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Comment by raincole | Hacker News Reader

My point is that they're stupid for the exact same reason.

You buy "something". That "something" doesn't represent any legal right for you. If you buy a NFT of an image, you won't be the copyright owner of that image. You can't stop other people from using it either. Maybe there are some exceptions, but generally you just don't get anything legally. Similarly, buying a star doesn't give you legal right on that star.

Why does doing this programatically make it different? Plus, buying a star is not inherently non-programmable. You can launch a star registry with an API. You can laucnh an NFT for stars. What makes buying a star stupid is that it doesn't represent any legal right, not that it's doesn't scale.

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Sure, if you use a nonsense example you get nonsense results. Not really blaming you for that, I have no idea why people acted like an NFT with a url payload represented ownership given that it didnt interact with any of our systems of ownership.

The hypothetical under examination here is if I built a system that used NFT ownership as ownership of some in game thing - it represents a promise to value a given token, which is wholly different from the star thing (they dont value that certificate in a meaningful way). If your first instinct is to launch into a tirade about how dumb that is then great - total agreement. But, you could build it and it would work, and it would be meaningfully different from star ownership certificates.

Please explain how a promise to a value is different from a star certificate NFT? With the star system you can encode the position in the sky at a certain date in the block chain itself. The date of discovery (assuming this is for new star discoveries only) can act as a verifier when determining who discovered this first.

Because the issuer of the certificate will not in any way meaningfully enforce your 'ownership' of that star.

In my hypothetical game I can enforce that relationship. Lets say the game is pokemon except with scorpions, and each scorpemon is represented as an NFT. Your wallet contents then determine what scorpemon you can play with.

Does that make sense?

you don't own the scorpemon though. The second that original game shuts down or decides its not worth hosting that asset you have unique nft to nothing. It's up to the game maker to interpret whatever the hell your nft is worth hence it's not that different to ownership of a star. You can't just make up an imaginary decentralized world where people just make a scorpemon game and host it for free forever lmao. Someone is trying to make a profit.

Yes, obviously. Who are you trying to dunk on?

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