Comment on From millions of dollars to under a grand: The dramatic fall of the NFT

• Lemming6969@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I don’t have any nfts as I don’t have a personal use-case. If an authority adopts nft for any of my assets however, yeah I’d get one. For instance transacting a deed can cost a lot, but an nft would be 10-100x less.

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  • captainlezbian@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    That feels wildly unlikely. I’ll use two transfers of property to argue my point: car titles and house deeds. In both cases it isn’t possession alone of the document, including signature of transfer that legitimizes it.

    I have to go to a government office in order to complete the transfer a car title. It’s not expensive, with the American state I grew up in charging either $100 if you use the fast and privatized version, or $2 if you file through the government office. This can’t be replaced by an NFT because it includes government inspections and requires a notary confirm the seller’s signature.

    House deed transfers on the other hand, are a massive expensive pain in the ass. Why? Protections. Houses are expensive, they’re the largest asset that the average person can expect to hold, and in addition they’re a residency that can be bad. If you can con someone on either side of that transaction, someone has. Furthermore, because of this dual nature of a house as a residence and a particularly large financial asset, people not on the deed may have rights to it whether by marriage or through financial vehicles like leins. Additionally, the house sits on land which the government registers ownership of as one of the core duties of governance. The deed transfer is expensive because it has to be audited to ensure you don’t find out later that the seller wasn’t allowed to sell the house in the first place.

    So now, let’s compare this to a transfer on a blockchain. The blockchain ensures trustless (except of the system and that the system is acting with authority that extends into meatspace) verification that a transfer occurred from account a to account b. It does not ensure that account a did so willingly. It does not ensure that the legitimate owner of account a is the one to do it. It does not ensure that account a or b are able to ever access their account again. It does not ensure account b consented to receipt. It does not have a means to verify unnamed stakeholders. It does not give half a shit about the law. It does not contain an escrow period in which everyone can walk away. It more or less functions like a notary, but better in some ways (trustlessness) and worse in others (notaries actually check that you are who you say you are).

    I guess what I’m really saying here, is that if my government would be so foolish as to make house deeds nfts which contain the full legitimacy of the transfer process, then I’d be demanding my credit union offer a service of taking care of that for me, because the last thing I want is to be hacked out of my house, or lose my right to the land my house sits on in a fire or robbery, or forget the password to owning my house. All of these are ways in which people have lost a huge amount of cryptocurrency.

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    • Lemming6969@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Probably is, but the concept is sound. The inspections and other things aren’t always necessary, but even if they are, an nft transfer can likely be setup to be digitally signed by the recognizing authority. This creates a record on the public ledger rather than a private one, which can be a nice thing. For better or worse nft confers ownership of recognized by such an authority, so there is no concept of not allowed to sell. This is a fundamental feature of blockchain… Enforced control and ownership

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      • captainlezbian@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Ok I think I need to reframe what authority means here. An authority is a government or an organization or individual that a government authorizes to act on its behalf. It is the decision maker when it comes time to physically remove a claimant from the premises.

        A blockchain is a leger, a document. What you’re proposing sounds to me like legally defining it as the final say in ownership. To do that is more or less a complete rewrite of property laws in a way that would have far reaching effects, especially on marriage, government enforcement, and lending. On lending this would basically eliminate the capacity to use your house as collateral without a full conditional sale, and in that case I really hope you trust your banking institution. For government enforcement, this would eliminate leins as a means of compelling payment of owed money, which means other methods would be required (this is especially an issue in contexts like child support, where debtors can be particularly hostile). And for marriage this will really screw with inheritance and divorce proceedings. The fact that you can’t cash out and sell the house asap when your partner requests a divorce is something I personally think is good.

        Additionally, in every democratic nation to my knowledge, the existing registry of land is public. Public of course when referring to ownership by the collective of citizens, something the blockchain is less so. But it’s also publicly visible, just like the blockchain, except instead of having to download it you go to the appropriate store of public records and request to see it or to obtain a copy. At the very least in my country there’s a ton of information you can get in such places for asking. Property transfers, court records (unless a judge has sealed them, usually because sensitive information is contained within), building and digging permits, birth and death certificates… Most people only get what’s relevant to their life, but some people (like investigative journalists) have to look through public records for a living. Could it be valuable to digitize it all and upload it? Yes but not without risks, which also apply to blockchain here.

        So yeah. This leads into a famous question: What is Property? And ultimately that’s a fairly deep rabbit hole, of its own. So what is ownership? The ability to direct the state to utilize its monopoly on the legitimate use of violence in defense of your right to control something. No ledger can confer that. A state can declare a ledger the ultimate record of ownership, but it can just as easily take it away.

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  • Doomsider@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    So it wasn’t sarcasm then?

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    • Lemming6969@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      It’s just a technology even though people equate it with wildly overpriced art you can copy and paste, which is naive and reductive.

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• Canconda@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Top shelf sarcasm if my pallet is correct

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