[TheProbes]

I'm not an expert on the technology, but I've seen this same argument from friends of mine who are into a blockchain they claim will allow people to carry their Universities degrees / Academic qualifications with them. Similar to your "wallet" idea I guess.

So, by dint of being tokens, accreditation, land deeds, car papers, game items etc etc etc must all be able to be transferred right? Which means they can also be stolen or attributed to the wrong people right? So, if you get hacked and your car registration token gets stolen, or if someone steals your degree and starts walking around pretending to be a doctor using your token, what do you do? In fact, what happens if the University accidentally gives your degree to someone with the same surname as you, and you get a Diploma in Basket Weaving instead of your medical degree and they refuse to give it back? Because these things will happen endlessly.

Well, as always, you'll go to the DMV or the cops or the Uni and they'll.....what exactly? The answer, necessarily, will be to check their master records to see who should have what, and then change it. Which totally obliviates the purpose of the decentralised blockchain.

You can see this in action with that dope who had his cartoon ape NFT stolen. What did he do? Immediately appealed to the closest thing to a centralised authority there is, Twitter and the ape community, and begged them not to buy "his" NFTs. Then contacted the exchanges and begged them not to sell. Then contacted the cops. Then, in a move with a jaw-dropping lack of self awareness said it "didn't matter" that the NFT had been stolen, because he "still owned those apes". So in the space of about ten minutes, he firebombed every core tenet of NFTs, and that was over a cartoon ape in the first moments of NFTs even being a "thing".

What's your solution for the guy who gets his house token stolen?

[gaganyaan]

I think a house token is an interesting idea, once you accept the inevitability of having to interface with the real world.

If you had one and it got stolen, you'd file a court case with your state or local authority. They would then add a record saying that the ownership is disputed. If you won the case, they'd add a new record saying that the house still belongs to you. It turns it from "I'm screwed" to "Ugh, a legal hassle", the exact same as if your paper deed got stolen.

You'll probably say "but why bother then?" The main reason is standardization. I have no idea how to check housing records for other states, let alone other countries. Some shitty broken website created by a lowest bidder contractor? Request a copy by mail that probably costs money because someone has to physically print out a copy themselves? Instead, everybody everywhere can use the same software stack instead of reinventing the wheel N times. Checking the current state of things becomes trivial.

It's also trivial to do private house sales then. One transaction signed by both parties, and you're done.

[TheProbes]

That's not a solution. Most places have computerised land records, and maybe they aren't so great, but that is an argument for a new modern database, not a worse one (blockchain).

[csallen]

I don't fully understand your logic. Are you saying that theft will prevent the adoption of this technology?

People get shit stolen in the real world, and in the current implementation of the internet all the time. What happens when your Google account gets fished and someone steals tens of millions of dollars from your company? Do we shut down the internet and call it a day? No, not really. It has no effect on adoption.

The fact is that when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. So it goes with all new technologies, and so it always has. Have we ever simply said, "Welp, there are costs to go along with the benefits of this new tech. Let's just give up here!" Not to my recollection. We simply make the ships more crash-resistant.

The problems with new tech are almost always obvious early on, but the solutions require creativity and frequently result in hugely successful businesses.

Consider early criticisms[0] of the internet from 1995:

> "Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen." True enough. There's a cacophony. So what? The internet survives. Algorithms rank posts and tweets and surface the best insights.

> "How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach." True enough. So what? We got Kindles, and smart phones, and higher-res screens, and people bring laptops to cafes instead of beaches.

> "…the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them…" True enough. So what? A few years later this problem was largely solved by Google, which is now worth a trillion dollars.

> "…who'd prefer cybersex to the real thing?"* Hundreds of millions of people are addicted to porn. Not saying it's a great result, but the fact remains that problems don't stop adoption.

And do you remember how much credit card fraud there was in 90s e-commerce, when security was trash and almost nobody was used to regularly checking their digital bank statements, so it would take weeks or months for people to even notice? Hell, there's still a lot of fraud today. E-commerce still reigns supreme.

Sure, people will get their NFT good stolen. It will happen frequently. It already has happened many times. This will not hurt NFT adoption. It will simply spur innovation in security and defense, which it already has if you actually look into early solutions (e.g. custodians, insurance).

At best, you're simply pointing out problems that people will innovate to solve.

[0] https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...

[TheProbes]

This is really dumb sorry. Just one great big "waddabout" going on and on about problems OTHER tech has, and not addressing my question at all. I'll ask again.

The University sends your medical degree to someone with the same surname as you by mistake and you get their basket weaving degree. They refuse to return it.

What do you do? You go to the university, and they check their CENTRALISED MASTER RECORD, notice the mistake, and fix it.

So. #1: Why do you need blockchain at all? #2: How can you have your blockchain system WITHOUT also having a centralised database somewhere?

The answer, as always with blockchain, is "So I can sell you a token." Always.

