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Concert/event tickets. Titles/deeds, anything where you need to prove ownership of something. Proving you own a JPEG is a bit silly. Proving you paid for seat 4

by pkulak 5y ago

Concert/event tickets. Titles/deeds, anything where you need to prove ownership of something. Proving you own a JPEG is a bit silly. Proving you paid for seat 4, row 10, section 8 on November 18, 2021 seems useful.

delecti 5y ago
What makes NFTs better at either of those applications than just a database? Ticketmaster is garbage, but I can't say I've ever had any uncertainty about whether I owned a concert ticket. And titles/deeds are perfect examples of why NFTs are worse than the current solution. I don't want my house getting repossessed because I got hacked.
- CobrastanJorji 5y ago
  If I had to guess, it's because they're presumably transferable in a way that would be hard to cheat, making digital reselling easier. It would help create a secondary market for tickets, the primary use case would presumably be scalping. For that same reason, I couldn't imagine why any ticket vendor would be inclined to go down this path.
- pkulak 5y ago
  If I buy something, it would be nice to know it's actually mine and I don't have to ask permission to re-sell it. So no, I don't see Ticket Master doing this any time soon. But ya know, maybe Pearl Jam would like to use NFTs to sell seats some day? Who knows. As far as deeds to important things; you can lose the title to your house in the current system too. It's why you pay for title insurance. Would I like my home dependent on me never loosing a 128-bit key? Probably not. I'm fine with Ticketmaster and the paper title to my house. But my examples are at least a million times better than the hosted JPEG stuff, which I think was the only bar I had to cross. :D
  - setr 5y ago
    I’m fairly positive title insurance has nothing to do with losing the title. It’s dealing with the problem: someone sold you a house, but they weren’t actually allowed to do that. With possibilities ranging from they didn’t actually own the house, to they were mentally competent to make the decision, to the house was incorrectly registered in the gov systems. You would still need this in a title-in-NFT world, because an NFT is just supplanting the government title office, which is actually the final source of truth on ownership (not the literal paper title). And like the government office, which is really acting as a convoluted database (which is all the NFT chain is doing as well), you still have all the problems of dealing with fallible humans. It’s basically a case of the naive rewrite — the current solution is too complex, so we’ll scrap it and start over… without realizing some of the complexity was accidental, but it was largely essential from dealing with all the edge cases.
  - delecti 5y ago
    Amusingly, the existence of title insurance demonstrates exactly the problem with NFTs that I was talking about. If somehow I manage to go through the steps of selling a house I'm not authorized to sell (whether by fraud or otherwise), typically the buyer doesn't get to keep the house, because our court system has people in it who can examine a whole situation and unwind it. Buyers get title insurance to protect against that kind of thing, so they can get their money back. With NFTs you'd need title insurance in the exact opposite direction. You'd need to insure your title to make sure that a fraudulent and irreversible NFT transaction didn't irrevocably transfer ownership of your house and leave you boned. And also, the bar I set was "better than a database" not "better than a poorly drawn JPEG".
    - pkulak 5y ago
      Well, I shouldn't have brought up the title thing, because of course everyone jumped on housing titles (which I didn't explicitly mention) because it's the easiest argument to rip to shreds. And of course I ran down the hole defending it, because I'm really bad at arguing on the internet and just like playing devil's advocate. I still genuinely think lower value things like concert tickets are better in a shared database rather than a private one, especially since I trust the owner of the private database (Ticketmaster) exactly as far as I can throw them.

by pkulak 5y ago

delecti 5y ago

What makes NFTs better at either of those applications than just a database? Ticketmaster is garbage, but I can't say I've ever had any uncertainty about whether I owned a concert ticket. And titles/deeds are perfect examples of why NFTs are worse than the current solution. I don't want my house getting repossessed because I got hacked.

CobrastanJorji 5y ago
If I had to guess, it's because they're presumably transferable in a way that would be hard to cheat, making digital reselling easier. It would help create a secondary market for tickets, the primary use case would presumably be scalping. For that same reason, I couldn't imagine why any ticket vendor would be inclined to go down this path.
pkulak 5y ago
If I buy something, it would be nice to know it's actually mine and I don't have to ask permission to re-sell it. So no, I don't see Ticket Master doing this any time soon. But ya know, maybe Pearl Jam would like to use NFTs to sell seats some day? Who knows. As far as deeds to important things; you can lose the title to your house in the current system too. It's why you pay for title insurance. Would I like my home dependent on me never loosing a 128-bit key? Probably not. I'm fine with Ticketmaster and the paper title to my house. But my examples are at least a million times better than the hosted JPEG stuff, which I think was the only bar I had to cross. :D
- setr 5y ago
  I’m fairly positive title insurance has nothing to do with losing the title. It’s dealing with the problem: someone sold you a house, but they weren’t actually allowed to do that. With possibilities ranging from they didn’t actually own the house, to they were mentally competent to make the decision, to the house was incorrectly registered in the gov systems. You would still need this in a title-in-NFT world, because an NFT is just supplanting the government title office, which is actually the final source of truth on ownership (not the literal paper title). And like the government office, which is really acting as a convoluted database (which is all the NFT chain is doing as well), you still have all the problems of dealing with fallible humans. It’s basically a case of the naive rewrite — the current solution is too complex, so we’ll scrap it and start over… without realizing some of the complexity was accidental, but it was largely essential from dealing with all the edge cases.
- delecti 5y ago
  Amusingly, the existence of title insurance demonstrates exactly the problem with NFTs that I was talking about. If somehow I manage to go through the steps of selling a house I'm not authorized to sell (whether by fraud or otherwise), typically the buyer doesn't get to keep the house, because our court system has people in it who can examine a whole situation and unwind it. Buyers get title insurance to protect against that kind of thing, so they can get their money back. With NFTs you'd need title insurance in the exact opposite direction. You'd need to insure your title to make sure that a fraudulent and irreversible NFT transaction didn't irrevocably transfer ownership of your house and leave you boned. And also, the bar I set was "better than a database" not "better than a poorly drawn JPEG".
  - pkulak 5y ago
    Well, I shouldn't have brought up the title thing, because of course everyone jumped on housing titles (which I didn't explicitly mention) because it's the easiest argument to rip to shreds. And of course I ran down the hole defending it, because I'm really bad at arguing on the internet and just like playing devil's advocate. I still genuinely think lower value things like concert tickets are better in a shared database rather than a private one, especially since I trust the owner of the private database (Ticketmaster) exactly as far as I can throw them.