this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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Digital certificates has already existed for half a century. There’s nothing new. A certificate doesn’t get any more legitimate just because it’s recorded on a blockchain.
Yes but NFTs are held in trust by you, not a 3rd party business. If you want to sell your NFT to a friend you can do that without brokering the exchange through a middleman who can/will charge a cut
Don't blockchain brokers charge a transaction fee?
Yes.
How you transact the ownership of NFTs is a different story. I’m reacting to the claim that NFT is “like a certificate of authenticity, but digital”, which is not unique to NFTs at all.
This claim is also often misunderstood, since the NFT can only verify the authenticity of the certificate itself, not the art/asset it’s pointing to.
I can easily create an NFT of Mona Lisa. The blockchain will see no problem with it at all. Heck, I can create 1000 NFTs of Mona Lisa if I want.
Rookie numbers, I can create billions
This is still solved by certificates, I can make my own self signed certificate that says it me and sign whatever I want. The only thing that crypto “solves” is over the wire man in the middle attacks, which aren’t even really a problem in the modern internet
How do I know you haven't made 10 copies of that same certificate and sold 9 to other people?
If it was an NFT I could see you issued 9 other copies of it before I was approached with the sale. Any other way I either have to place blind trust in you or rely on a 3rd party to handle the issuance/transaction
I could just use 10 different URLs for each NFT. All pointing to the same image. I can also use 10 different wallets to obfuscate it more. For that matter, I can use different blockchains as well.
Now it’s 10 completely different NFTs pointing to the same image. To verify there are no duplicates, you need to check every NFT in existence (across all blockchains in existence).
Why are people so obsessed with bringing scarcity back on the internet
Why would I want that, I’m not selling you anything
This sounds completely logical, until you realize it’s for selling JPGs and expecting them to only exist in that one buyer’s hands.
There's basically 3 ways to verify a certificate.
In all three you need to trust someone, and ask three are a pain to transfer something to new owner.
NFT gives a fundamentally new option here, that's transferable and doesn't require trust. That it's been used for and gotten known for monkey scams is a shame.
And how do you verify that the NFT can be trusted? With any of the 3 methods you mentioned!
Blockchain doesn’t circumvent this need of trust.
The thing blockchain eliminates is the need of a timestamp authority when doing transactions. Satoshi even called his invention “distributed timestamp server” before people started to call it blockchain. You don’t need timestamps when verifying the authenticity of an NFT.
Not really, signatures on blockchains is just another TOFU or WoT variant, because how do you know the original token is the legit thing you wanted in the first place? It's only after you have identified it that the existence of the blockchain becomes relevant in that it can track ownership without central authority.