NFTs aren't money, or currency and just because they can be created on some blockchains doesn't make them so.

I also don't see a genuine effort from the author to really understand why proponents think that this technology will positively change the world. You might not agree with them, but at least then rebut their arguments instead of creating straw men.

Bitcoin is open source, the original founder is nowhere to be found, there were no VCs involved in its creation or in the distribution of the coins and the entire network is run out in the open. The Bitcoin network is a commons.

The permissionless, decentralized, p2p and stateless aspect of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin is as revolutionary as it was 12 years ago, and in these 12 years "normal" (i.e. non-rich) people had access to them as much as anyone else. Heck, 10 years ago there were faucets that would hand out 5 bitcoins if you solved a captcha.

The people who are today involved in the creation and distribution of fiat money have incredible power, a power which is largely hidden from view, but which actually drives and shapes a lot of what we see. Of course these people won't take an open source competitor lying down.

Satoshi is dead, the dream is dead, people are just trading the corpse

I'm talking about things like Reflexer's RAI[1], which is designed to have stable value independently of any singular currency, and whose most centralized component is price oracles (so not very centralized).

[1]: https://reflexer.finance/

It is hard to understate how radical that is. Such an act of quiet resistance against the powers that be was somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible in 2005.

Sounds great btw, amazing product, can't wait to sell it to my friends and neighbors.

1. At least so far, Bitcoin and the rest do indeed let you and anyone send or receive money regardless of what political institution, corrupt government or censorious, politically pressured private company prohibits or selectively permits (think Visa/mastercard/paypal and their bullshit arbitrary restrictions on all kinds of things they or some politician decided to call "immoral")

2. Anybody can access the BTC blockchain and most other blockchains with minimal cost, extremely minor technical knowledge that they could easily pick up, and use them for money transfers. Playing along with the pump and dump bullshit or falling victim the bubbles is strictly optional.

In these things, it is indeed revolutionary in a quiet but important way, and I have a hard time understanding the sheer amount of snarky, hateful commentary from so many people on this site. Where the goddam fuck did the scrappy, freedom-loving respect for technologies that help individuals avoid arbitrary rules go?

The Bitcoin network has stayed remarkably stable and it's still possible to run a node on a raspberry pi, which is done exactly because the Bitcoin community value the ability of normal people to participate and be able to verify their transactions and that of the whole chain.

Concerning scams. Let's look at another relatively open technology. Email.

The vast majority of emails are actually spam, and a lot of those are scams (phishing, Nigerian princes etc.). In the beginning a lot of people fell for email scams, many still do, but by and large people are aware they exist and are able to use email productively without constantly falling victim to scams.

And well, it benefits (smart) ordinary people. That is, those who have invested or are investing. Smart money is here - and small investors are here too. And I'm saying purposefully "investing" as opposed to "trading". The former doesn't require any technical skills.

As for "ordinary people" not versed into technologies doing what their government is telling them to do (bans, warnings, hackers, criminals, murderers, ...), well... I'm feeling sorry for them, but crypto cannot just replace local country currencies without government consent. Now think again: who is to blame?

Also velocity will get rid of volatility !

Hmmm. You've conveniently danced around any suggestion or mention of the fact that the "creator" of bitcoin mined 1.1 million - 1/20th of all bitcoins that will ever exist(!) - coins in private before launching bitcoin publicly and holds them to this day.

I'm absolutely on board to criticize the amazing amount of grifters in crypto. But letting this corrupt the image of the few people like Satoshi (and Vitalik Buterin and many others basically absent from the media), who willingly strayed from the opportunity to be among the richest individuals in the world, in order to instead focus on building something they think can better humanity, is not right. You don't need to look far to find the real grifters, they're showing ads in US media and paying millions to celebrities for product endorsements right now.

[1]: https://bitslog.com/2020/06/22/a-new-mystery-in-patoshi-time...

Also, AFAIK those were mined because Satoshi was the first miner, not because he purposefully kept it private in order to get the most for himself before anyone else could participate.

Otherwise, you could just steal the coins straight after handing over the private keys. And even if that wasn't the case, the loaner will want exclusive control and move them to another key they control anyway.

If it was a loan, you would have blockchain records of movement of Satoshi coins. This can be proven not to be the case, and so we can be quite confident there was no loans to Satoshi.

