced to pay for repairs to a nearby church you never visit and have no interest in, on account of land you own was historically liable for such repairs and this was never cancelled. A real person, this century, had to pay about £350 000 as a result, so that's not inconsequential (although the circumstances were pretty unusual). But that's scary enough that a real estate lawyer might argue they're not sure the property you want to buy is unaffected, you should take out Insurance against the liability, conveniently sold by another lawyer.

The government tried to "fix" this, but the problem with lawyers is, obviously no fix will be good enough to prevent lawyers saying what if the fix didn't work, so chances are you get persuaded to buy insurance even though the liability probably no longer exists because hey, if I'm wrong I'm not going to pay £350 000 so...

Fifty years from now, if the fact there's "an NFT on the blockchain" for a property you want to buy is even something anybody knows about, your lawyer will know, and they'll tell you that another lawyer offers $1000 insurance, buy that and if "the blockchain" ever tries to sue you and take the property back they'll have your back...

You just gotta etch the block into the foundation. Then it's physically part of the house. Maybe make a radioactive label and bury it on the property. That way people now the property they're standing is on actual property.

> Oh fun, which startups are those?

Some are covered in this article: https://archive.is/k3w7F

> ...if someone loses access to their wallet they presumably lose the ability to ever sell their house.

It is software at the end of the day and seems like there is already a solution for it: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Multi-signature

The startups in that article don't seem to be selling entire properties on the blockchain though - it looks like they're doing things like buying a property and then selling fractional interest in that property to different investors as tokens.

I'll believe that multi-sig wallets solve this when I hear frequent stories about regular human beings (not highly sophisticated tech insiders) who both understand them and use them successfully.

Or, do what enterprises do with sensitive documents: Store it with a custodian (or a hardware wallet).

Mutli-sig wallets are but one non-custodial solution.

Not long ago, Signal demonstrated a way to recover passphrases in a way that server compromise doesn't really reveal anything at all about the passphrase itself: https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/ The OPAQUE standard also has similar properties to Signal's design but much more cheaper to implement: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-irtf-cfrg-opaque... I point these out because Novi (Facebook's Diem wallet) implements the latter. These never require keys to ever leave a client device (which inturn could be a hardware wallet).

Useable security will take time. It was a long road from GnuPG to Keybase/Signal. Given the amount of cryptographers and engs building for "web3", I'm sure something useable will crop up. May be it is Moxie himself who comes up with it, who knows? ;)

So two escrow companies and I each have 2-of-3 keys.

At this point what is the blockchain providing that normal title records don't?

It isn't as much about blockchain, than what NFTs enable. Properties can be sold digitally, like any other goods are on e-commerce websites, for example. Of course, NFTs aren't strictly needed, but could be used as a cryptographically secure (for some definition of secure [0]), publicly verifiable, record of ownership.

[0] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

What does the use of NFTs change in the transaction?