In this ‘house NFT within the court system’ paradigm, what happens if the court disagrees with the blockchain on who is the rightful ‘owner’ of the house NFT?
Considering it's a physical house they sould be able to do more than they can when someone steals bitcoin.
So I imagine they can either legal pressure on the illegitimate owner to transfer the NFT to the other owner (which has worked with some bitcoin transactions in the past), or if that doesn't work, then the system of smart contracts created for something like houses would most likely have something in it that allows the smart contract owners to mark that NFT as void in the blockchain (while it remains in the perpetrators wallet, it would no longer be associated with the physical benefits) and have a fresh NFT minted based on the data in the previous one and sent to the legitimate wallet.
Barring all that, they could just not recognize the owner and send police to physically remove someone who thinks they own it because the have the NFT. That's one reason why some people like bitcoin so much, the government can't (easily) take it from you by force (because there's no physical aspect to it) like they can a home or gold.
>Barring all that, they could just not recognize the owner and send police to physically remove someone who thinks they own it because the have the NFT. That's one reason why some people like bitcoin so much, the government can't (easily) take it from you by force (because there's no physical aspect to it) like they can a home or gold.
If this were to happen and the blockchain and the physical world diverge, how would potential house NFT buyers know whether the physical house purportedly linked hasn't been overridden by local government? If the answer is for local registries to publish a list; then that list is the only thing that matters. The entire blockchain component becomes completely superfluous and a centrally managed electronic exchange would be faster, easier and cheaper.
You could check if the NFT was still valid by calling the smart contract directly if they provide public functions for it. No need for a published list by a centralized authority (beyond whatever you're using to call functions on a smart contract, like I'd probably use Etherscan if it's an ETH contract).
And calling read-only functions (doesn't write anything to the blockchain) doesn't cost anything.
I didn't think of this with my original post, but there are NFTs that are used for access to things that people already say "don't buy these on the secondary market, legacy, no longer used". Not too dissimilar of an idea. Those NFTs are still in those people's wallets but it no longer provides the benefits associated with it.
Like the old Premint pass, which gives you access to tools to help launch NFT projects. The description for the old pass says "DO NOT BUY THIS PASS. This pass has been replaced with the PREMINT Creator Key" and the banner image says "THIS PASS IS NO LONGER VALID": https://opensea.io/collection/premint
“NFTs create a frictionless easily exchangeable market for goods… BUT make sure you check with the people, project, company or government that has authority over this good as to whether this particular NFT is actually a useful representation of anything. Because, at any arbitrary point they can just decide to not honor any of these.”
Why not buy the good directly from this party? Then at least the government has authority and can enforce your right to the product or service or at least a refund?
All NFTs are is a token on a blockchain. People might decide that having it let's you do other things, but that's all it is really. That's not being taken away from anyone.
It's up to the organization or society or code written in smart contracts whether they want to honor, and how much they honor, the promises made for having possession of that NFT. It's really no different than any other organization out there for any service.
I can buy a ticket to a concert and be denied entry as well, or the concert be cancelled, or the company goes out of business, or any other manner of things. I still have the ticket, but it no longer provides the benefit associated with it.
Additionally I can go to the concert, and then try to sell the ticket to someone else, possibly claiming that it will let them get into a future concert, and that buyer needs to verify that the legitimacy of the ticket before purchase.
Or someone who buys a video game that's basically just a case with a code to download the game from a store that then redeems the code but sells the game to Gamestop with a no longer valid code, and Gamestop puts it back for sale even though it's basically useless at that point. That's kind of what's going on with people putting those old Premint passes up for sale on the secondary market.
You could argue that organization should not be trusted with future NFTs or be sued and punished, or the person who sold the now defunct NFT be punished, and that's fine, people no longer patronize or sometimes sue organizations or people all the time when they've been wronged somehow.
As for Premint, they do want you to buy directly from them and not from the secondary market. That's what they are directing you to do. I don't know too much of the details of Premint but they probably wanted to upgrade their service and used older smart contracts without update capability built into it, so the contracts were immutable and limited in some way.
So they needed to issue new smart contracts that had better capabilities, and in the process it rendered the old contracts obsolete. I'm guessing, I don't know, I'm not a customer and I don't work for them, it's just a service some people I know were considering using at one point since it's huge and has a large network of users and one of the things their service helps with is limiting access to bots, which is something the people I know cared about preventing, and is difficult to prevent, at least currently, in web3.
It seems like, whenever there is an issue with the representations of blockchain the answer is to ignore the blockchain. (Shoot, our smart contract was a little too limited for the service we want to offer “Hey everyone don’t use that NFT!”) Where as a traditional database the answer is to fix the database or code. I look at any process involving NFTs and have to wonder how they aren’t more easily and cheaply accomplished as digital records in a centralized database and have yet to see any examples where that is not the case. Concert tickets? Set aside the fact that minting an ETH NFT is probably the entire profit margin of a ticket seller, why not a REST API? Or a web interface? (FYI they already do this) If the people who are letting you into the show are the final say whether you get in – you’re already trusting them and they already have full authority. What are you gaining bringing blockchain into this?
So I imagine they can either legal pressure on the illegitimate owner to transfer the NFT to the other owner (which has worked with some bitcoin transactions in the past), or if that doesn't work, then the system of smart contracts created for something like houses would most likely have something in it that allows the smart contract owners to mark that NFT as void in the blockchain (while it remains in the perpetrators wallet, it would no longer be associated with the physical benefits) and have a fresh NFT minted based on the data in the previous one and sent to the legitimate wallet.
Barring all that, they could just not recognize the owner and send police to physically remove someone who thinks they own it because the have the NFT. That's one reason why some people like bitcoin so much, the government can't (easily) take it from you by force (because there's no physical aspect to it) like they can a home or gold.