NFTs on other hand appears to be equivalent of selling Golden gate bridge to tourists.

What's the value of pretending an easily duplicated digital thing is rare?

I realize that an NFT minted on a given chain is unique, but so what, that doesn't make it unique and interesting they way a baseball card might be.

> Whatever cryptocurrency might someday be For All Mankind, it is most urgently and avidly in this moment something that people tell weird lies about in hopes of getting richer.

You seem intent on spreading such get rich quick and utopian dreams on cryptocurrency. How much do you have invested in the ecosystem?

Edit: In my opinion, people who genuinely care about the revolutionary potential of Bitcoin need to avoid feeding the hype train that helps normalize the sketchy lieing behavior in the ecosystem and simply work on building that future instead.

Please point me to where I spread get rich quick dreams in my comments.

The NFT scene is even more BS. It could destroyed uninformed people's life, just like gambling. However, this kind of gambling is public on the internet with little regulations.

I hope more tech people speak about this instead of just ignoring them.

I agree that there are lots of scammy "blockchain" startups, but I don't think it's fair to paint them all with that brush. There are also plenty that are actually building cool projects, without pumping their coin, and announcing light interactions with a company as partnerships.

If you have 20% of companies being scummy, but churning out 80% of the news, your assumption will be that all of the companies are scummy.

- But cuz you work in a sleezy one so you can only meet the bad company

We were very technical oriented in the beginning. I was hired to do formal verification and system design. Until, money happened, and founders realize they over promised.

For example, authentication/identity using blockchain technology seems interesting to me.

[1] https://blog.ipfs.io/decentralizing-the-internet-s-root/

Identity on blockchain beyond resolving zooko’s triangle (I.e. stably mapping pseudonyms to pubkeys) typically does not offer an advantage over (partially) centralized identity providers. E.g. putting anything related to government ID on a blockchain is pointless because you might as well have the ID issuer run a central or federated service.

If you want to trust a conglomerate of folks who have a vested interest in keeping you small and poor to solve your problems, then there is no advantage. If you do not, then the advantage is exactly that it is not centralised.

Imagine a world tmr where bitcoin is everywhere. You ll have mining conglomerates in the cheapest electricity providers working as cartels to help each other and protect their interests (so can envision centralizing a blacklist of addresses they dislike, coordination on software version etc), de facto cartels of whales (like todays "billionaires" people describe as a collaborative force), and large lenders who concentrate capital and therefore still can buy out whatever they want (today called banks).

How do you think the blockchain solve any of that?

It's not rocket science. When you keep your wealth in monetary terms, you don't get to have it in physical terms. Money represents how much real wealth you could have if you spent it. It's deferred consumption. There is no real wealth in something that didn't happen.

If someone hacks into my account, my bank will likely reimburse me for any losses. There are controls in place to stop them from stealing it al. If someone just transferred it to their own account, I could use the courts to get it back. If I use a credit card to pay a scam, I can do a charge-back.

With cryptocurrencies, it's just "bye money". They're not going to fork for you. There's no logic to stop people in Russia transferring my entire account. It's too hard to find criminals to get any relief. It's just your fault for using cryptocurrencies and not having 100% perfect security.

Not to mention, the chance of my bank stealing all my money is nil. They'd be sued and arrested, and the FDIC would reimburse me anyway.

What if it's taken thorough wrongful civil forfeiture? Will you be able to afford to navigate the courts to get your assets back after they've been seized?

Cryptocurrencies don't have to replace all existing financial instruments to be a useful hedge. They can just be one tool of many to diversify your risk profile.

Especially consider that for people living outside the developed world, the risk of having your assets stolen through legal channels is going to be much higher.

You had to cover the "too big to fail" system.

On btc no.

Funny - I have never seen someone in the traditional financing system do that and not get caught. Closest things were ponzi schemes like Madoff (and he did get caught)

I have, however, heard of dozens of exactly this incident happening with cryptocoin exchanges (wallets, services, the most general term for all combined slipped my mind)

1. How much security do we need for this transaction?

2. For this block of transactions?

3. Can we have varying levels of security?

What we are ultimately trying to know is, is it profitable to double spend? If the answer is yes, then no one should be transacting, and anything they do transact is a gamble. If the answer is no, there's much less risk, and the farther the answer is no, the safer the transaction.

