The book is just a register, the power is in the legal system that defends that register and will settle disputes. Plus legally owning a house grants far more rights than merely having an entry in the register saying you do.

Yes, but the book has a legal authority backing it up saying that its entries are property rights to the listed address.

Buying an NFT just to have an NFT is like paying for an entry in a book with no further meaning. You just get to say that’s your entry.

Oh and the entry is an http url, so there’s a good chance it’ll 404 eventually (if you even get a status code back)

And where does legal authority come from? Social consensus - it's the same thing.

The legal edifice maintaining property rights also requires maintenance.

This is true, but the flaw in your reasoning, and in the raison d'etre of NFT's in general, is that social consensus is the be all, end all.

There isn't really the problem of acquiring a 100% perfect copy of an asset in the real world. You can approximate an item, but you can't literally get the same exact thing down to the molecular composition. On the internet, this is absolutely possible (replace molecules with bytecode), and is I'd argue, one of the defining features of it.

The true secret sauce behind modern property rights is the enforcement through legal authority. In the event of a dispute, courts have potentially a few hundred years' worth of precedence. Following that, there are proven legal procedures to remove a person from unlawful possession of another's property, which hold penalties ranging from monetary fines to loss of freedom.

And the driving force behind that is social consensus, but on a case by case basis. There will be no such thing with NFT's. It's simply impossible to build it in.

The NFT is the property. Social consensus is why people want to own it. The blockchain enables the creation of an ownable digital record. Our legal system continue to function and will still arrest you if you steal an NFT.

Most people don’t understands existing IP laws (see what results you get when searching YouTube for “no copyright intended”); adding a new one isn’t likely to improve the situation, so I don’t accept that there is (nor that there is likely to be) a real social consensus in favour of NFTs.

The army and the police force. "Legal authority" is not a constraint on you, its what constraints the state's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence

Sure, most things are 'just' social constructs if you reduce them to that, but notice how the state will literally kill you if you break some laws in some ways. Essentially, legal authority comes from a perceived violence monopoly.

> The legal edifice maintaining property rights also requires maintenance.

Hey, just want to point something out here. The quoted sentence is really important. Civil society doesn't just happen, we all (or at least most of us) have a vested interest in maintaining the legal edifice.

So tomorrow, be nice to someone in traffic. And show good grace and community when faced with one of the social frictions (like waiting in line).

Yes, but the legal system could back specific NFTs instead of specific books. That would give those NFTs meaning and value. Right now I just don't see why any government would want to do that.

It's not the book/register or the mindshare. It's a central authority (sovereign government) and it's legal system that grants and enforces the ownership rights. Remove that authority and what do you have? Anarchy. There's a reason why central authority based systems have evolved. It reduces violence.

Similarly, the value of the NFT is not in the token but in the community (artist, other NFT holders) honoring it and sometimes enforcing certain rights.

But you can't verify that the content behind this URL was the same all the time. How can you enforce rights in a court if you can't prove that the content was the same.

If you have a hash of the content in the NFT verifying what it pointed at is trivial.

The sign analogy works. The person owning the sign can't change the house, like painting the walls. That's only for the person owning the house.

If you own an NFT you can't print the image on a t-shirt and sell it, because the artist has the copyright, not you.

The stipulations of the book are enforceable by law. If you have the "mindshare" of the governing body and their means to create and enforce laws you are generally better off.

I physically live in that house and nobody can trivially and completely legally take it down for good.

You can physically live in a house that you don't legally own. Those are two different concepts.

Not really the ability to physically occupy the house is one of the rights owning it gives you. There are other ways to gain that right but there is conceptual overlap there.

In some legal systems, physically occupying the house gives you ownership rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession

My tenant in the UK does not own the flat they occupy; my landlord in Berlin does own the flat I occupy. There are rules to say that landlords can’t just enter on a whim, and rent is a very common way to occupy a property.

Yes exactly, ownership gives you the right to occupy the property and you can also trade that right for rent as well as reaquire it. Hence conceptual overlap.

squatters.

eminent domain.

Not minshare only. It resides in the arrangements between organizations to enforce whatever rules areon the books regarding property rights. Smart contracts just put those rules into code on a blockchain. What is missing is the “enforcement” element.

But that may be a good thing to libertarians. NFT may be an early attempt to move past more violence-enabled business models for “intellectual property”, including the mode dominated by VCs for startups, and Music and Movie studios for artists