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NFTs of jpegs are scams. NFTs that are linked to real-world assets (through intermediaries that you have to trust, yes — unlike everybody else on the blockchai

NFTs of jpegs are scams. NFTs that are linked to real-world assets (through intermediaries that you have to trust, yes — unlike everybody else on the blockchain) like stock, real estate or anything else are not.

cj 5y ago
Can the people downvoting this explain why this comment is not valuable?
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  Despite originally being called deeds, I have never seen an NFT used to show ownership of a physical asset. Not really sure how well that would work anyway, since usually courts are the final judge of ownership, and when they figure out they can't order NFTs to be transferred they'll just say they don't actually show ownership.
- thot_experiment 5y ago
  Sure, there's no difference between an NFT of something in the real world and a contract that you write on paper and mutually agree to. If you had the NFT of a jet nationalized by Putin well, you'd still be screwed.
- SahAssar 5y ago
  Because real world assets already have frameworks governing their ownership, and those frameworks generally do not take NFTs into account. If the NFT actually grants you ownership of something tangible (like stock, IP, real estate, etc.) then to make that legally enforceable you need to also sign a traditional contract which makes the NFT pretty pointless. If I bought your house and in addition to all the legal paperwork you also gave me a handwritten note saying "house is yours now, promise!" do you think I'll care about the handwritten note? If you only gave me the note and not all the normally required paperwork do you think I'd pay you?
  - eric_cc 5y ago
    But in theory, a decentralized framework consisting of smart contracts and NFT’s could work. In such a framework, the NFT would be providing real utility (unlike scammy JPEG NFT’s)
    - SahAssar 5y ago
      In such a framework how would you solve repossession? inheritance? seizure? How would any state authority be able to handle any case where the person supposed to hold the keys either is unwilling or unable to authorize a transaction that should legally go through? If I lost the keys (as in the keys to my blockchain wallet) to the NFT for my house should that plot of land just be abandoned forever? If a company gets hacked and their keys for all their assets (or stock) gets deleted should that company just close down forever even though nothing tangible actually changed? You cannot impose the rules of the blockchain on tangible assets. If your counter argument is to give some institutions the power to rewrite or add unauthorized transactions to the blockchain then you have simply reinvented the state, and lost all of the properties of a blockchain that make them interesting/valuable.
      - eric_cc 5y ago
        You raise great points and I don’t have all the answers. But I don’t believe it’s impossible to achieve such a framework given the time to work out issues like those you’ve described. > you have simply reinvented the state If you could reinvent the state so that it is predictable, testable, and not subject to human corruption then I’d say it’s a good thing! And also quite the experiment haha
        SahAssar 5y ago
        > If you could reinvent the state so that it is predictable, testable, and not subject to human corruption then I’d say it’s a good thing! I think you misunderstand my points. All the things you stated are simply not things we can achieve as absolutes in society or the physical world. The current rules of blockchains and smart contracts deal in absolutes, and when they can't they defer to oracles (which interface with the real world, so they have all the problems you stated). The real world is full of nuances, judgment calls and edge-cases which is why we have people who can adjudicate them. The points I listed in the parent comment are just a small fraction of the real world problems that would creep up in the first day of implementing this sort of system. From here on