Comment by cloudking | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cloudking | Hacker News Reader

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Think about collectables in the real world, and imagine how they could possibly work in the digital world. For example, people collect trading cards for various sports, and there is 1 owner per card who can trade/sell the card to others. How would you facilitate this idea in the digital world?

Well you can't use a regular database, because it's easy for it to be hacked/shutdown, and if it's run by a third-party then even if you have entry in that database you don't technically "own" it. Turns out blockchains are a good solution for facilitating the idea of digital ownership, it can't be easily hacked/shutdown, it's run by the community, and if you own the keys to the NFT token that represents your ownership, technically you own that "database entry". You can easily sell/trade your NFT to others via smart contracts, transferring the ownership of the collectable/object they represent. The market has decided that NFTs are a good way to represent digital ownership based on the technical solution.

Want to see a successful example of the trading card world gone digital with NFTs? https://nbatopshot.com/

Except, in many cases the value isn't derived from simply owning something when it is still publicly accessible and can be copied and reupload with many people claiming original ownership. Imagine Hollywood movies in the NFT space where anyone can access them for free and share then for Profit. , or the platform where they are hosted might shutdown. And while you might in some legal sense still have rights to something you'd no longer have access to something the courts haven't really got the involved yet so there is very little case law. It would be like going to judge and saying you own something, and someone else says but they share it for free on the Internet. It would be like movie studios bootlegging their own content

I’ve unfortunately forgotten who it was I saw making this argument, but: why would you want that? We, as a society, finally figured out how to eliminate scarcity of (most forms of) media. New works are being produced at unprecedented rates. What is the social value of reimposing scarcity, beyond an appeal to our (possibly culturally instilled) desire for exclusive possession?

Steam manages to have digital trading cards without blockchains. And I'm pretty sure pokemon and magic the gathering do too, although I am less familiar with them. Whilst there is definitely a security risk with high value digital goods, I'm not sure that it is solved by the blockchain.

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