But we likely don't need as much security as we do now. In fact, it's very easy to handle at a user level.

A. Put the transaction on the blockchain.

B. Wait for additional blocks.

C. If your transaction is huge, wait for more additional blocks. Wait a week, a month. This is an important transaction. When the blockchain has not reverted for such a long time, finally do the transaction in the real world.

If you are transacting with yourself, you don't need any security at all. If you are transacting with a bar and the bar knows you, much like a tab, you don't need much security. If you are transacting with an anonymous person, you want high security.

So security is currently handled on a blockchain by blockchain basis, where it should be a transaction by transaction basis. What if you can't wait a month? Then you should put heavy fees on that transaction and it should be put in with other higher fee transactions.

4. How does security change with transaction size? Does it make sense to have limits?

5. How does security change with total transaction block size? Does it make sense to have limits?

6. When the coin price goes up, how does that change these factors?

7. When the mining reward in coins drops, how does that affect security?

8. When Bitcoin, in 100 years, moves to 100% transaction fee system, what happens to security? What would the transactions fees look like?

9. In 50 years when the block reward has been halved 5 times, either the price of Bitcoin moves to $1 million, or the security drops. Is that okay?

Bitcoin (and it's successors) are a decentralized solution to the double spend problem. If "decentralized" is a requirement, then a cryptocurrency can be an excellent solution. Other known solutions (like "just trust everyone") don't scale well (an understatement!).

If "decentralized" is not a requirement then there are other solutions to the double-spend problem.

This is only marginally better than SSO with Google/Apple/Facebook/whatever. It dodges the "Google closed my account" problem, which is a meaningful improvement. But I'm not fully certain why you need the public key to be part of a blockchain for this to work. Couldn't you just publish your public key identity on any number of considerably less wasteful systems? As far as I can tell, the only advantage here is the mapping between the name "UncleMeat" and my public key would be able to be reused across services... but in so many cases I don't want my identity to be consistent across services.

- It allows you to use the same passphrase for all services without compromising security since your passphrase never needs to leave your own machine; it is never sent over the wire. You just send signatures to different services.

- The cost associated with purchasing tokens needed to initialize an account on the blockchain would serve as a spam prevention mechanism; an alternative to SIM cards which most centralized services rely on today as a cost barrier to limit the creation of spam accounts.

- Superior integration potential between different services/systems provided by different companies/groups since they can all refer to the exact same account on the same blockchain and provide new ways to unify data between the different services.

I'd wager that most people don't care about this much, though it is real. Still, this can be achieved with signature-based authentication that doesn't require the tremendous waste of BTC. Just... tell the service your public key and sign a message when you sign up. Your key pair doesn't need to be associated with some distributed system for that to work. This has been around for decades and not exactly caught on.

> It allows you to use the same passphrase for all services without compromising security since your passphrase never needs to leave your own machine; it is never sent over the wire. You just send signatures to different services.

This is true for all signature-based authentication, which does not necessitate a blockchain.

> The cost associated with purchasing tokens needed to initialize an account on the blockchain would serve as a spam prevention mechanism; an alternative to SIM cards which most centralized services rely on today to limit the creation of spam accounts.

This sounds like an anti-feature to me. Especially since it'd be foolish for a service to only support authentication via a blockchain. Imagine telling my grandmother that she needed to buy some btc in order to sign up for the service that hosted my wedding photos.

This is different because your grandma would have to buy the tokens once and signup once and she will have access not only to the 'wedding photo service' but a large number of other services. It's more like paying a small amount of money to get access to an ecosystem of services. Like how people pay money to buy an iPhone and this gives them access to the Apple App Store and all the apps therein.

There will also be network effects associated with the blockchain price going up with adoption. People who signed up early to the right blockchains will have priority access to certain software ecosystems and exclusive services which are only accessible to the richest among them (for example).

This seems even more like an anti-feature TBH. Imagine not being allowed to use the future equivalent of basic services because you were not "early enough". Sorry grandma, no wedding photos for you because you didn't buy these specific three coins out of the thousands started every month.

I cannot possibly imagine a world where services will choose to only permit authentication via some expensive blockchain such that they deny themselves access to markets outside of the global rich.