[csallen]

In your example, who cares if the university has a centralized master record of the degrees they choose to recognize? If they choose to tell everyone on earth that the degree they gave me was baloney or false or was revoked, that's their prerogative. If they choose to record coin NFTs and the blockchain aren't meant to prevent that.

What NFTs guarantee is that the degree the school gave me is still mine. Without NFTs, they could not only revoke my degree, but also delete it from their database and leave me with no proof I graduated from there whatsoever, since I never really owned the degree as property. But with NFTs, no matter what they change or delete in their centralized database, my degree still exists as my property in my decentralized NFT wallet, and the school can't delete or take that back. Which is how property should work! In the real world, if my alma mater were to revoke my degree, they'd update their databases, but they wouldn't also come to my house, find my paper degree, and rip it up.

Now this is obviously a contrived example, because the entire point of a degree is to say, "Look! <AuthorityX> thinks highly of me!" So of course if the authority changes their mind about that, then your degree is worthless whether you still own it or not.

In a less contrived example, there might be property you own that's valuable regardless of the original owner's opinion of you or any records they keep in their database. For example, if you get a magical sword in World of WarCraft in NFT form, you now own that, and you can use it in other games that choose to recognize and represent that NFT. Even if you get in a fight with Blizzard's CEO, and he orders his minions to delete your account from their servers, you'll still have the NFT, and other games will still respect it.

Whereas in a world without NFTs, the only way for other games to even know you had the sword would be to query Blizzard's servers, so you would be fucked in this scenario, because Blizzard would delete all records, because they owned the records, not you.

[TheProbes]

That's your example? A sword in a video game? Honestly though, I guess it makes sense, because NFTs are arse for anything that has actual real life meaning. Even you, yourself, realised that halfway through your post. Yeah, no shit your degree is worthless if the university says it's worthless.

So, on to video games. You think it would work that way huh? Your sword would still be worth something if Blizzard revoked it because you "own" it? You are making the mistake of thinking that whatever game you want to use the sword in wouldn't check with Blizzard to find out if you are a douchebag who has been banned or not, before they allowed you to use the sword for something in their game. They'd check, see that Blizzard has no record of it on their database, then decide that you'd either been banned or had stolen it, then block you.

Btw: Even this won't happen. Read what an actual game developer says about it. https://docseuss.medium.com/look-what-you-made-me-do-a-lot-o...

[csallen]

1. The NFT degree actually could still be useful for proving that you were accepted to the college and that you graduated. Not every entity cares if the college subsequently revoked your degree, and not every entity will check.

2. Other "real world" use cases abound, especially with intangibles. Degrees, certifications, licenses, tickets, contracts and invoices, perks, discounts, coupons, identifications, you name it. And these are just physical goods becoming NFTs, to say nothing of digital goods. Turning any good into an NFT adds it to a blockchain, which (a) enables ownership, (b) makes it part of a publicly accessible API that unlocks infinite creativity, (c) plugs it into a booming and a liquid market where owners can buy, sell, and trade their goods, and (d) guarantees its existence and accessibility for the long term.

3. I completely disagree with you that most games would check to see if Blizzard has marked you as a douchebag. Why would GameX care if a player broke some arbitrary rule that Blizzard has? They wouldn't.

4. The person who wrote that post barely even understands what an NFT is, and gets a whole bunch wrong. For example, they write that the concept of ownership of NFTs is "unenforceable," as if the blockchain needs some sort of enforcement. I'm not sure you want to get your predictions from somebody who doesn't understand the technology. There are plenty of smarter game developers working on NFT companies and writing much more intelligent posts.

[TheProbes]

1: It doesn't prove it. The only thing it proves is that you have the NFT. The only way to prove you have the degree is to contact the central authority, thereby invalidating the need for the blockchain entirely.

2: All your examples can be done easily without blockchain. Perks, discounts, coupons, tickets etc. We already do all of this just fine.

3: "They wouldn't". Lol. Why not? It takes them zero effort, it would be an automated system, and guess what, it totally destroys your whole assertation. Doesn't it? GameX would check with Blizzard for reason that Blizzard would also check with GameX.

4: Ownership with NFTs is entirely unenforceable. Contrary to your point, you are the one who actually doesn't understand NFTs, nor the real world it seems. You seem to want to turn everything into a bearer bond, when in fact nothing in real life will ever work that way.

ID's? Ok, you have some ID token that "proves" you are 21. Does that mean you are 21? No, the only thing it proves is that you have the token. In any consequential case, the entity wanting to verify your age would have to check back with a central authority to determine if it's valid or not, thereby invalidating the need for the blockchain.

Tickets? You somehow think any ticketing agency on earth will hard over all control to what happens to the tickets they have sold?

Coupons? You've seen all the legalese and prohibitions written on coupons I take it. There are more rules about what you can and can't do with a 10% Off Pizza Hut token than many contracts. Yet you think they'll start putting them on the blockchain?

You live in fantasy-land mate. No game company is going to devote a whole bunch of effort and programming time into allowing someone with assets from a competitor to use them in their game.

[oblio]

The solution? ... crickets ... :-)