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Comment by Qub3d | Hacker News Reader

This puts to words the uneasy feeling I've had towards NFTs.

The thought experiment that made this concrete was a sort of reductio ad absurdem:

Let's say for a moment that NFTs win worldwide support and begin to be used as proof of ownership for everything. As part of this movement, the Louvre registers an NFT signature for each item in their collection.

Now, let's say a nefarious actor manages to use social engineering and convince a naive Louvre curator to transfer the NFT ownership of the Mona Lisa.

This bad actor promptly goes to Sotheby's and asks them to list "his" Mona Lisa for sale.

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Of course, the Mona Lisa would not go anywhere. The French government would never allow it. This is an extreme example but can be walked back to less and less valuable items: would this work for an NFT of a house, a car, a computer, etc?

Unless the state decided to universally and with no exceptions enforce ownership of NFTs, they are ultimately worthless.

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This isn't completely unlike a deed to a house. People have conned folks out of their deeds to properties, and sometimes the transaction is upheld and the bad actor gets to move into a house, and sometimes the transaction is recognized as invalid, and nobody gets kicked out of a house they've paid for.

You got any more detail on this?

Most developed contries have digitized their deed system, so I am not sure how you can con someone out of their deed.

Also, back when we did use physical deeds, there generally was owner’s copy and land office’s copy, and on the back of the deed would be the transfer history.

So to con someone out of their deed, you would not only need to get the owner’s deed, but you would also have to get your name added to the land office’s copy.

> Most developed contries have digitized their deed system, so I am not sure how you can con someone out of their deed.

Not the US*. I mean I guess they are digitized in the sense that records are typically published online electronically, but it is all still based off these bits of paper going back and forth, there is not like a database of ownership.

*Except for Iowa https://archive.curbed.com/2018/2/26/17017142/title-insuranc...

> Most developed contries have digitized their deed system, so I am not sure how you can con someone out of their deed.f

"Digitizing" something doesn't make it invincible to con artists - there's really no difference between me conning you into signing over a deed if it's paper or digital.

Nobody on Alpha Centuari cares how much Jeff Bezos owns either. All ownership is contextual, it only looks like we have universal rights enforcement because of the powerful state acting as middleman.

Therefore I have to conclude that NFT usage is an extremely radical act against state power, because what it says is that the state doesn't matter, this blockchain(the one you are using at that moment) does. And you are accepting that your rights end where it does, too, so you had better trust the community.

Thats not different than other forms of proof of ownership on paper or in some database. If somebody steals or defrauds you, you can go to the authorities and they might act on it. That does not make those instruments useless.

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