There’s nothing there that can’t be done with a standard, public database. What’s lacking is the political will to modernize these systems. NFTs don’t solve that.
I brought up Ticketmaster because it’s a common thing to bring up for NFT replacement. A dumb thing to bring up, because while everyone hates Ticketmaster, people don’t understand why venues are beholden to them and how NFTs won’t solve that.
For classical databases there is always someone with root access, who could modify whatever they want.
In practice, for important stuff, there is a good chance enough people were observing to make a case based on witnesses, but it isn’t exactly ideal.
You don’t often get banks running with your money or some storage facility selling your stuff illegally, but it could happen. And that is enough for some (paranoid) people. Maybe some day there might even be applications that would not otherwise be feasible due to fear of scams.
There is a usecase for crypto currencies, so why not the highly related NFTs where the only difference is that the stuff you own is a unique thing (like a title) instead of a bunch of non-unique things (like currency).
There are audit trails and compliance for this stuff. It’s a solved problem. Techbros just don’t understand what’s already there and think it needs to be fixed with something that happens to make them rich.
You can’t be 100% sure about organizations following these practices, to the degree that blockchains allow. Organizations aren’t fully transparent, and people are fallible.
I still prefer https over all the secrecy we managed to get in letters before the digital era, even if our audit systems to ensure secrecy of communications then were impressive.
Even with a perfect audit trails and merge requirements, convincing a small group of people part of the same organization is easier than convincing a larger cryptographically-herded pool of who-knows who.
You can argue about how likely that is to ever be relevant for practical applications, but it is a system that is perfect in ways its “predecessors” aren’t.
OP is about NFTs failing due to an Instagram account being hacked. No, it is very much not perfect.
The fact that banks aren’t running off with people’s life savings is empirical evidence that the system works. They might try to find legal loopholes, like reordering transactions to make overdraft fees come out higher, but they are strongly incentivized to never fuck with the audit system. This stuff gets written down.
It’s not failing in the technical sense, in the same way tech-support-scams aren’t a failure of online-banking.
You can consider the unfixable nature of such scams an inherent flaw of the system, I suppose it is. An inevitable tradeoff for the automated nature such a system has, where a central authority would have the ability to roll things back.
On the other hand, plenty of online financial scams are not able to be rolled back, often enough banks simply pay you out of an insurance pool. The same could be implemented for blockchains I suppose. Or on top as a regular insurance specialized for “blockchain trading” or whatever. You could also enforce transaction locks, similar to a lot of bank transactions, though that would slow purchases in the same way.
About banks not running off with stuff, I mean rarely they are but usually not yes. There is a reason the core audience of blockchain technologies are paranoid people.
The legitimate usecases for fungible blockchain (crypto currencies) is countries (and corporations) regulting and limiting anonymity and even ability of transactions. That has applications from drug purchases (meth) to drug purchases (hormone therapy under anti-lgbt regimes).
The usecase of blockchain contracts for example is for simple digital trade, currently I can only think of crypto currency exchange, since this fundamentally only makes sense for goods that are themselves on a blockchain.
The legitimate usecase of non-fungible blockchain (nft) is
And what happens when the audit doesn’t get written to, because there is a “delay” when the transaction happens? Or maybe it doesn’t happen at all.
In the NFT design, the transaction is it’s own audit entry. It’s federated because that’s how block chains work. No one can argue that the transaction didn’t happen, and everyone knows who it belongs to.
There’s nothing there that can’t be done with a standard, public database. What’s lacking is the political will to modernize these systems. NFTs don’t solve that.
I brought up Ticketmaster because it’s a common thing to bring up for NFT replacement. A dumb thing to bring up, because while everyone hates Ticketmaster, people don’t understand why venues are beholden to them and how NFTs won’t solve that.
For classical databases there is always someone with root access, who could modify whatever they want.
In practice, for important stuff, there is a good chance enough people were observing to make a case based on witnesses, but it isn’t exactly ideal.
You don’t often get banks running with your money or some storage facility selling your stuff illegally, but it could happen. And that is enough for some (paranoid) people. Maybe some day there might even be applications that would not otherwise be feasible due to fear of scams.
There is a usecase for crypto currencies, so why not the highly related NFTs where the only difference is that the stuff you own is a unique thing (like a title) instead of a bunch of non-unique things (like currency).
There are audit trails and compliance for this stuff. It’s a solved problem. Techbros just don’t understand what’s already there and think it needs to be fixed with something that happens to make them rich.
You can’t be 100% sure about organizations following these practices, to the degree that blockchains allow. Organizations aren’t fully transparent, and people are fallible.
I still prefer https over all the secrecy we managed to get in letters before the digital era, even if our audit systems to ensure secrecy of communications then were impressive.
Even with a perfect audit trails and merge requirements, convincing a small group of people part of the same organization is easier than convincing a larger cryptographically-herded pool of who-knows who.
You can argue about how likely that is to ever be relevant for practical applications, but it is a system that is perfect in ways its “predecessors” aren’t.
OP is about NFTs failing due to an Instagram account being hacked. No, it is very much not perfect.
The fact that banks aren’t running off with people’s life savings is empirical evidence that the system works. They might try to find legal loopholes, like reordering transactions to make overdraft fees come out higher, but they are strongly incentivized to never fuck with the audit system. This stuff gets written down.
It’s not failing in the technical sense, in the same way tech-support-scams aren’t a failure of online-banking.
You can consider the unfixable nature of such scams an inherent flaw of the system, I suppose it is. An inevitable tradeoff for the automated nature such a system has, where a central authority would have the ability to roll things back.
On the other hand, plenty of online financial scams are not able to be rolled back, often enough banks simply pay you out of an insurance pool. The same could be implemented for blockchains I suppose. Or on top as a regular insurance specialized for “blockchain trading” or whatever. You could also enforce transaction locks, similar to a lot of bank transactions, though that would slow purchases in the same way.
About banks not running off with stuff, I mean rarely they are but usually not yes. There is a reason the core audience of blockchain technologies are paranoid people.
The legitimate usecases for fungible blockchain (crypto currencies) is countries (and corporations) regulting and limiting anonymity and even ability of transactions. That has applications from drug purchases (meth) to drug purchases (hormone therapy under anti-lgbt regimes).
The usecase of blockchain contracts for example is for simple digital trade, currently I can only think of crypto currency exchange, since this fundamentally only makes sense for goods that are themselves on a blockchain.
The legitimate usecase of non-fungible blockchain (nft) is
I might be incorrect, but databases can always be updated to affect existing data.
That’s what an audit trail is for.
And what happens when the audit doesn’t get written to, because there is a “delay” when the transaction happens? Or maybe it doesn’t happen at all.
In the NFT design, the transaction is it’s own audit entry. It’s federated because that’s how block chains work. No one can argue that the transaction didn’t happen, and everyone knows who it belongs to.
The fact that banks generally aren’t running off with your money suggests the system works.
The fact that hacking an Instagram account can let you social engineer yourself into the NFT system shows that system does not work.
I’m fairly certain financial institutions don’t use it because of that anti-laundring application.
They don’t usually want their transactions publicly known anyway.