this is more opinion/political: If the discussion was about making laws more aligned with those points then the last place to start would be with crypto-tokens that have no real world impact (besides using a bunch of compute/resources). The place to start IMO would be to start removing exceptions from laws/taxes that don't make sense anymore, get the legal code down to a manageable size, introduce better accountability to our democracy and so many other steps. Starting with the tokens is destructive because it focuses energy at the wrong end of the problem and has clearly just led to most destructive parts of society (thieves, criminals, grifters, scammers, MLMs, etc.) to profit. It also makes people who see the obvious problems with it (I count myself among them) unwilling to participate so there is less force behind it even if it (against all odds) was a good idea. I think it's also clear that a proper system to solve these issues would not be based on the current technical platforms being built since those are incapable on a fundamental level to answer questions like the ones I asked.
- czzr 5y ago
  Hard to say since it’s a short comment, but an NFT of a stock is worthless without some other mechanism to enforce ownership, at which point why do you need the NFT?
tablespoon 5y ago
> NFTs that are linked to real-world assets (through intermediaries that you have to trust, yes — unlike everybody else on the blockchain) like stock, real estate or anything else are not. Do those actually exist, or are they just a fairy tale to hype NFTs? Also, even if they do exist, they probably demonstrate a particular kind of confusion that's often used to hype cryptocurrency-type things: there may be a link to the crypto-space, but it's entirely superfluous and all the real work is being done by a traditional non-crypto mechanisms.
kerkeslager 5y ago
I agree with you in principle, but if you're trusting an intermediary, then I struggle to see what doing this on the blockchain adds. If I'm going to trust a centralized entity to buy and hold land for me, then it seems like I'd want to go with a trustworthy centralized entity, rather than some new organization that was created to operate on the blockchain. I think a better use-case for NFTs for now is as as keys, i.e. early investors to a project are granted a limited number of NFTs, which then allow them preferential access to later high-APR investments or whatever. This is a somewhat niche use case, but at least it's all on-chain and trustless.
SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
> NFTs that are linked to real-world assets (through intermediaries that you have to trust That makes the NFT redundant.
- golergka 5y ago
  The point is interacting with them via smart contracts and other blockchain tools. Done correctly, NFTs are simply an API from real world to the blockchain.
  - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
    What's the relevant value of putting your house on the blockchain?
- silverlake 5y ago
  I paid intermediaries $10k to transfer a house title to me. Took a few weeks and many contracts. I agree NFTs are silly, but real world systems need to improve quickly.
  - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
    But is applying a blockchain the answer? What happens if someone steals your wallet or you lose it or the password to it? What happens if someone dies without giving someone access to their wallet? Do those lots now sit vacant? Sure, there's some legal cruft around this, but much of that cruft is actually there for a reason.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > I paid intermediaries $10k to transfer a house title to me. Took a few weeks and many contracts. I'm pretty sure you didn't pay that for the transfer of the house title. Most of that was for other stuff that happened around the same time, like getting a mortgage and having your lender make sure they're not going to be left holding the bag. https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/mortgages/closing-costs-mortgage-fees-explained https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/mortgages/closing-costs-m...

