The ability to have ownership over an asset independent of an institution is a pretty neat technological feat.
Using it to prove ownership over monkey pictures is straight up idiotic though. But it’s somehow the only thing that comes to mind whenever NFT’s are brought up.
To a lesser degree the same is true for crypto in general.
Edit: to all the comments saying there still is an institution needed to enforce/accept the ownership, you are right. However the unmodifiable characteristics of a blockchain ledger are still interesting even when we take that into account. Hard to change records there :) Physical property is a rather extreme (though still potential) use case. It is more easily applicable to e.g. intellectual property.
It only works if there’s some institution enforcing the NFT ownership, so that’s back to square one.
I can mint an NFT saying I own Mona Lisa. It doesn’t matter. There’s no one sane who would respect that NFT.
Blockchain
ninja moves
Ownership is just a social agreement, dude.
We literally made it up.
You never needed an institution.
You just needed a granddaughter who holds your fav hat, and even though it would look great on her, won’t wear it because it’s so intensely yours. Because wearing it would be like appropriation and admitting she’d never see you again and wronging you all at once.
Or a pen to write your name on it in the fucking fridge.
Or the understanding that you have put this in your mouth and used it to scrub goo off your bones and are likely to do so again in the future. Maybe an appreciation from those who live near you for the benefits of that scrubbing to their sense of smell.
I have the title to my car in paper. If someone steals the title and forges my signature i can notify the police and the BMV and they can work to find the thief and provide me with a new title while i continue to drive my car since the thief didn’t steal my physical keys or the car itself. If i had the title as an NFT and my wallet was hacked, the thief would outright own my car, and I could possibly be locked out of my car depending on how integrated the NFT was with the vehicle.
Ownership can only be determined by force. Either i am stronger than you so what’s yours is now mine, or a central authority uses force to make sure I can’t just take your stuff. NFT’ transferred that authority from (albeit poorly) regulated officals to a wild west hellscape of maleficent actors.
Except NFTs didn’t do that.
NFTs only represented ownership to the extent institutions looked to NFTs to determine ownership.
If I mint an NFT of your house deed, do I own your house or just the NFT? Can I evict you from the house if I have the NFT? If not, seems like the NFT didn’t do much to confer ownership by itself and there’s something else that enforces the property relation, like maybe the local government, which will defend your home ownership by punishing those that violate it by e.g. cutting down your trees or painting your walls or planting mint in your garden.
Ownership is literally dependent on institutions… A system of property rights depends on some kind of law being enforced by institutions of authority. These laws and institutions can take many different shapes, from courts and police to custom and social pressure, but they have to be there.
An NFT only gives you ownership of something to the extent that some institution of power is ready to enforce it.
The ability to have ownership over an asset independent of an institution is a pretty neat technological feat.
As soon as you discover how to do that, make sure to publish it. Meanwhile, a committee of apathetic developers and seeders make for a really lousy institution that isn’t any better than a registry.
AI will of course be totally different though
My theory is that not many people at all ever actually thought art NFTs had value beyond something to gamble on. But the idea that they did was used to create the plausible impression that there were a lot of “greater fools” out there who would buy the bags of said gamblers, and this idea was also attractive to people who despised the whole thing and like the idea of stupid people to look down on, so both groups collaborated to signal boost it.
Benefit of sight*
