this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2024
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No.
NFTs are not proof of ownership. At best they are the equivalent to receipts, at worse they are mere url links. They are certainly not title deeds, not proof of copyright ownership or anything of that sort. They are just a ledger that person D paid something to person C who paid something to person B who paid something to person A.
Lets use those NFT monkeys as an example. There is literally no proof anywhere on that NFT chain that person A is the rightful copyright owner or has the rights to sell said image. Furthermore, there is no proof that person A gave the rights to person B to resell said image. Or that anyone down the chain sold the complete rights instead of just selling the link to access monkey.jpg
The whole point of cryptocurrency is decentralized ownership. That's the big breakthrough in technology, it's the whole point of it, I can try to ELI5 how that works if you want to, but for the moment I'm just going to assume you accept that cryptocurrency can demonstrate ownership.
NFTs are an extension of that, except they can't be split or traded by one another, i.e. they're non-fungible. Therefore you can by definition prove ownership of those tokens, as that's the whole point of the technology, which again, if you're curious I can try to explain how it works.
How does ownership of those tokens transfers to ownership of something else? Well, that's an excellent question, and the answer is that it happens in the same way that a piece of paper grants ownership of a house. There's no innovative technology behind that piece of paper, but still everyone would agree that it grants ownership, and the reason is that the authority that enforces that chose to respect that piece of paper. Nowadays this is mostly databases and the piece of paper is just generated from the records there, but this is very insecure as anyone with database write access (or access to the physical folder containing the documents in case of old paper deeds) can transfer ownership. NFTs solve this because only the owner of a token can transfer it to someone else, so they're inherently safer than any of the alternatives.
Again, the technology is great and has millions of excellent applications, but people use it for pyramid schemes and scamming others, but people do that with any piece of technology.
So NFTs are not inherently proof of ownership as the person above said. The general concept of owning crypto (which no one is questioning here) is a very different topic than using NFTs as proof of ownership of literally anything else.
Do you consider a deed to be proof of ownership? A stock? The registry of a car? They're not inherently proof of ownership, they're just pieces of paper or entries on a database. If you go down the road of what is proof of ownership then no technology we have is able to prove it.
The thing is that NFTs you can prove ownership of the token, if the token correlates with something, e.g. if the DMV stored car ownership in a Blockchain, NFTs could be used to represent car ownership in a secure and decentralized way.
but, why? is there some problem with the way we prove ownership of things now? as far as i know there isnβt an epidemic of car titles or house deeds getting hacked.
No, there isn't, but there are advantages to it as well, just like how a database has advantages over a paper folder.
An NFT can't be transferred by anyone other than the owner, and ownership can be verified independently.
Here's an example of a use that would be very cool and would take advantage of it (even though I know it's unlikely to happen). Ownership of games, some games are sold on different platforms, to verify the ownership of the game (or DLC, or cosmetics) games have to verify with first party services (like PSN or Steam), which means that for the most part you need to buy games on each platform individually, but if platforms used an NFT for it games would be buy once play anywhere, and they would allow you to sell or even borrow games, and no company could prevent you from doing so. Which is obviously the reason this will never happen, but it's a nice idea.
That being said there are downsides to it as well, such as a person being the full owner of stuff means that a person can lose the key and therefore lose access to the house, or that scammer can steal everything, whereas making you sign your house to someone else is a lot more beurocratic, which serves to protect you from you.
Just to be clear, I'm not a "we should use NFT for everything" type of person, in fact I don't think there are many use cases nowadays that are worth using it, but the technology is interesting regardless, and solves the problem of how to prove ownership without a centralized trusted organization.
yummy koolaid
Buddy must have purchase a couple of bored apes just after the peak. He's still waiting for them to peak again
Nope, never bought any of the NFTs that were sold to idiot speculators because I understand the technology and see no value in owning a token representing a digital image. I feel that the rage of downvoting comes from people who got scammed because they didn't understood the technology and now see it mentioned and think it's all a scam, similar to how old people used to think emails were a scam because they sent money to a prince in Nigeria.
I dream of one day owning a link to a pdf document