cj 5y ago

Can the people downvoting this explain why this comment is not valuable?

colinmhayes 5y ago
Despite originally being called deeds, I have never seen an NFT used to show ownership of a physical asset. Not really sure how well that would work anyway, since usually courts are the final judge of ownership, and when they figure out they can't order NFTs to be transferred they'll just say they don't actually show ownership.
thot_experiment 5y ago
Sure, there's no difference between an NFT of something in the real world and a contract that you write on paper and mutually agree to. If you had the NFT of a jet nationalized by Putin well, you'd still be screwed.
SahAssar 5y ago
Because real world assets already have frameworks governing their ownership, and those frameworks generally do not take NFTs into account. If the NFT actually grants you ownership of something tangible (like stock, IP, real estate, etc.) then to make that legally enforceable you need to also sign a traditional contract which makes the NFT pretty pointless. If I bought your house and in addition to all the legal paperwork you also gave me a handwritten note saying "house is yours now, promise!" do you think I'll care about the handwritten note? If you only gave me the note and not all the normally required paperwork do you think I'd pay you?
- eric_cc 5y ago
  But in theory, a decentralized framework consisting of smart contracts and NFT’s could work. In such a framework, the NFT would be providing real utility (unlike scammy JPEG NFT’s)
  - SahAssar 5y ago
    In such a framework how would you solve repossession? inheritance? seizure? How would any state authority be able to handle any case where the person supposed to hold the keys either is unwilling or unable to authorize a transaction that should legally go through? If I lost the keys (as in the keys to my blockchain wallet) to the NFT for my house should that plot of land just be abandoned forever? If a company gets hacked and their keys for all their assets (or stock) gets deleted should that company just close down forever even though nothing tangible actually changed? You cannot impose the rules of the blockchain on tangible assets. If your counter argument is to give some institutions the power to rewrite or add unauthorized transactions to the blockchain then you have simply reinvented the state, and lost all of the properties of a blockchain that make them interesting/valuable.
    - eric_cc 5y ago
      You raise great points and I don’t have all the answers. But I don’t believe it’s impossible to achieve such a framework given the time to work out issues like those you’ve described. > you have simply reinvented the state If you could reinvent the state so that it is predictable, testable, and not subject to human corruption then I’d say it’s a good thing! And also quite the experiment haha
      - SahAssar 5y ago
        > If you could reinvent the state so that it is predictable, testable, and not subject to human corruption then I’d say it’s a good thing! I think you misunderstand my points. All the things you stated are simply not things we can achieve as absolutes in society or the physical world. The current rules of blockchains and smart contracts deal in absolutes, and when they can't they defer to oracles (which interface with the real world, so they have all the problems you stated). The real world is full of nuances, judgment calls and edge-cases which is why we have people who can adjudicate them. The points I listed in the parent comment are just a small fraction of the real world problems that would creep up in the first day of implementing this sort of system. From here on this is more opinion/political: If the discussion was about making laws more aligned with those points then the last place to start would be with crypto-tokens that have no real world impact (besides using a bunch of compute/resources). The place to start IMO would be to start removing exceptions from laws/taxes that don't make sense anymore, get the legal code down to a manageable size, introduce better accountability to our democracy and so many other steps. Starting with the tokens is destructive because it focuses energy at the wrong end of the problem and has clearly just led to most destructive parts of society (thieves, criminals, grifters, scammers, MLMs, etc.) to profit. It also makes people who see the obvious problems with it (I count myself among them) unwilling to participate so there is less force behind it even if it (against all odds) was a good idea. I think it's also clear that a proper system to solve these issues would not be based on the current technical platforms being built since those are incapable on a fundamental level to answer questions like the ones I asked.
czzr 5y ago
Hard to say since it’s a short comment, but an NFT of a stock is worthless without some other mechanism to enforce ownership, at which point why do you need the NFT?

tablespoon 5y ago

> NFTs that are linked to real-world assets (through intermediaries that you have to trust, yes — unlike everybody else on the blockchain) like stock, real estate or anything else are not. Do those actually exist, or are they just a fairy tale to hype NFTs? Also, even if they do exist, they probably demonstrate a particular kind of confusion that's often used to hype cryptocurrency-type things: there may be a link to the crypto-space, but it's entirely superfluous and all the real work is being done by a traditional non-crypto mechanisms.

kerkeslager 5y ago

I agree with you in principle, but if you're trusting an intermediary, then I struggle to see what doing this on the blockchain adds. If I'm going to trust a centralized entity to buy and hold land for me, then it seems like I'd want to go with a trustworthy centralized entity, rather than some new organization that was created to operate on the blockchain. I think a better use-case for NFTs for now is as as keys, i.e. early investors to a project are granted a limited number of NFTs, which then allow them preferential access to later high-APR investments or whatever. This is a somewhat niche use case, but at least it's all on-chain and trustless.

SketchySeaBeast 5y ago

> NFTs that are linked to real-world assets (through intermediaries that you have to trust That makes the NFT redundant.

golergka 5y ago
The point is interacting with them via smart contracts and other blockchain tools. Done correctly, NFTs are simply an API from real world to the blockchain.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
  What's the relevant value of putting your house on the blockchain?
silverlake 5y ago
I paid intermediaries $10k to transfer a house title to me. Took a few weeks and many contracts. I agree NFTs are silly, but real world systems need to improve quickly.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
  But is applying a blockchain the answer? What happens if someone steals your wallet or you lose it or the password to it? What happens if someone dies without giving someone access to their wallet? Do those lots now sit vacant? Sure, there's some legal cruft around this, but much of that cruft is actually there for a reason.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > I paid intermediaries $10k to transfer a house title to me. Took a few weeks and many contracts. I'm pretty sure you didn't pay that for the transfer of the house title. Most of that was for other stuff that happened around the same time, like getting a mortgage and having your lender make sure they're not going to be left holding the bag. https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/mortgages/closing-costs-mortgage-fees-explained https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/mortgages/closing-costs-m...