Yes, domain names have existed since forever, but I don't see how crypto domain names are any different or changes anything.
Does a domain name need a token attached to the service in order to operate?
I would say it is still a scam as it is airdropping ENS tokens that were minted out of thin air and insiders pump and dumping the token to make a profit.
You can't do that illegal stuff with traditional domain names.
The name itself is the non-fungible token. You just pick your own ENS name and buy it from the system, much like DNS, though they did add a bit of complexity in an attempt to limit name squatting. (ENS later airdropped a fungible token used for things like voting rights, since this is meant to be a decentralized project and there's no reliable way on Ethereum to identify individual people for voting purposes.)
Ethereum is essentially a database, so certainly centralized databases can do similar things. The point is to do them with decentralization, openness, censorship resistance, and an economic model where users pay the expenses as they go. You may or may not think those things are valuable, but some people do; Ethereum and similar projects fill that niche.
AFAIU the token is only needed in case you want to participate in the voting of governance events, related to the roadmap of the ENS project. You don't need ENS tokens to register or use ENS domains.
IMO the token might be an illegal security indeed; and if that's the case I hope the SEC crushes them. But in the meantime I'll be using ENS names happily as a user and watch the events with popcorn.
> but I don't see how crypto domain names are any different or changes anything.
It will prevent that a big corp with the court on their side redirect your domain-bought-in-a-complete-legit way to them.
"It will prevent that a big corp with the court on their side redirect your domain-bought-in-a-complete-legit way to them."
No, it will absolutely not. It does not matter what method of accounting or voting you use, you will be made to comply with a court order. If you don't comply, you're going to prison.
If the domain is bought anonymously, the court cannot notify the buyer; not to mention jurisdiction issues. Also, courts cannot reverse blockchain transactions.
Sometime I'd like to see a court rule on the SEC's theory that a token airdropped to people who made no actual financial investment nevertheless passes the "investment of money" clause of the Howey test.
Could you elaborate? There are a lot of proposed NFT usecases that sound superficially useful (e.g. magically preventing secondary sales of event tickets), but don't actually solve any real problems when you think about it properly.
In the case of shipping it was about providing a cryptographically verifiable chain of custody for each shipment.
It’s just a cryptographic enhancement of existing systems, but a nice use of the tech (standardized rather than proprietary too).
One company also used smart contracts to update other systems & such automatically. It was quite a nice system, crypto-based or not.
Personally, as a huge crypto skeptic (and I have worked in the space), I think this kind of use has much more long term utility than the gold rush value stores.
The ticket thing you mention could be useful, but I’ve never seen an implementation that was worth any company (let alone Ticketmaster) bothering with. It “solves” a mostly solved problem.
The use case that I am most familiar with (just from reading about) was to allow artists to sell digital work derived real work, and have them benefit financially from any resale of that digital work. Not sure if there's a non-NFT way to accomplish the same.
Now that the jpeg craze is dead, capital should be allocating itself towards more virtuous NFT use cases, should it not? That's where economic activity in an efficient market would move towards.
The marketplace decides what the purpose is. The use case people wanted was an easy way to launder real money into jpegs of arbitrarily set ETH values. Now that the PPP loan and ZIRP era is over, the bottom has fallen out of NFTs entirely. NBA Top Shot was one of the few non-jpeg early succes stories but that's flamed out as well.
It really isn't, because if you either don't trust the sender or the shipping company, then your real issue is that the shipment or its contents get stolen, not that the shipping information is wrong.
Once again, crypto is trying to solve problems that don't actually exist while completely failing to address the ones that do.
> then your real issue is that the shipment or its contents get stolen
No, the chain-of-provenance use-case is to prevent people from being able to sell grey-market products while claiming that they're official products. E.g. selling iPhones built out of reconstituted parts from iPhones that were pickpocketed from their owners and then scrapped for parts. (Yes, this is a big issue — Google "my stolen phone ended up in shenzhen" and you'll get a ton of news stories.)
If you (or a retailer) forces the retailer (wholesaler) to provide a chain of digital signatures demonstrating each hand-off of the parts all the way back to the factory that produced them, then you implicitly reject any assemblage of parts where some of the parts were black-market-sourced. Which allows for legitimate refurbishing using legitimately acquired parts (i.e. it doesn't put the Shenzhen phone-repair stores themselves out of business); but destroys the demand for the electronics "chop shops" these stores currently sometimes order parts from.
In this case, a "blockchain" here is an open-public-participation multiparty ledger that tracks ownership of physical goods; with a digital signature inherent to each transfer of the digital asset representing the physical good, which should be done at time of transfer of physical goods. Unlike other use-cases, you really can't simplify the solution — to enable this use-case, you need a system with pretty much all the properties of a blockchain.
This might be simplistic or ignorant - but does the essential core of crypto boil down to having a public trust ledger? Could a use case of crypto (and NFTs) be a replacement for PGP?
This whole signing a physical product to prove it's official kind of sounds like PGP but I only have a 10000 foot view and don't know much about PGP other than you sign stuff and people can cryptographically verify that you actually signed it.
Optional follow-up because I'm curious: how do you actually track that the physical thing wasn't modified or tampered with in practice? Couldn't a bad actor repair a broken RAM chip with their own parts and it would still be officially signed? Or does it rely on the owner invalidating their device, saying their phone is broken, and then all the parts in the phone get flagged as broken?
Blockchain doesn't solve any of that. It's just coming back to the oracle issue. I still have to trust people putting stuff into the chain, and I don't have any reason to just because you say blockchain.
Hashing and hash stores are not unique, or particularly original, so really this is just applying common crypto tooling/standards to an existing problem.
> I like crypto but think 99.999% of NFTs are scams
It is more like 100% are scams, there is no NFT use case, it's all just jpgs.