And telling my grandma "don't worry, the coins you don't understand will go up in price" is not going to help.

This is the core question: why is signature-based authentication using public keys associated with BTC wallets superior to signature-based authentication using public keys not associated with BTC wallets? As far as I can tell, the only benefit here is that now my identity on my photo sharing service can be linked to my identity on my wine rating service. Why do I want that?

“Services will make more money because blockchains are trendy” isn’t a meaningful difference.

Doesn't seem like that to me. If I get banned I can just move my cash to another account and start again, and assuming multiple services does this I can amortize the cost over all of them.

The rest seems to me like something mTLS could solve better.

You don’t need blockchains for this. Ordinary websites can implement this. They usually don’t, but, they could?

Essentially yes :)

There are some stateful blockchains which allow changing the passphrase but of course there is no 'forgot my password' feature; a malicious actor who manages to steal your passphrase could potentially use it to change your passphrase and lock you out of your account but at least you don't have to live in doubt if you suspect that your passphrase was compromised.

The idea behind the blockchain auth approach is that you would only need one passphrase for all services but you would have to secure it carefully since losing it would cause you to be locked out of all services associated with that account.

So you're gambling bigger: less likely to have your identity stolen, but complete loss of everything to do with that identity, with no recourse, if it is stolen.

I'm not sure I like those odds.

An amazingly succinct title. Absolutely true. Whenever someone hypes up cryptocurrency, it is almost always for their personal gain, directly or indirectly.

What was Satoshi lying about? What has he done with his riches?

> The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

This is not the motivation of someone trying to get richer. It's someone who cares deeply about humanity.

Is it so hard to believe that there are others in the space with similar motivations?

I wish cryptocurrency fans would stop smelling their own farts for once and realize they aren't the absolute geniuses in finance that they claim to be. It's arrogant.

I have looked at lots of potential money systems and I'd say most cryptocurrencies fall into the usual deflation speculation death that lots of government currencies (especially during the gold standard) have fallen victim to.

In fact, most currencies are heading down that route. The euro and yen are prime examples. It's kind of funny how people shout about inflation the most when it's been super low for a long time. They complain about inflation when their real problem is that they have no bargaining power because inflation target policies are also supposed to inflate wages. Bitcoin also doesn't solve the rentier problem with land. If your purchasing power magically increases with Bitcoin then the land owner just gets more of your money.

I am really tired of the anti debt crap. The only reason people would be against debt is that there are crazy people who are out of touch with reality who insist on permanent positive interest rates. Just think about the absurdity of hating debt when interest rates are negative. It's simply illogical.

>AntiBitcoin people are trying to centralize the world. Empower the already powerful.

Deflation is empowering the rich. That's what positive real interest rates do. If you have a lot of Bitcoin and Bitcoin goes up in value then you get more gains than a poor person with very few Bitcoin. Inflation and negative interest rates hurt those who are rich the most and hurt those who have very little the least.

>Stamp that boot onto the face of humanity forever.

Is this supposed to be some kind of joke?

>Ensure that the state can always rob its people of their savings and lifes work, and force compliance with weak fiscal policy, negative interest rates.

Savings are literally just a reduction in demand for labor. Reducing your demand for labor doesn't make anyone wealthier by itself. It's only because there are other people who want that labor that saving even earns a return. You are basically paid to reduce your demand so that other, more productive people get to have the scarce labor. If you reduce your demand for labor and nobody ends up demanding the freed up labor then you basically worked for nothing. The entire point of inflation and negative interest rates are to get this fact into your damn head. You are piling up a bunch of potatoes that spoil before you eat them. Stop that.

So, No, I will not stop that. Thank Satoshi that I don't need to.

I choose to opt of your authoritarian and paternalistic philosophies. I will always convert fruits of my labor into hard money, where you cannot hurt me.

You can't stop us (all).

FOMO hits the poor way harder than it does the rich. Rich people have lots of places to invest their money that give good returns and they don't need to "get rich quick".

I want cryptocurrencies shut down so they stop using insane amounts of power so that people can gamble.

We all indirectly gain if cryptocurrencies cease to exist, because less carbon will be released into the atmosphere.

Then your ire should be directed at scammers, not a specific implementation detail of their scams. Should we abolish wire transfers and gift cards because scammers use those in scams, too? How about stocks, while we're at it? Those get pumped and dumped all the time, too.

