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Comment by infide1castr0 | Hacker News Reader

This was an insightful thread, but I think these arguments miss the "bigger picture" that NFTs carry with them. Yes the popular use case right now of expensive art and "selling a JPG" is rather silly, just like the art world always has been. What I see in the space however is a lot of opportunities to grow community-building tools - POAPs for example are rarely sold for profit (some still try to) and are a great way to encourage participation and attendance of events, with added functionality of rewarding said participation after an event for example. A lot of media coverage is on the absurd art market use cases, and though the possible profits make it a loud use case, it is just one sliver of potential of Blockchain technology. I am excited to see NFTs move beyond these cases, and I see that happening quite often.

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> What I see in the space however is a lot of opportunities to grow community-building tools

Technological solutions to what are fundamentally social problems don't typically work out.

What exactly does the blockchain contribute, that could not be accomplished in a superior way with an SQL database?

The primary advantage is increased trust. With a SQL database, it is necessary to trust the organization that hosts the database. With blockchain it is necessary to trust a distributed network of organizations (or more precisely their computational power).

If you think that NFT issuers are more trustworthy than banks or big companies then I have bad news for you. The NFT you get is as trustworthy as the paper you bought saying you own the golden gate bridge. Nobody can take that paper from you, but they sure can take the bridge.

The question was (paraphrased) "what value does blockchain add over SQL database table with a unique index?" - not whether NFT issuers are more trustworthy than trusted organizations or if NFTs are a valid asset class.

But it isn't the same, with NFT's the trust comes from the NFT issuer and not the blockchain. With bitcoin you just have to trust the chain, but with NFT's you have to both trust the chain and the issuer.

You still can't trust what is fed to the database though, right?

I think this is a misevaluation of the trust involved. NFT's are using the blockchain to whitewash trust, the blockchain contains a smart contract and a URL. It provides no assurance that the URL contains the same contents as when the NFT was first minted.

With how most NFTs are implemented you need to have trust in the blockchain it self, in the implementation of the smart contract, in the server hosting the referenced metadata URL, and the server hosting the actual digital asset the NFT represents. If trust in any one of these is misplaced it can undermine the trust placed in the others.

The blockchain can not provide more trust than the least trustworthy part of the rest of the NFT chain. Since the URL referenced in the blockchain is likely stored in some single organization's SQL database, the maximum trustworthiness of an NFT is never going to be larger than the trustworthiness of that SQL database.

Suggest having a look at arweave.org (and related). This is the solution to the mutable URL problem as discussed above.

> Yes the popular use case right now of expensive art and "selling a JPG" is rather silly...

There's nothing silly about "selling a JPG". Billions of dollars are spent annually on digital copies of photos. People pay for (high) resolution and rights.

Selling an NFT is usually "selling an NFT", not even "selling a JPG". Most of the time the NFT just points to a piece of digital media accessible to anyone, and it conveys no rights of ownership or use of that digital media.

> Most of the time the NFT just points to a piece of digital media accessible to anyone, and it conveys no rights of ownership or use of that digital media.

Or very surprisingly any guarantee that the media pointed to is immutable or won't disappear.

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