NFTs Are Legally Problematic [video] | Hacker News Reader

NFTs Are Legally Problematic [video]

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3 pointsolliej7 comments

So, I have yet to buy or have interest in NFTs. But to post a bit of a defense for them, I think the underlying technology is interesting and has merit.

Transferring the title for a home is a big, complex, and fairly expensive affair. Literally nothing is stopping me from just marching into it if I wanted to, but society says the title is a valuable legal thing and so lots of elbow grease and paperwork gets filed to make sure they own the house and then I own the house and in the right order.

An NFT (or a blockchain in general) makes this complex ownership handoff so cheap and easy that I can essentially do a title transfer for, like, a breadstick.

Because it's so cheap (and kinda crappy right now, imo), it won't replace the escrow company just yet. But I could foresee a future where it gets out of the gimmicky crap and start to have some legitimate uses. And again, it's very cheap relative to the alternative (an honest to goodness title transfer). Email is kinda cheap and used for a lot of garbage, but it's cheapness certainly lent it to supplanting actual mail.

And while we in the western world have pretty stable rule of law and rights and clear ownership records, I could definitely see parts of the world where something decentralized and cheap and slightly better than their local options might catch on.

The large costs and paper work involved in buying a house are a product of:

* getting a mortgage

* getting the mortgage provide funds for and title company to create the escrow

* a few other random bits?

If you say no escrow, all cash, you can generally walk into the title company with a [bank] check. If you want escrow you have two checks some amount of time apart.

A lot of the costs are realtor fees, I like to imagine those are avoidable, but I do not know how (as an industry they do a lot to make things opaque)

When we bought our last house, the title transfer alone was about $500 (a couple hundred went to the state just to file), and the title insurance was about $750. My understanding is that even if we got the house for free, we would still have to have paid this amount.

The insurance is crazy part when you think about it. Even paying the $500, there's not a guarantee you actually rightfully had the title.

I'm normally loathe to submit videos but I found this a good discussion (to be clear my opinion is that NFTs are nonsense, so take that bias as you will).

I certainly learned things - I thought the yacht club ones were systematically created, not actually generated, and for all the ownership noise I assumed that they at least represented a IP transfer of the NFT artwork's copyright. Instead it turns out there's no ownership whatsoever? You just get a license to the copyright, that remains owned by the NFT minter?

Sounds like a bunch of scarcity minds trying to cobble together scarcity in a post-scarcity context if you ask me.

Probably is what ever license is transferred via the license agreement. if there is one.

The point is that by definition a license is not any form of ownership

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