But with a book, you have that privilege in perpetuity, and you can loan, transfer, and resell it.
Coincidentally, NFT’s got the “transfer” side of the equation, but forgot about the “privilege” part! The tokens are yours in perpetuity, and can be transferred to others, but it’s not at all clear what privilege they provide.
> Coincidentally, NFT’s got the “transfer” side of the equation, but forgot about the “privilege” part! The tokens are yours in perpetuity, and can be transferred to others, but it’s not at all clear what privilege they provide.
Exactly! This is the part that I cannot get past whenever people talk about NFTs. They are a neat toy, self-contained, and having unambiguous ownership of the NFT. But there is absolutely nothing in the real world connected to it. It's like those pie-in-the-sky physics models that have hundreds of free parameters unconstrained by any experimental measurement. Sure those models might make some interesting predictions, but they have nothing tying them to the real world.
I could imagine a system where NFTs are used to establish ownership, but that requires there to be some trusted source that signs the initial NFT. This could be a land surveyor to make a NFT that represents property borders, or a patent office to make a NFT that represents a granted patent, or a MMO video game company to make a NFT that represents a particular asset within the game. But as it is, J.K. Rowling could make a NFT representing "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone", and I could make one as well. There's no indication of which one is a valid link from mathematical space to real space.
NFTs need a legal system in order to tie them to anything outside of the NFT ecosystem. They need trusted authorities who are the only ones that can generate NFTs with specific legal authority. And once you have that trusted authority, there's no point in having any of the other trustless blockchain architecture whose sole, flimsy excuse for existing is in avoiding having a trusted authority in the first place.
(Sorry, that turned into a longer rant than I had expected, but your phrasing crystallized some ideas that had been floating around my head, and I wanted to write them out to see where they went.)
This is the same issue all decentralized systems of ownership/value have, including all cryptocurrencies. Technology itself can't be a trust anchor without enforcement.
The dollar has value due to a mixture of trust in its continued value and in the entity enforcing it.
Bitcoin has value mostly because people speculate it has value. The extra decentralization loses its value as soon as you add enforcement, because now it is just a really complicated dollar.
Similarly, smart contracts do not solve an actual problem we can't solve with real contracts much cheaper, and the contract itself is unenforceable if any participant stops cooperating.
If you have to rely on police and courts to enforce your smart contract, why do you need the decentralized smart contract to begin with? Can you even model a smart contract that satisfies the legal constraints of all countries where participating in it is possible? Why aren't you just leaving this to lawyers and signatures on paper?
I would say this is more a fundamental problem/feature of human relations than technology. Every transaction, every contract, every treaty and every law has, on its own, little more value than a receipt. Centralization doesn't really solve that issue so much as it pretends to add the weight of government/society/God/{abstract entity of choice} where there is none. What's remained the same since time immemorial is that every act of trade is done voluntarily or under force. What blockchains and bitcoin change is by making the receipts self-provable and consistent without needing more information than a public key and a time of transaction. It doesn't change the need to assert one's property rights. That is still the purview of law and law enforcement short of a breakthrough in jurisprudence.
Your point about the dollar is flawed. The value of the dollar may be a floating currency at its most ideal but its "true" value, outside of forex, is determined by fiat. The Fed just financially engineers it in a very complicated manner with veritable pulleys and levers and, somewhere along the way, a gun to everyone's private bank account in the form of artificial inflation/negative interest rates, punitive taxes, and from time to time, suing institutions that make US financial theater look bad by threat of dubious litigation.
>>If you have to rely on police and courts to enforce your smart contract, why do you need the decentralized smart contract to begin with?
If police departments have to rely on private citizens to be bounty hunters or informants, is there a point to having a police force at all? What's the point of a legal system that depends on executive enforcement when the citizenry is capable of doing so on its own? Why do we have to have a mayor/governor/president? Why not a government of individual people addressing their own affairs as need be and judges/arbitrators as referees?
The answer to both sets of questions is that they are both options to a larger question: "How should one handle interpersonal expectations and violations thereof?"
I'm not sure if you went anywhere with the question of "what use does a smart contract actually have" beyond "justifying vigilante justice" or "anarcho-capitalism" (which, let's be clear, boils down to feudalism in which they'd be little less than a formality).
I addressed it in my first paragraph but, to repeat, a smart contract is a self-provable receipt.
In addition, I don't see how you read my statement and came away with the idea that I support vigilante justice or anarcho-capitalism. My questions were pointed towards addressing the unstated assumptions inherent to your question and the other questions in your post that I didn't quote. Namely, that a centralized authority or agreement of centralized authorities is a requirement to render any transaction/contract/agreement valid. That's an assumption I find to be unproven and easily contested.
NFTs need a legal / authority system ensuring they are tied to something. I agree and this is why NFTs and block chain are simply not needed at all. A simple certificate signed by an authority would make more sense .. no purpose in a anonymous block chain for this I can see.
Books will last much longer than that. Their most common mode of destruction is storage-in-landfill. Moisture (may that be flooding or mold) and fire are the main environmental factors diminishing the lifespan of a book. Things such as the acidity of paper are only an issue for book collectors and libraries. That leaves wear and tear, which can usually be repaired. In other words, books are more than capable of lasting for the lifetime of the original purchaser.
Now contrast that to digital downloads with DRM, where you are at the whim of the vendor. The worse example I've seen is a perpetual license expiring after 2 years, though I have lost access to several hundred dollars worth over purchases over the past decade (and I'm not a big spender).
I have little pulp paperbacks that are older than 40 years, and those are about the least durable books around. I expect finer books to last 100 years and as many readings... and to go on to do it again. Barring environmental damage or my deliberately binning them, I expect most books I’ve already had 20 years to outlive me by going another 50+... and I got most of them used to begin with, often already 10-80 years old when I got them (a few older, but they’re outliers). If the next owner re-binds them many could survive another lifetime or two.
Coincidentally, NFT’s got the “transfer” side of the equation, but forgot about the “privilege” part! The tokens are yours in perpetuity, and can be transferred to others, but it’s not at all clear what privilege they provide.