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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

I still can't see how a blockchain here would do something that a database wouldn't. A DB of authentic serial numbers with a way to mark them as claimed is all you need. If your new widget's serial is already marked as claimed on the manufacturer's website then you most likely have a counterfeit, no blockchain necessary.

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Well, all you need is an immutable write-only (edit: append-only) database. Which is the one thing a blockchain actually is.

I think you mean append only. Blockchains are immutable thus not writeable

Whoops, yes

But a very very very slow such database, one that uses insane quantities of memory and energy.

What if you want to sell your thing?

Who is hosting this db?

You are, as a saas I think.

I mean, this gives you all the control, you can charge for all sorts of services and "value adds". There's no reason you, as the maker of this software, would want this available as a block chain.

Unless you also create a token and start having people speculate on your anti-counterfeiting blockchain?

That's what it looks like to me anyway.

I am not really following you. The appeal of an nft is that it doesn't rely on a saas, it doesn't rely on a trusted third party that needs up time that needs to be available in the future.

Jacob Collier tried to sell an nft that granted lifetime access to his concerts.

The appeal of such an nft is that it can be traded independently of any third party, on the open market.

Of course it depends on Jacob's promise to honor it.

He went back on it when people raised environmental issues.

Most NFTs depend on trusted third parties to determine what they even are. Collier’s proposal makes a lot more sense; a promise to grant specific rights to the holder of a specific token really does make the token valuable. But in the typical case, an NFT is really just a dangling pointer to some content (encoded in the Ethereum blockchain to varying degrees of completeness). Nothing stops me from minting copies of any NFT I’d like and selling them as the one true SpicyNFT of the underlying media - and if my platform outcompetes the others, eventually the SpicyNFT will be the only one that matters. (Equivalently, nothing stops me from minting NFTs of art that has nothing to do with me and securing first mover advantage over its actual owners.)

You can't mint a copy of Collier's NFT because if you show up at Collier's concert with SpicyNFT they'll turn you away.

The arguments about SpicyNFTs is just kind of a distraction. It would be like if I argued against banks by saying, I could hang a shingle, accept deposits, and then just run with the money.

Do we really need to enumerate all the possible ways that a new, very limited, technology can be misused? We might be here a while, I'm pretty sure there are infinitely many ways that NFTs can be abused.

So it's like a contract, but not enforceable.

In other words, worthless.

Right, an NFT by itself is worthless. A NFT granting access to a concert is only as valuable as the promise associated with it.

It could be tied to an actual contract.

The value prop of an NFT is pretty much limited to just being able to transfer it reliably without relying on a trusted third party.

It's not like it provides a cryptographic guarantee that some contract that exists outside it will be honored.

Somebody always host the NFT image, it can be taken down from ipfs or from a cloud service like s3 at any moment. Also NFT are only worth something because someone provides a frontend to serve the "NFT metadata".

NFTs are essentially sleek frontend UIs mixed in with a speculative volatile currency less juridicial than dollars. It also helps that blockchain assets led by bitcoin are in a bull run.

The innovation is now a company like Dapper Labs can provide a marketplace like NBA Topshot providing a digital experience with licensed content. This digital experience can be traded using Paypal but using a traditional method comes with tradeoffs. Dapper Labs created an in-house blockchain called Flow. The benefits of a blockchain is it is harder for double spends to occur. Blockchain makes it hard for race conditions to occur when the source of truth is distributed among computers in a network.

It would be easier to make a database of hash values but traditional databases are less transparent than blockchains. Blockchains are too expensive. Some digital experiences are worth it, most probably aren't, enough people care about the frontend.

Databse dies with company that set it up. And companies die all the time.

NBA Topshot is already worthless without the express written consent of the NBA.

NBA Topshot would be better served by a DB. The NFT part is there for hype.

opensource the database (just as dying companies should opensource repair manuals and signing keys - have fun with your blockchain-authenticated John Deere). and regularly archive the state hash in a public archive.

Sounds like a lot of work. Not sure why you think that is superior to simply using a blockchain.

Because a blockchain is far, far, far more expensive in terms of computing resources.

Only if it’s a Proof of Work blockchain. Ethereum is what is mainly used for NFTs and it’s in the process of migrating to Proof of Stake.

I wonder why e-gold didn't just opensource their database.

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