> I want cryptocurrencies shut down so they stop using insane amounts of power so that people can gamble.

> We all indirectly gain if cryptocurrencies cease to exist, because less carbon will be released into the atmosphere.

Not all cryptocurrencies are proof of work; proof of stake, for example, is increasingly common (Cardano is the biggest current example, and Ethereum is moving toward it) and uses negligible energy (and therefore releases negligible carbon into the atmosphere).

To get to (B) from here, we must endure some path dependence that takes us through an era of unaccountable wealth transfer.

Bad taste of the bored rich is not a new thing, but I hope NFTs won't become a noble tradition.

All an NFT is is a token that represents ownership, like if the title to your car or house deed was on a blockchain.

NFTs have some sane use causes like designating the owner of a valuable asset or creating electronic tickets that can be resold or transferred without some centralized entity like ticketmaster.

Prior to NFTs existing, would you purchase the ownership rights to a gif or tweet? Probably not. And that is what is dumb about the excitement around NFTs, some people with more money than sense seem to think that now that you can represent ownership on a blockchain some things, like crappy jpegs, have suddenly become valuable assets.

I can sell NFTs of bridges all day long; doesn't mean anyone is buying a bridge.

When people first started talking about them I thought that was the idea - a kind of people's copyright registry on the blockchain. Which seems like a fairly reasonable idea, as far as it goes.

Edit: To be clear, I mean a copyright registry that is used for the sort of thing copyright registries are used for, ie. adjudicating copyright disputes. I am not saying an NFT of the Mona Lisa is good evidence you painted the Mona Lisa (unless you minted it in 1502), and I'm definitely not saying the current market in NFTs is sensible.

It's really not at all reliable. I could create an NFT for the "Joeboy" HN account right now, and ostensibly become the owner of your HN account since such an NFT does not already exist. Obviously, this makes no sense, the NFT is meaningless.

If instead Ycombinator would release each user as an NFT, and allow people to buy/sell then, then yes you could become the owner of an HN account via NFTs. But until then, the one who knows the password is the owner.

People seems to have some sort of problem with trying to understand NFTs were all thoughts and logic go out the window as soon as NFTs are mentioned.

All that can be definitively proved outside of other methods is who created the token.

NFTs also don’t put the image on chain usually instead just linking from the metadata so a fraudster could register a bunch of placeholder NFTs and then later put stolen art where the link points to. Hey Presto you can steal art and “prove” the actual creator is the fraud.

Anyway. I wasn't talking about NFTs as they exist today. I'm just saying the original concept (as I understood it) seemed basically reasonable, before everybody went insane.

The second clause shows why the first is not true: the other evidence is what gives you the information you need. In every context where it really matters it comes down to what a court would accept and … uh … I would not want to be the one having to tell a judge that something is proof of ownership when anyone on the internet could submit the same record.

NFTs are the ownership-tying documents - specifically, asserting ownership over some property, just like any other deed/title to some property (be it tangible or abstract/intellectual). NFTs, like any other sort of deed/title, require recognition, validation, and enforcement by society at large to have any real value.

That is:

> I can sell NFTs of bridges all day long; doesn't mean anyone is buying a bridge.

I can sell deeds/titles to bridges all day long (complete with thick paper and fancy seals); doesn't mean anyone is buying a bridge.

No. An NFT is just a few bytes of text pinned to a blockchain. They are essentially useless, and every useful property of an NFT can be achieved using asymmetric encryption or digital signatures, the blockchain component is just wasteful hype.

The ability to hold and trade the NFT on the public blockchain makes that asset accessible to a large number of autonomous on-chain markets, like dApps which allow a person to take out self-executing loans that use the NFT as collateral.

In other words, you don't need the blockchain because the actual value comes from a different system. The only thing it's adding is overhead and unreliability.

"makes that asset accessible to a large number of autonomous on-chain markets, like dApps which allow a person to take out self-executing loans that use the NFT as collateral"

What market undergridded by banks provides these features.

The blockchain provides extremely high assurances of up-time and immutability in its protocol rules - which assures accessibility and protection from third party interference. This is ideal as a digital asset registry.

Not to mention you are not the only one to hold it either as someone else can Taylor Swift NFT and sell it to.

