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Maybe NFTs for collectibles isnt ideal but Im wondering if there are some more - lets say - utilitarian uses of this concept that we havent discussed yet. The o

Maybe NFTs for collectibles isnt ideal but Im wondering if there are some more - lets say - utilitarian uses of this concept that we havent discussed yet. The other day I tried buying a bike. Id really like to know it wasnt stolen, and somehow being able to tie a real world representation into a virtual single item good would be somewhat useful.

TheDong 6y ago
Bikes have unique serial numbers. https://bikeindex.org https://bikeindex.org runs a free website to let you lookup serial numbers and mark them as stolen, and there's also various other regional websites that do a similar sort of thing. If you want to buy a bike, make sure it has a serial number (and if the number was filed off, then yes it was probably stolen), and look it up on the index. How would an NFT be better than the above database in any way? I do think the bikeindex could be run better (fewer regional websites, a database we can download for archival purposes, sharing of information between multiple registries), but all of those things seem like they're easier and cheaper to do without a blockchain or NFTs. Rather than do something like NFTs, they could do what the certificate transparency project does, and just dictate "here's the data format, here's how you share data", and get all the benefits I can think of with none of the downsides or ecological waste. For what it's worth, there is evidence that such a database can be made and work in a similar case, since car registrations, transfers, etc are all quite well handled with no NFTs.
- lmm 6y ago
  An NFT is inherently decentralized, maintained by multiple independent parties, and more or less tamper-proof. That database is only as resilient as the organisation running it (or maybe less, plenty of organisations have lost their databases before), and presumably there are corruptible humans with write access to it.
  - TheDong 6y ago
    The certificate transparency project has the same attributes you mention to my knowledge. There is the problem of correct data, but I don't understand how an NFT manages to make data correct. How do I prove to the NFT that I own the bike with SN 123? How do I prove it was stolen? I'd love if we replaced the bikeindex with a certificate transparency project-esque system and each large bike manufacturer ran an instance. That also seems like it would be vastly easier to create than having people use the bike-stolen-registry-NFT you're talking about, and as a bonus it would be far less wasteful.
    - michaelmrose 6y ago
      It seems like it would optimally require the manufacturer to participate in creating a token representing that serial number and assigning it to the person who bought the bike who would have to transfer it to the next owner and so forth.
      - growse 6y ago
        And so when I sell my bicycle to someone (and write them a receipt) but forget to do the weird token transfer thing, who owns the bike? In the eyes of the law, the guy holding the bike and the receipt owns it. What the NFT says is irrelevant. So how are NFTs useful again?
        michaelmrose 6y ago
        If they had been out long enough to be pervasive you could require all online marketplaces ebay,offer up, facebooks etc which are commonly used to traffic stolen goods to upload an NFT as part of the transfer whose description matches the item being sold which is transferred with the good. It would be like requiring every good sold to have a trivially electronically verifiably accurate original receipt that only someone who acquired it illegitimately would lack.
    - lmm 6y ago
      Certificates still have the problem of who your trusted root is, and don't (by themselves) solve provenance issues - if two people have certificates for the same bicycle then there's no way to choose between them, whereas an NFT inherently has an auditable chain of custody going all the way back to the original issuer (presumably the bike manufacturer in this case) and digitally signed at each stage. I'd love it if these industries/communities adopted log-structured distributed datastores with digital signing to track provenance of things without wasteful "mining". But the fact is that they've shown no willingness to do so, and it's a lot harder to bootstrap a system like this - if your system relies on a trusted root then you need the trust before you can start to develop the system at all, but users have no reason to trust the system until it's all fully running and proven.
- yowlingcat 6y ago
  It's another example of the title problem. You can think of it in a similar to how VINs work for cars, or ESNs work for phones. In those cases, there's a centralized database that tracks whether things are stolen or not. It's possible that NFTs could be a decent way to handle supply chain auditing of this variety, considering it's just rebirthing a process that already exists but in a more analogue form. The advantage over something like bikeindex is that you could make the transfer process a lot more seamless. You could build things like escrowing into the protocol, so when someone sells a bike to you on craigslist, you have a nice clean transactional system which adds some nice anti-fraud measures and protections for you without necessarily requiring you to buy it from a store or marketplace to gain those protections.
