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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone doing this for real? It doesn’t seem like it adds any value over a real contract since it’s still relying on the courts for enforcement, and it seems unproven that there’s much demand.

Adding a blockchain also adds a number of complexities which would lower the value: you need to hedge against bugs in the smart contract (the Ethereum folks probably won’t rewrite history again for you), there’s a complex and expensive tech stack you need to support instead of a sheet of paper, and you have limited your potential buyers to those comfortable with that and on your particular system rather than another one.

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People really are writing tokens with custom transfer functions that do this sort of thing. The main use case seems to be allowing artists to collect fees on non-first sales of an NFT. This whole genre of program is a bit suspect to me though, because if you had a trusted counterparty or an escrow you could just sell them the private key for the account containing the NFT, and they could conduct a "sale" for $1 to their own wallet.

That is what I meant by the value being enforced by the courts: the artist could cheat me by selling my “exclusive” purchase again or in different locations, I could cheat them by making copies elsewhere or hiding part of the transaction, etc. and in each case the remedy is a court case just as with a normal contract making the same claim — the difference is that I don’t need to pay to maintain an expensive IT operation as well.

There will never be a real secondary market for NFTs.

How are people going to re-sell an NFT when its metadata points to a file that 404s.

NFTs that point to particular IPFS proxies or that point to IPFS files that nobody pins are not a great start. There are technical solutions to this problem, like using Arweave instead.

Overall I don't really like or care about NFTs.

It doesn't rely on the courts for enforcement, it relies on the underlying crypto-network. The contract is built in to the original sale.

Think about this beyond the sales pitch: I accept your offer, taking a lower price because you double pinkie swear that you’ll share part of any future sales of an object, profits from a company, etc.

At every point, you (the person who controls the thing with actual value) can choose to simply ignore the blockchain in many ways: not sharing profits with shareholders, selling a real-world object outside of the same blockchain, making copies of a digital object or listing the same thing on many NFTs, using a smart contract with a bug or unreliable oracle which you can exploit, etc. My recourse is my ability to sue you for breach of contract.

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