Comment on From millions of dollars to under a grand: The dramatic fall of the NFT
Lemming6969@lemmy.world 6 hours agoProbably 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
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 5 hours 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.
Lemming6969@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
I mean, I definitely agree on this specific use-case that it’s problematic. I think some aspects can be resolved with smart contracts or multi-signature requirements, but it really fails here when it comes to compulsion.
If a court cannot compel someone to transfer, because the court doesn’t have the keys… Or you lose the keys and cannot… Obviously this falls apart.
There is a reason people deride nfts, mostly it’s due to ignorance and spectacle lemming behavior surrounding the ape pictures, but the legitimate criticism is really there aren’t many use-cases. But we don’t and shouldn’t wait to build things until a use-case exists. Nfts could be important eventually for preventing things like naked shorts maybe. There are likely very valuable use-cases.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Yeah I’m totally in favor of inventing things for the hell of it. But i don’t think that hating a technology because of how it was pushed on society is necessarily bad until it develops a legitimate use case. I dislike them because I still see people thinking “this cool technology must have a problem that it solves” rather than looking at problems and asking what technology could solve them. But at the same time it’s also been a serious case of tech lovers not caring to understand the problems they wish to use tech to solve. That was annoying a long time ago, but now I live in a society that’s been made worse and worse by that specific problem over the past 20 years.