- dingaling 6y ago
  > How would an NFT be better than the above database in any way? It wouldn't depend on the benevolence of a third-party absorbing the cost of running the index. It would be geographically and culturally agnostic. Zoom out here and notice how little of the World's population is involved: https://map.bikewise.org/#0/84/-77 https://map.bikewise.org/#0/84/-77 It would be globally unique and would not require the cooperation of manufacturers. Neither of my two bikes has a serial number because they're 'too old'. Other bikes have conflicting serial numbers. It would eliminate the privacy and security risks of maintaining a central database of PII and associated valuable assets.
  - __float 6y ago
    > It would be geographically and culturally agnostic Who's to say everyone is using the same NFTs for this? We already see a variety of different platforms for NFT art. > It would eliminate the privacy and security risks of maintaining a central database of PII and associated valuable assets. How are there now fewer privacy and security risks when the entire blockchain is completely public? Where's the privacy?
  - handmodel 6y ago
    I still am confused by this though. If the police/government don't acknowledge this then you can't really get it back without a fight. Wouldn't you rather just have it run by an entity the legal system can point to? If you don't trust the legal system...then I really doubt that having a third-party website is going to help you with a bike thief in anyway.
  - grey-area 6y ago
    No instead it would foist that externality on the entire world in the form of carbon emissions and depend on the highly uncertain future value of a cryptocurrency. And it would still require a third party to benevolently run an app to search and make sense of the data from the ledger, and also to verify that the data inserted was actually real and not poisoning the db.
  - j4yav 6y ago
    How would you prove to a blockchain that a particular serial number really is owned by you, or was lost, or all the other things that can happen that don’t occur on the blockchain? Aren’t you sort of back to needing the cooperation of lots of different entities globally, and some kind of authority equivalent to the third party database maintainer to ensure the data makes sense?
analog31 6y ago
I actually had a similar idea, last time the theft of a famous painting was reported in the news. The museum could offer a deal, where they get the painting back but give the thieves a certificate for it. As part of the deal, they have to hang a sign next to the painting, saying, "This painting is considered to be stolen." The thieves can do whatever they want with the certificate -- use it to pay illicit debts and so forth. They can visit their painting at the museum, and brag to their friends about it. But the rest of the public still gets to enjoy the painting too. Now closer to home, I'm a musician and play a modestly valuable instrument. I've thought of taking really high resolution images of it, because the grain pattern of the wood is practically like a fingerprint, and would be difficult to conceal without destroying the instrument. A database with hi-res pictures of valuable instruments would be like a serial number database for bikes.
- setr 6y ago
  You could do the same thing today, offering a certificate of authenticity or whatever, validated by the relevant comunnaly accepted authority, and it would be be just as baffling and nonsensical an offer. The certificate is not the weilder of value , even if it were required for the object itself to be valuable (eg originality). With an NFT I don’t even know what you’re certifying, except that this one chain says you own the object. In your example that’s not even true, the museum “owns” it, yet the thieves have it, and the NFT is now just as flawed as today’s understanding of ownership.
- smt88 6y ago
  > The thieves can do whatever they want with the certificate -- use it to pay illicit debts and so forth. They can visit their painting at the museum, and brag to their friends about it. But the rest of the public still gets to enjoy the painting too. I love this answer because it's a perfect analogy to explain why NFTs are total nonsense. Owning a one-of-a-kind, literally irreplaceable painting cannot be substituted for a certificate. The certificate has zero value because it does not allow the owner to restrict access to the original painting. The core concept of ownership (control over a scarce resource) is violated as soon as you start trading a certificate instead of the original item. It's like someone saying that owning the last remaining Michael Jordan baseball card is the same as owning Michael Jordan, and that both have the same value. It's ludicrous.
mtalantikite 6y ago
This all assumes most people care about buying a stolen bike or not. Maybe you care, and maybe I care, but I’m sure there are plenty of people that really don’t give a shit and are thinking “it’s a cheap bike and I don’t have the luxury of money or time to care, I’ve got to get to work”.
quickthrower2 6y ago
The be your own bank headaches that most people can’t handle will then apply. You need to spend a lot of money on gas fees, hardware wallets etc and get a good grounding in cyber security. Or just get a lock and bike insurance.

