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I appreciate your comment. It's one of the better pro-NFT comments I've read. That said, I don't think your examples stand up to scrutiny. - NFTs between com

I appreciate your comment. It's one of the better pro-NFT comments I've read. That said, I don't think your examples stand up to scrutiny. - 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.

grumbel 5y ago
I think the biggest potential use for NFTs would be the transfer of games/movies/books between services and users, e.g. buy a movie on Amazon Prime and than watch it inside Netflix or sell your used digital movies to somebody else. 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.
- acdha 5y ago
  What does an NFT add over a PKI signature? The rights holders aren’t going to allow their materials to be published without restriction and they’re not going to accept claims from anyone they don’t trust, not to mention many people won’t want their media purchase history being published. 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.
  - grumbel 5y ago
    NFT behave like physical goods, they can't be duplicated, but they can be transferred. A plain PKI signature does not and if you surround it by additional bookkeeping that you can, you are just reinventing your own NFT. 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.

grumbel 5y ago

I think the biggest potential use for NFTs would be the transfer of games/movies/books between services and users, e.g. buy a movie on Amazon Prime and than watch it inside Netflix or sell your used digital movies to somebody else. 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.

acdha 5y ago
What does an NFT add over a PKI signature? The rights holders aren’t going to allow their materials to be published without restriction and they’re not going to accept claims from anyone they don’t trust, not to mention many people won’t want their media purchase history being published. 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.
- grumbel 5y ago
  NFT behave like physical goods, they can't be duplicated, but they can be transferred. A plain PKI signature does not and if you surround it by additional bookkeeping that you can, you are just reinventing your own NFT. 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.