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Comment by ryandamm | Hacker News Reader

> My wife recently suggested one: NFTs minted by your university as proof of your diploma. Or perhaps your academic transcript. No way to forge a fake diploma again.

This is once again better served by a database. Diplomas are inherently centralized and issued by a trusted authority.

Guess we gotta keep brainstorming for use cases -- that's how technology development works, right?

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The university can shut down, suffer data loss or get hacked. Decentralized storage is an improvement.

No sense in diplomas being transferable though.

Is it the time to invent NTTs? Non-transferable tokens?

Except NFT storage is actually highly centralized?

What happens if OpenSea shuts down?

another market pops up. opensea is just reading on-chain data, just like everyone else.

Except it isn’t. The actual Jorge are hosted on open sea. No one actually stores the “product” on chain because it would be prohibitively expensive for anything pastba few bytes.

No need for a blockchain though. The University can just key-sign the diploma. Then the user can choose to keep it wherever they like.

What makes you think you can’t sign as a trusted authority a decentralized object? Maybe before you condescend you should learn the utter basics of what you are talking about.

> Guess we gotta keep brainstorming for use cases -- that's how technology development works, right?

Unironically, yes.

I'll grant you that sometimes there's just such a cool tech that you gotta hammer your head against the wall until you find something worth using it for. And sometimes maybe that creates something awesome (though I can't conjure anything at the moment.) I think that's usually a money-loser, and someone else building something like 140 character messaging ends up making the money.

In general though, I believe solving real-world problems with whatever tech is available creates the most value. (And I mean real value, not some numbers on a ledger that don't mean anything at all.) That doesn't mean tech for tech's sake isn't interesting.

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