[dragontamer]

Have you ever tried to convince someone to not buy second hand Windows 10 keys?

Your argument relies upon other people acting in the way you describe. As opposed to the way I've seen them act for the last 20 years.

EDIT: Scalpers exist because they're the only ones who can sell seats after a show has been sold out. 2nd hand Windows 10 keys exist because when a Corporation buys 1000+ licenses but only uses 500 of them, they wanna recoup the costs by selling 500+ of those keys onto the 2nd hand market (even for a loss).

You can't beat economics with just saying "encryption" or "safety". Encryption/safety just changes the economics, and the price will adjust as appropriate. Fundamentally, scalpers (or at lest, more expensive tickets that are sold "after" a sellout is announced) is just an economic reality.

[yata69420]

I think you've got it, so I'm not sure why you don't understand the value of NFTs. It's entirely about economics.

In the case of Windows keys, if Microsoft issued them as an NFT, then the only way to get a valid one would be from Microsoft or via secondary market resale.

Obviously, if Microsoft sells the key, the user paid for the key.

If the user resells the key, Microsoft can now also get paid a transfer fee baked into the NFT contract. Plus they have traceability for where every key went.

Now instead of policing secondary gray markets, they capture additional value from resales. The purchaser of the resale is 100% sure it's a valid key, and the sellers with surplus licenses have a marketplace to unload them.

The NFT in this scenario facilitates Microsoft getting paid for this trade without the trouble of setting up a secondary license trading site. As long as the fee to Microsoft on the NFT transfer is less than the 20% or so that the escrow (ebay) takes, it makes good economic sense for all 3 parties.

[dragontamer]

> If the user resells the key, Microsoft can now also get paid a transfer fee baked into the NFT contract.

Not if people just swap NFT accounts and sell their keys+accounts in their entirety.

IE: Microsoft sells LicenseKey to NFT-Account#1234. The owner of NFT-Account#1234 sells the *ENTIRE ACCOUNT* on the secondary market, for a lower price than Microsoft's official price.

What you don't get is that human consumers don't like people locking them down, and people will find extremely easy ways to avoid the "trap" you hoped to put them in. And the reason this happens is economic incentives. You can't beat microeconomics on this one.

[yata69420]

> Not if people just swap NFT accounts and sell their keys+accounts in their entirety.

There's a cost to doing this. Usually as an escrow fee paid to ebay or g2a or wherever you're selling keys. As long as the NFT transfer fee is lower than the escrow cost, I don't see how it wouldn't be cheaper and safer for everyone.

I'm not saying this is a solution to piracy or violating the regionality of the licensing agreement, just that it would allow buyers and sellers to trade; with the original licensor taking the fee instead of ebay, because the NFT cryptography takes the place of the reputation+escrow provided by existing platforms.

[dragontamer]

Windows costs $100 normally.

It costs only $10 when you buy them from a key reseller, for $90 of savings.

There's a lot of loophole that can be afforded in the $90 gulf between the two prices.

[yata69420]

I haven't ever actually bought Windows, so I wasn't aware the discrepancy would be that crazy. I just assumed it was a reputation/escrow problem as there's no shipping information and no way to validate who used the key.

I wonder why Microsoft doesn't region lock them or do some kind of audit if they don't want that market to exist. I'm also not sure why someone would buy an obviously grey market key when there are KMS activation solutions on github.

If Microsoft did want to allow for resale at any price and at least capture the fees, an NFT solution would let them do it without a lot of effort (building an exchange, processing payments, handling fraud, etc in each locale).

That's the sort of problem NFTs solve, generically, for digital ownership and transfer (licensing, tickets, club membership, etc).

With some amount of network effect and ease of use (the web3 wallet experience is actually quite good), I think NFTs will look like the obvious answer.

[dragontamer]

In practice, Microsoft doesn't really care because they just tie the Windows license to your physical motherboard (that's why you can reinstall Windows on your laptops over-and-over again without a license prompt). This only matters in hobby builder circles where you build your own computer

So yeah, its not really a thing NFTs solve, and something that a very simple chip on a motherboard solves perfectly.

People don't really "buy Windows" in practice. They buy a laptop, or a Dell computer. And they sell the laptop, or Dell computer, in its entirety.