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Comment by kemonocode | Hacker News Reader

NFTs are fine to tokenize things that are valuable because they are limited, say, like property deeds. You own the token, you own the deed, and it's possible to establish an one-to-one relationship.

Attaching a token to something that's inherently reproducible such as digital art yet with granting no means to actually enforce copyright is pretty much lunacy and it's just muddying the waters further when it comes to cryptocurrency.

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> say, like property deeds.

The problem with this line of thought is that the Venn diagram of cases where there is a potential natural fit for NFT and the cases where there is both a need for them and likelyhood of adoption may well have an empty intersection.

Property deeds are a good example. They can't practically replace the current system without radically rethinking that system, and it's unclear that the stakeholders would find any compelling reason to consider that.

Do you have a compelling example?

e.g. a secret bank account that can be accessed by presenting a token. It's like a transferrable password: once it's given to someone, the previous owner forgets it.

That seems to have the same problem as property deeds. Unless the compelling example is something like "tax evasion" it isn't obvious why this is particularly useful or desirable, so we're right back where we started.

A deed? You mean, a legal document which is enforced through a centralized power i.e. government....

What advantage is gained by tying it one-to-one with an NFT or storing it on a blockchain at all?

Well, if you tie it to an NFT, you can make it easy to lose or be stolen, which is helpful because...<why again?>

For one, if I want to sell/give something to someone, I just transfer the NFT representing the agreement.

Imagine if you could transfer car ownership without having to deal with the government or anything else? Just a transaction away. If the seller/buyer also uses cryptocurrency, you could safely write a contract that swaps the funds for the NFT without any risk of either parties running away with both of them (funds and NFT).

> Imagine if you could transfer car ownership without having to deal with the government or anything else? Just a transaction away.

uh you still have to register with the government, for good reason. and that's not going away.

Well, imagine the car maker when creating the car creates a NFT. At that point it's registered and government can read all the details from there.

When it reaches the reseller, it changes hands from the manufacturer to the dealer. Once the dealer sells it, it reaches the owner. At that point, government can still see all the details, transfers and more by just doing queries, instead of relying on people filling out forms.

Or am I missing what you mean?

Sure, it makes sense from an "imagine a world where..." perspective. Sounds convenient.

I'm looking at it from a "why would any government on Earth choose to use a 'decentralized' blockchain as a source of truth to keep track of property deeds in their jurisdictions" perspective.

> Imagine if you could transfer car ownership without having to deal with the government or anything else?

Even if there wasn't any value in registering a car with the government, people buy how many cars in their lifetime? I expect that the number of cars that I'll ever sell in my life is less than ten. So this would save me like 30hrs in my entire life in DMV trips.

Maybe there is some utility here for dealerships who are dealing with a lot of government paperwork involving titles, but for a general population this seems like an incredibly tiny benefit.

Imagine getting evicted from your house because your realtor accidentally used = instead of == for comparison in the smart contract.

The strength of smart contracts are also their greatest weakness - they're code, so any bug in the code is a de facto rule of the contract.

Yeah there are all kinds of edge cases when a digital token represents ownership of a physical object that just aren't accounted for. What if I get foreclosed on but smash the hard drive containing the key out of spite. Who owns the house now? The chain says me, the law (central authority) says the bank and under the rules we live by today the central authority is correct.

What now?

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