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Comment by meribold | Hacker News Reader

I could write on a piece of paper that I grant you exclusive rights to something I created for $x and then you give me $x and we both sign the piece of paper. A court would consider that piece of paper valid which makes the contract real. Replace the piece of paper with a text file with cryptographic signatures and a court may consider that valid as well.

Isn't an NFT basically such a text file embedded into a decentralized marketplace? It's real if you can find a court that says it's real.

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Absolutely not. We can't have NFT land deeds (for example) because the legal system has the power to takeover your land (e.g. if you fail to pay taxes), but the legal system doesn't have the capacity to force you to transfer your NFT, especially if you delete your private key, in which case nobody can ever transfer it again.

If the legal system says you don't own the land, but the NFT says you do, the legal system wins.

The NFT appears useful only when it happens to do exactly what the legal system would already do, and is useless when it disagrees with the legal system. As a result, minting and transferring was a giant waste of electricity; you should have just registered your deed at the county recorder's office, the old fashioned way.

But that is all solved with signing and verifying in cryptography. Why does it need to be on the blockchain? I think you are asking the same thing somewhat. In many countries (at least in the EU) the gov now has mobile apps (and horrible desktop versions but the idea is the same) which generates a key pair on your device, sends the public key to the gov where it is connected to your tax number and that is it. This involved a bunch of security steps like your bank. Works very well but unfortunately it is not useable yet by any company; once it is, signing by pen is in the past. It is efficient and blockchain is not needed. But I guess the blockchain fans will argue that if your gov suddenly turns Russia, this centralised version is now not trusted anymore. And they would be right, but like you say; neither are the courts so it falls apart anyway? What’s the solution that is solved by the chain?

The main point of it is to take out thridparties to fight against anything they could enforce. Blockchains are public registries where you cryptographically sign everything you do to ensure it happened. NFTs are digital assets, be it code, music or pictures. You can prove their unicity through the blockchain and if you were to trade an asset you'd have the proof it happened too. Now you could sell your house on a safe p2p market without the need to involve banks for example. It's really the main goal behind the crypto ecosystem, to provide a safe way to stop relying on often abusive thirdparties.

But you are not answering the question of my parent and myself; you can sell your house or land or whatever on the p2p market, but if the government doesn't allow you to sell your house or land, then that's that. You got money, the new owner got some digital snippet of something they now not own. Which makes it centralised; no different than it is now but with far more risks (abused smart contracts stealing the money for your house) and no recourse. So the problem is; what is exactly the decentralised advantage of this when you still need the same courts etc. Sure, no banks IFF the seller takes crypto and if the country in question is crypto friendly etc, but AML laws will kick in anyway. So I see the theory for having a house NFT and everyone singing and dancing the decentral dance, but in reality, this won't work or it will be exactly the same as any house deed transfer. I rather would see a gov that has my certified public key and I can sign from my mobile app to sell my house with one click and a notary handling it all without any parties having to rock up to some office etc. Blockchain fixes that , but no differently in UX (I think and I don't hear anything different) but far more inefficiently (and risky as there is no rollback) than what we can do with some cryptography and a php crud app?

Edit: in short, I would love to talk to a proponent of blockchain who has a more compelling story than 'transfer value'. I mean; I see the case for transferring money to and from warzones etc; if your gov does not allow you to use your money or doesn't allow you to buy a more stable currency than your country has, then this is a means, if kept on chain, for you to have liquidity.

I could write on a piece of paper that I grant you exclusive rights to the piece of paper and sell it to you for $x.

The piece of paper is real, but it doesn’t matter if there is the address of a house written on it or whatever - the only think you own is the piece of paper.

That seems a better description of most NFTs which have no contract meaning at all.

It's not the signing that OP criticizes. It's that the "something" is defined by an URL whose destination can change, and otherwise none of the "something"'s content (like, for example a hash) is in the contract.

I doubt a court would consider such a vague definition of content as "real".

> Isn't an NFT basically such a text file embedded into a decentralized marketplace?

Well, without the cryptographic hash, sure, and without any particular rights either...

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