[swalsh]

/*

FYI, the down arrow is not an indication of agreement, it is an indication of quality. If you disagree with me, at least have the common courtesy to comment.

*/

It's a shame the acronym NFT has become synonymous with digital images. As a concept it's a huge idea with so much potential. The issue is people now hear NFT, and their mind shuts down thinking it's some stupid monkey picture thing.

Everything you can do with an NFT, you COULD do with a centralized database. The problem is then you have to trust that database. You have to trust the person running it, you have to trust they will still be in business, you have to trust the person running it will allow other people to connect to it (or get stuck in their walled garden).

We're pretty far into this Web 2.0 experiment with centralized services. The experiment is over, the results are in. We can't trust them.

Does decentralization solve all problems? No absolutely not. Does it have a whole new set of problems? yes, but hopefully we can work through most of them. To me, the trade off of a more open ecosystem is worth it. If email was created in Web 2.0 it probably would have been stored in a database, and there would be little accessibility outside whoever created it. It would look like whatsapp.

What NFT's give us, is the ability to own a unique digital assets in an open system and not have to rely on ad driven business models. It's a digital asset which can be ANYTHING.

[grumple]

> The problem is then you have to trust that database. You have to trust the person running it, you have to trust they will still be in business, you have to trust the person running it will allow other people to connect to it (or get stuck in their walled garden).

That's just it. I do trust the bank. The bank has stood for several human lifetimes (might have changed names, but the same bank). They have overwhelmingly served people reliably. The deposits are insured by the government that has stood for several human lifetimes. They are accountable legally and practically. Bad transactions can be reversed thanks to the trusted processors, banks, and government.

> We're pretty far into this Web 2.0 experiment with centralized services. The experiment is over, the results are in. We can't trust them.

What on earth are you talking about? I've never had money taken from my bank account without my permission. Those few cases of fraud I've experienced have been detected and resolved swiftly, with little activity required from me.

Meanwhile with a blockchain you have to trust the majority of unknown actors. People I don't know, from states where theft of my money might go unprosecuted, if the actor can even be detected. Bad transactions cannot be reversed. Fraud? I'm SOL. And then there's the fact that crypto enables ransomware. And the environmental costs. Absurd.

> What NFT's give us, is the ability to own a unique digital assets in an open system and not have to rely on ad driven business models. It's a digital asset which can be ANYTHING.

We already have this in the US and other nations, it's called copyright, and the courts will enforce it as well as they can. NFTs do not provide an enforcement mechanism, they still rely on the legal system, and a pointer to a uri does not prove what object was originally at that uri.

[exdsq]

NFTs in regards to digital licences and tickets to events are game-changers in my eyes. I wish the focus was on that instead of on jpegs. If anyone is working on these, or wants to work on these, I'd be keen to collaborate.

[llimos]

Both of those have a central authority that is granting the relevant rights. What's the advantage of an NFT over letting that central authority manage it in a centralized database? And if they won't agree to facilitate transfers, why would they agree to release the license/ticket as an NFT to begin with?

[exdsq]

Bands != Ticket Master. Right now the easiest way to release tickets is through a central authority that takes fees to manage them, and then control the resale market. You can take the tickets elsewhere like Stubhub but that introduces 25% in fees to have insurance that if your tickets aren't valid and don't get you into the venue, you can have a refund. It's still impossible to check the tickets you purchase on these sites are authentic too - ticket fraud is a wide-spread multi-million dollar issue in the resale market (as you will see in the news from time to time).

If you move this to NFTs you have a few advantages. The workflow would look like this: Band creates NFTs (maybe via a website?) and they now exist in the bands wallet. Band puts them up for sale with a smart contract. Fans buy the tickets. Fans can attend the gig by showing the ticket is in their wallet to enter. Fans can resell the tickets if they're allowed to via another smart contract with the a small royalty going back to the band. Don't want the ticket to be resellable? Add a boolean flag to the NFT in its metadata. Want to check the ticket is authentic? Check it's tx history back to the bands minting (or check the NFT address exists in the list of valid tickets on the bands sale site or something). There are some UX issues here but they should all be solvable. Use a chain like Avalanche and the tx fees are $0.02 at the moment.

Essentially the whole man-in-the-middle central company that manages the creation, sales, resales, etc, becomes an open-source peer-to-peer infrastructure. This same thing could be true for game licenses or really any truly digital item. These assets become programmable and new business models are becoming viable while old business models are in theory obsolete - obviously this has some huge caveats: the UX on web3 sucks, we need to migrate from proof-of-work so it's not environmentally awful, and we need to disassociate ourselves with the scammy $1m NFTs. Also some edge cases need to be solved like how customer service will work if something goes wrong.

I mean the most fundamental thing about the blockchain and NFTs still blows my mind from time to time - these transactions are atomic and stop double-spend attacks. I can set up a transaction with you where you pay USDC and I send an NFT for a bands ticket, and we know for certain that at the end of the tx you're going to have that ticket and I'm going to have that money. No "you send it first, I don't trust you" or escrow service needed. The fact we can stick a Turing-complete program in the middle of that and add things like verification the ticket is from the set of authentic tickets, or that it's only valid if the USD is worth 1.25-1.30 Euros to avoid slippage, is just awesome (to me).

[Gigachad]

You assume that these ticket companies are providing no value for the fees they charge. Which I think isn’t a safe thing to assume. Everything you have listed here would be much much easier in a database.

Any kind of argument here would have to start with an explanation of why it wouldn’t be possible or practical to just start a new ticket company that does this all for free/very cheap.

[exdsq]

> Everything you have listed here would be much much easier in a database.

No, it isn't. How would you buy a ticket from me online when you don't know me? The only real option is to use stubhub which requires us to both create accounts, put our credit cards in, verify ourselves, you put the ticket up, me to buy it, and for me to not know the ticket is A. not been purchased by someone else B. authentic.

A decentralised app that runs this requires a smart contract to mint tickets and a smart contract to wrap reselling them, plus a web UI to tie it all together. An open source developer could build this and charge $1 per tx to maintain it.

What's the centralised alternative?

[Gigachad]

Band sells tickets via platform A. I buy ticket, I no longer want ticket, I sell it back to platform A which makes it available to you to purchase. They can also have a feature which allows specific person to person transfers if I want to give it to a friend.

This is all technologically possible. The reason platforms usually do not let you do this is due to business requirements. Why would the business switch to a platform that strips their ability to control resale if it isn't something they want to begin with? If they do want resale, its trivially possible with existing boring tech.

[acheron]

FYI, downvoting to disagree has always been ok on HN and the mods have reiterated that many times; first pg and then dang. Wherever you got the “down arrow is not an indication of agreement” thing, it wasn’t here.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

[hatware]

You get it. Everyone who says this is "dumb" said the internet, Facebook, Instagram, or Tik-tok was dumb too. Yet here they are.

Kinks need to be worked out, sure, but in ten to fifteen years artists will not be beholden to corporations. That is something to work towards and be very proud of.

[Gigachad]

There is a much much larger pile of garbage that was called dumb and just died off because it was.