Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

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> NFTs can be minted in exchange for currency

So can bearer tokens, client certificates, concert tickets, etc. Put up a webpage that takes payments (including crypto if you so desire) and hands out whatever authentication instrument you want upon successful payment.

> can be traded between owners later

A conventional, non-chain-based system can also include this functionality. Presenting your current bearer token and a contact for the desired new owner would invalidate your current token and email them a new one.

Any system where this kind of transfer makes sense and is willing to allow this kind of trade already has it - you can freely trade video game cosmetic items on most games, you can resell tickets on Ticketmaster (albeit for a fee), etc. If the platform owner doesn't want you to trade then NFTs are of no help either because the blockchain has a publicly-visible history of all trades which the platform owner can use to refuse access to any NFTs that have been traded (so if you want to trade you need to trade the actual bearer token - or private key in a cryptocurrency world - and hope the seller is honest and didn't keep a copy - again crypto/NFTs doesn't help here either).

The problem is that NFTs only make sense on-chain. As soon as you go off-chain you lose most/all of the advantages of NFTs, at which point you may as well rely on an authentication instrument also issued and managed off-chain.

> Any system where this kind of transfer makes sense and is willing to allow this kind of trade already has it

No it doesn’t have it. That was the whole point. The examples you gave had to each build their own in-house bespoke infrastructure for this functionality. With blockchains it already exists, it’s secure and any new app or user can start using it right away.

They don't need their own in-house bespoke infrastructure, the hard part is user identity, and there are many services that will host this for you and also integrate seamlessly with third party providers (Firebase, for example, which will let you identify via Google, Meta, GitHub, Twitter, etc. right out of the box)

The difference between Firebase and Ethereum+metamask isn't a significant development cost for anything beyond a toy weekend project.

The difference is only about trust.

The argument you want to make is that we shouldn't trust Firebase, they could steal our auth tokens and act on our behalf without our permission, so we need trustless decentralized solutions.

That would be a valid argument, but a hard sell to an audience that doesn't buy the premise. I'm not going to debate it.

However, it has nothing to do with the technical layer of auth which is just "prove that you know the secret" in all cases.

Either you don't understand how this works, or you're deliberately avoiding the point.

Where do you think Metamask stores your private key?

It would be trivial for Firebase to release a browser extension that used LocalStorage to store the secret, like Metamask, instead of regular web storage.

How the hell does firebase enable users to interact p2p to exchange a digital asset from one vendor with an asset from another, or use them as collateral for loans?

In the exact same way that blockchain does - you present a token that can be validated by your peers.

However, in blockchain it's the combo of your private key to sign your wallet, along with the consensus engine where decentralized voting decides to accept the generation and association of new tokens.

In centralized servers, it's the combo of your credentials to login, along with the servers that update the database.

Once you own a token, you can create signatures for it that other peers can validate. For example

https://firebase.google.com/docs/auth/admin/create-custom-to...

I've already addressed your points about collateral and loans. That's purely business logic, and has nothing at all to do with NFTs (which are _only_ user<>token_id mappings)

> In the exact same way that blockchain does -

So if i have a software licence and i want to exchange it for a concert ticket that a stranger doesn’t need anymore, where precisely do i go, today, to make this happen? What’s the app name or the website i go to? Because i know exactly where to go to exchange NFTs, in a secure, configurable and trustless manner.

> That's purely business logic

Call it whatever you want, the infrastructure that enables it and that is already functional today is only compatible with NFTs.

Tell me where you go on Blockchain to exchange a software license for a concert ticket?

This doesn't even make sense for most chains since software licenses generally depend on some sort of secrets or drm that can't work on transparent chains (anyone can look at the tx and impersonate the owner to grab an activation code).

The actual product and ecosystem of these things is the hard part. You can't actually do anything at all with NFTs because they are merely mappings of users to random strings.

They have absolutely zero utility in and of themselves. Not as rights to jpgs and certainly not as proof of concert ticket ownership.

The business logic is what makes it all actually work, and can be applied far more easily in centralized systems.

Again, the usefulness in Blockchain is not authorization tokens, it's decentralized consensus, which is only useful insofar as you distrust the centralized alternative.

The auth token itself, whether NFT or any other bearer-like, is neither innovative nor interesting nor inherently useful. It only becomes useful where decentralization is useful and compelling products use it for practical needs.

I'm repeating myself now, no point in beating a dead horse.

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