The legal edifice maintaining property rights also requires maintenance.
The legal edifice maintaining property rights also requires maintenance.
There isn't really the problem of acquiring a 100% perfect copy of an asset in the real world. You can approximate an item, but you can't literally get the same exact thing down to the molecular composition. On the internet, this is absolutely possible (replace molecules with bytecode), and is I'd argue, one of the defining features of it.
The true secret sauce behind modern property rights is the enforcement through legal authority. In the event of a dispute, courts have potentially a few hundred years' worth of precedence. Following that, there are proven legal procedures to remove a person from unlawful possession of another's property, which hold penalties ranging from monetary fines to loss of freedom.
And the driving force behind that is social consensus, but on a case by case basis. There will be no such thing with NFT's. It's simply impossible to build it in.
Hey, just want to point something out here. The quoted sentence is really important. Civil society doesn't just happen, we all (or at least most of us) have a vested interest in maintaining the legal edifice.
So tomorrow, be nice to someone in traffic. And show good grace and community when faced with one of the social frictions (like waiting in line).