This is the part of NFTs and crypto more broadly that I struggle to understand. What exactly about car registrations or licenses needs improving and how does a crypto token do that? A drivers license is already relatively difficult to forge, and for verification there is already a central registry of them, so where does the token come in?

It doesn't. If you really need a blockchain, an old-school permissioned one will do the job cheaper, more reliable, and, paradoxically, often even in more decentralized fashion. NFTs don't bring anything to the table, other than being a cute and wasteful collectible card equivalent that's perfect for money washing and scamming clueless people.

> crypto more broadly

Think about all of the licensing, money printing, and registration agencies to ever exist. What percentage of them have significant corruption? Blockchains provides a lot of stability in a way more traditional human organizations fail to.

At the end of the day, the vehicle registration agency still needs to issue the license, so what's the benefit of a blockchain here? You do not need a blockchain to, say, cryptographically sign something such that it can be verified as a genuine item. And blockchain won't stop corrupt minting of licenses by the agency. And even if you did need a blockchain, the ledger wouldn't be public because the data on it is private. So now it's just a database with a ton of extra steps, complexity and kneecapped performance.

They would have the same central authority problem, the real issue is to get evereyone to agree to using a system like that..

The old school ledger system is working fine. Even if I lose my blockchain private key I still own my house because the title is recorded with the county.

Have you considered the fun in losing your house because you clicked on the wrong link?

A small price to pay for being profiled in Wired as the wild-eyed technology fan who was a pioneer in getting robbed.

I'm imagining a combination of the guy who locked half a million in a smart contract with no way to get it out[1], ever, and the Libertarian Cop copypasta[2], where the crypto police is hired by an NFT marketplace to evict you from your house and set up an armed perimeter to prevent use of the house as it is now stuck in a smart contract with no exit.

[1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/blockchain-enthusiast-alleged...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/7iqxko/libertari...

If the title of your house was on a blockchain, the title would still be recorded in your county's system. The blockchain is just a ledger, it's up to people to come to agreement on if they trust that ledger or not. The whole point of having your house title on-chain isn't to replace the traditional courts, it's to add additional features to your title and allow you to use that asset's value in decentralized finance more easily. If you lose your keys to your title, you would have to use the traditional court system to replace the title on-chain with severe legal repercussions if you're lying. You could also include a blacklist feature in the house title's onchain contract. It doesn't matter if it's a centralized system either (even if it's on-chain), because the only point of putting it on-chain is to make illiquid assets more liquid because now those assets can be be programmed, used and traded in global decentralized financial markets in web3 24/7, globally.

What's the point? I can already get a mortgage refinance or Heloc super easy if I want to. Where are the additional features?

I often ask questions like this, and the most popular non-answers are, 1) think of the possibilities, 2) this technology is just getting started, so you can't judge it yet, and 3) unverifiable stories about some use case that is at best extremely narrow and may well be hogwash.

And when stating the imagined gains, the costs are always assumed to be zero. We know not to trust our data to a version 0.3 app, but somehow that's a fine thing to do with one's house or life savings.

It seems to be hype and speculation in its purest form. Pure as in having no actual utility. Reminds me of things like high frequency trading. Just expensive computation that extracts value and distracts people. With the difference that high frequency trading is less inherently dumb and feels more like an exploit rather than a scheme.

In fact, the profits of high frequency trading can be seen as rewards for filling the market with liquidity, so it's not strictly an exploit.

Is there much evidence that HFT yields in better results for those making economically meaningful trades? A theoretical increase in liquidity may not matter in already liquid markets, and if it does, it's not clear to me that the end-user gains are enough to justify the negative effects.

I don't get it.

If the on-chain house title isn't the real one, treated as the ultimate authority, why would anybody want to buy it? Nobody in the right mind would want to pay for something that doesn't actually confer ownership. At that point, there's no benefit over just selling your house the normal way because all crypto does is adding extra steps to an existing process.

If the on-chain house title is the ultimate authority, then the logical conclusion that any way of obtaining it is valid -- if I manage to get it, then I should be able to kick you out of your house, since now I possess the title.

The first option seems useless/fraudulent, and the second incredibly awful security-wise. Fall for a scam/virus/trojan once, and there goes all your stuff.

If implemented with even the furthest reaches of understanding and blockchain tech that I’m aware of, I feel this would be (much closer to) a dystopia.