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Comment by HeadsUpHigh | Hacker News Reader

If the artist signs the NFT to you, then you can't track resales. It will always be signed as belonging to the original person who bought it. So basically this "alternative" to NFTs would be impossible to trade. It blows my mind that people still don't understand stuff this basic.

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The only reason for tracking resales is to prevent double-spending, in other words, to create a false illusion of scarcity. The whole thing is a charade.

We already have artificial scarcity. It's called steam. You buy a game in steam, you can't resell it. This allows you to resell the things you buy.

You can't resell a game in steam because Valve doesn't let you, not because the game is being made artificially scarce. Which it is, but this is not the reason you can't resell it. The point is that reselling an NFT doesn't require a central ledger. The central ledger is necessary to prevent the same token from being sold multiple times by the same seller. In other words, to create the illusion that the seller doesn't have something (and therefore can't sell it) when in fact they actually have it.

Each NFT is separate. You can authenticate a digital game by owning the nft. The publisher can sell as many tokens as they wish, that's entirely different. The point is that they can't stop you from reselling, because it's on the blockchain, not on steam.

It cant be artifial scarcity when there is endless supply.

And how valuable is that capability?

That's up to you. It could easily replace steam for me. Or digital audio purchases.

It's what you're paying for.

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