It's likely to work. It's the same dudes.

Scroll back through any AI evangelist's twitter (if they are still on Twitter, and they are) and it is better odds than a coin toss that you find they were an evangelist for either NFTs or crypto.

I mean the CEO of OpenAI is also the CEO of a shitcoin-for-your-iris-scans company, for one.

(Prosaically: these things are usually spear-phishing of some kind anyway, are they not?)

It’s that funny intersection where abstractions meet the real world. We assume that the guy with the keys collecting the rent checks is authorized to lease it out because it’s just too expensive to assume otherwise. But sometimes that assumption is wrong and man, what a mess that turns out to be.

Similarly, it’s like if I get back to my house tonight and someone has changed the locks on the front door, I’m pretty sure I could ultimately verify that, yes, I’m the owner, but I sure am glad that due to social norms or inertia or the sheer hassle of being a squatter that is not something I have to deal with on a regular basis.

> Ideally government administered, but if we can't have that then maybe a distributed ledger would do the trick.

The problem is that it has to be government administered because otherwise you’re constantly stuck with the risk that what you see won’t survive a legal challenge. This is a constant problem for ledgers because the sales pitch is about being “trust less” or distributed in some sense that everyone can participate, but making them work is an exercise in picking which third-parties you trust to settle disputes. For the most important things, that usually means the government unless part of their authority has been delegated to a private entity.

That’s actually insane to learn that there is no public title database in the US