TheDong 6y ago

Bikes have unique serial numbers. https://bikeindex.org https://bikeindex.org runs a free website to let you lookup serial numbers and mark them as stolen, and there's also various other regional websites that do a similar sort of thing. If you want to buy a bike, make sure it has a serial number (and if the number was filed off, then yes it was probably stolen), and look it up on the index. How would an NFT be better than the above database in any way? I do think the bikeindex could be run better (fewer regional websites, a database we can download for archival purposes, sharing of information between multiple registries), but all of those things seem like they're easier and cheaper to do without a blockchain or NFTs. Rather than do something like NFTs, they could do what the certificate transparency project does, and just dictate "here's the data format, here's how you share data", and get all the benefits I can think of with none of the downsides or ecological waste. For what it's worth, there is evidence that such a database can be made and work in a similar case, since car registrations, transfers, etc are all quite well handled with no NFTs.

lmm 6y ago
An NFT is inherently decentralized, maintained by multiple independent parties, and more or less tamper-proof. That database is only as resilient as the organisation running it (or maybe less, plenty of organisations have lost their databases before), and presumably there are corruptible humans with write access to it.
- TheDong 6y ago
  The certificate transparency project has the same attributes you mention to my knowledge. There is the problem of correct data, but I don't understand how an NFT manages to make data correct. How do I prove to the NFT that I own the bike with SN 123? How do I prove it was stolen? I'd love if we replaced the bikeindex with a certificate transparency project-esque system and each large bike manufacturer ran an instance. That also seems like it would be vastly easier to create than having people use the bike-stolen-registry-NFT you're talking about, and as a bonus it would be far less wasteful.
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    It seems like it would optimally require the manufacturer to participate in creating a token representing that serial number and assigning it to the person who bought the bike who would have to transfer it to the next owner and so forth.
    - growse 6y ago
      And so when I sell my bicycle to someone (and write them a receipt) but forget to do the weird token transfer thing, who owns the bike? In the eyes of the law, the guy holding the bike and the receipt owns it. What the NFT says is irrelevant. So how are NFTs useful again?
      - michaelmrose 6y ago
        If they had been out long enough to be pervasive you could require all online marketplaces ebay,offer up, facebooks etc which are commonly used to traffic stolen goods to upload an NFT as part of the transfer whose description matches the item being sold which is transferred with the good. It would be like requiring every good sold to have a trivially electronically verifiably accurate original receipt that only someone who acquired it illegitimately would lack.
  - lmm 6y ago
    Certificates still have the problem of who your trusted root is, and don't (by themselves) solve provenance issues - if two people have certificates for the same bicycle then there's no way to choose between them, whereas an NFT inherently has an auditable chain of custody going all the way back to the original issuer (presumably the bike manufacturer in this case) and digitally signed at each stage. I'd love it if these industries/communities adopted log-structured distributed datastores with digital signing to track provenance of things without wasteful "mining". But the fact is that they've shown no willingness to do so, and it's a lot harder to bootstrap a system like this - if your system relies on a trusted root then you need the trust before you can start to develop the system at all, but users have no reason to trust the system until it's all fully running and proven.
yowlingcat 6y ago
It's another example of the title problem. You can think of it in a similar to how VINs work for cars, or ESNs work for phones. In those cases, there's a centralized database that tracks whether things are stolen or not. It's possible that NFTs could be a decent way to handle supply chain auditing of this variety, considering it's just rebirthing a process that already exists but in a more analogue form. The advantage over something like bikeindex is that you could make the transfer process a lot more seamless. You could build things like escrowing into the protocol, so when someone sells a bike to you on craigslist, you have a nice clean transactional system which adds some nice anti-fraud measures and protections for you without necessarily requiring you to buy it from a store or marketplace to gain those protections.
dingaling 6y ago
> How would an NFT be better than the above database in any way? It wouldn't depend on the benevolence of a third-party absorbing the cost of running the index. It would be geographically and culturally agnostic. Zoom out here and notice how little of the World's population is involved: https://map.bikewise.org/#0/84/-77 https://map.bikewise.org/#0/84/-77 It would be globally unique and would not require the cooperation of manufacturers. Neither of my two bikes has a serial number because they're 'too old'. Other bikes have conflicting serial numbers. It would eliminate the privacy and security risks of maintaining a central database of PII and associated valuable assets.
- __float 6y ago
  > It would be geographically and culturally agnostic Who's to say everyone is using the same NFTs for this? We already see a variety of different platforms for NFT art. > It would eliminate the privacy and security risks of maintaining a central database of PII and associated valuable assets. How are there now fewer privacy and security risks when the entire blockchain is completely public? Where's the privacy?
- handmodel 6y ago
  I still am confused by this though. If the police/government don't acknowledge this then you can't really get it back without a fight. Wouldn't you rather just have it run by an entity the legal system can point to? If you don't trust the legal system...then I really doubt that having a third-party website is going to help you with a bike thief in anyway.
- grey-area 6y ago
  No instead it would foist that externality on the entire world in the form of carbon emissions and depend on the highly uncertain future value of a cryptocurrency. And it would still require a third party to benevolently run an app to search and make sense of the data from the ledger, and also to verify that the data inserted was actually real and not poisoning the db.
- j4yav 6y ago
  How would you prove to a blockchain that a particular serial number really is owned by you, or was lost, or all the other things that can happen that don’t occur on the blockchain? Aren’t you sort of back to needing the cooperation of lots of different entities globally, and some kind of authority equivalent to the third party database maintainer to ensure the data makes sense?

