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Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

> If the user resells the key, Microsoft can now also get paid a transfer fee baked into the NFT contract.

Not if people just swap NFT accounts and sell their keys+accounts in their entirety.

IE: Microsoft sells LicenseKey to NFT-Account#1234. The owner of NFT-Account#1234 sells the *ENTIRE ACCOUNT* on the secondary market, for a lower price than Microsoft's official price.

What you don't get is that human consumers don't like people locking them down, and people will find extremely easy ways to avoid the "trap" you hoped to put them in. And the reason this happens is economic incentives. You can't beat microeconomics on this one.

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> Not if people just swap NFT accounts and sell their keys+accounts in their entirety.

There's a cost to doing this. Usually as an escrow fee paid to ebay or g2a or wherever you're selling keys. As long as the NFT transfer fee is lower than the escrow cost, I don't see how it wouldn't be cheaper and safer for everyone.

I'm not saying this is a solution to piracy or violating the regionality of the licensing agreement, just that it would allow buyers and sellers to trade; with the original licensor taking the fee instead of ebay, because the NFT cryptography takes the place of the reputation+escrow provided by existing platforms.

Windows costs $100 normally.

It costs only $10 when you buy them from a key reseller, for $90 of savings.

There's a lot of loophole that can be afforded in the $90 gulf between the two prices.

I haven't ever actually bought Windows, so I wasn't aware the discrepancy would be that crazy. I just assumed it was a reputation/escrow problem as there's no shipping information and no way to validate who used the key.

I wonder why Microsoft doesn't region lock them or do some kind of audit if they don't want that market to exist. I'm also not sure why someone would buy an obviously grey market key when there are KMS activation solutions on github.

If Microsoft did want to allow for resale at any price and at least capture the fees, an NFT solution would let them do it without a lot of effort (building an exchange, processing payments, handling fraud, etc in each locale).

That's the sort of problem NFTs solve, generically, for digital ownership and transfer (licensing, tickets, club membership, etc).

With some amount of network effect and ease of use (the web3 wallet experience is actually quite good), I think NFTs will look like the obvious answer.

In practice, Microsoft doesn't really care because they just tie the Windows license to your physical motherboard (that's why you can reinstall Windows on your laptops over-and-over again without a license prompt). This only matters in hobby builder circles where you build your own computer

So yeah, its not really a thing NFTs solve, and something that a very simple chip on a motherboard solves perfectly.

People don't really "buy Windows" in practice. They buy a laptop, or a Dell computer. And they sell the laptop, or Dell computer, in its entirety.

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