analog31 6y ago

I actually had a similar idea, last time the theft of a famous painting was reported in the news. The museum could offer a deal, where they get the painting back but give the thieves a certificate for it. As part of the deal, they have to hang a sign next to the painting, saying, "This painting is considered to be stolen." The thieves can do whatever they want with the certificate -- use it to pay illicit debts and so forth. They can visit their painting at the museum, and brag to their friends about it. But the rest of the public still gets to enjoy the painting too. Now closer to home, I'm a musician and play a modestly valuable instrument. I've thought of taking really high resolution images of it, because the grain pattern of the wood is practically like a fingerprint, and would be difficult to conceal without destroying the instrument. A database with hi-res pictures of valuable instruments would be like a serial number database for bikes.

setr 6y ago
You could do the same thing today, offering a certificate of authenticity or whatever, validated by the relevant comunnaly accepted authority, and it would be be just as baffling and nonsensical an offer. The certificate is not the weilder of value , even if it were required for the object itself to be valuable (eg originality). With an NFT I don’t even know what you’re certifying, except that this one chain says you own the object. In your example that’s not even true, the museum “owns” it, yet the thieves have it, and the NFT is now just as flawed as today’s understanding of ownership.
smt88 6y ago
> The thieves can do whatever they want with the certificate -- use it to pay illicit debts and so forth. They can visit their painting at the museum, and brag to their friends about it. But the rest of the public still gets to enjoy the painting too. I love this answer because it's a perfect analogy to explain why NFTs are total nonsense. Owning a one-of-a-kind, literally irreplaceable painting cannot be substituted for a certificate. The certificate has zero value because it does not allow the owner to restrict access to the original painting. The core concept of ownership (control over a scarce resource) is violated as soon as you start trading a certificate instead of the original item. It's like someone saying that owning the last remaining Michael Jordan baseball card is the same as owning Michael Jordan, and that both have the same value. It's ludicrous.

mtalantikite 6y ago

This all assumes most people care about buying a stolen bike or not. Maybe you care, and maybe I care, but I’m sure there are plenty of people that really don’t give a shit and are thinking “it’s a cheap bike and I don’t have the luxury of money or time to care, I’ve got to get to work”.

quickthrower2 6y ago

The be your own bank headaches that most people can’t handle will then apply. You need to spend a lot of money on gas fees, hardware wallets etc and get a good grounding in cyber security. Or just get a lock and bike insurance.