It is exactly same as buying and owning cards of your favourite celebrity. They are worthless even compared to cowdung and have absolutely not practical value.

One has to be high on drugs to buy ugly gifs for thousands of dollars.

I feel like there are two vastly different audiences with NFTs. The casual, celebrity/athlete NFTs that are selling multiple of some persons face for fiat currency, and parole who are actively participating in minting NFTs with web3 dApps made by developers with roadmaps and a strong community.

It makes me doubly furious that NFT is advertised as caring for artists. In fact, NFT makes it easier than ever to sell stolen artwork. NFT itself doesn't contain any copyrighted material, and selling metadata/URLs is not illegal, so it's likely that fraud through NFT is de-facto legal if you just carefully word it as selling the NFT of the artwork, and not the artwork itself.

NFTs are equivalent to a orange checkmark on the website twotter.com that I just set up.

Hrm...I wonder if I should mint some nft's?

And so it begins.

Don't mistake extreme technical skill as being the sole reason humans value things. Sometimes, it's just about being the first to effectively convey a new idea, and the crudeness of the execution doesn't matter. And there are plenty of extremely skilled artists that spend decades mastering their craft whose work is effectively worthless, because they're not actually breaking new ground.

I was not actually implying that I would literally start making NFT's right now.

I did however forget that jokes and humor were against Hackernews rules, and for that I thank you kind sir for the reminder.

Learning to mix paint like Rothko would take years.

https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2015/03/02/beanie-baby-bubbl...

At the very least, you can buy a piece of IP directly from the IP holder, and receive a package that's nicely presented.

It's still totally overpriced, but I can see at least some value. It still needs to go a step further technologically. Like a special app that allows you to view the NFT with AR features artificially implemented. Or displaying it in a holographic form, especially for moments captured with 360-degree cameras.

You're not really buying the IP in any meaningful way, though, you just get a non-exclusive, non-transferable (!) right to display it. They can still air it or license it to others without paying you royalties.

And even then, I'd say those mass-manufactured DVDs with 90 mins of content are intrinsically more valuable than a GIF-length video clip.

There was talk about expanding off the one site, but I haven't seen any progress there.

The metaverse pitch is that you can create economies around these that aren't constrained to a single application. I can make and sell cool art, and you can buy that art and put it anywhere - and it's yours, in a way that a downloaded PNG just isn't.

The writing was on the wall when the big newspapers gave stock tips for consumers on the hottest newest telemetry startups.

We all know how it went.

I don't get the art focus.

They can be a degree, a concert ticket, a driving license, a permission to a API service, equity to a company.

You can code a non-tradable NFT no problem.

Tradable NFTs are just the hype right now.

WTF does that even mean?

Do people remember what a blockchain even is, at this point?

A blockchain is a chain of transactions. You take away the transactions, and its not a blockchain anymore. Unless we really stretch the definition of a "transaction" or blockchain......

Cryptocurrency has lost the plot. People are talking about blockchains, that don't have mining, or transactions now apparently.

Also, it doesn't necessarily have to be a single central authority adding transactions; a whole bunch of DMVs could very well post to the same blockchain and only trust the validity of ID tokens issued by one another (i.e. with some out-of-band method to associate keys with actual DMVs, much like PGP's "web of trust" concept). This could even pave the way to things like drivers' licenses being partially or fully decentralized, with independent issuing authorities trusting one another based on some external certification process (e.g. "the California DMV has audited Foo Bar Licensing, Inc. and verified that it issues licenses in compliance with the California Vehicle Code, and therefore recognizes FBL-issued licenses as valid").

> some external certification process

Or just skip the extra complexity and have it all handled by a central authority?

Yes, you can use a blockchain to implement it how you describe, but I still don't buy that it has any real advantages. Also, who would run the blockchain?

> a whole bunch of DMVs could very well post to the same blockchain and only trust the validity of ID tokens issued by one another

> with independent issuing authorities trusting one another

If they are the only ones who can issue tokens and they have to trust each other anyway, why does it need to be a blockchain anyway instead of some shared database? Or if you want to keep it distributed, a peer-to-peer distributed hash table or other peer-to-peer database of ID tokens that only the DMV's have write access to. No need for a blockchain.

> if you have a California driver's license and I (as a Nevadan) want to verify its validity

If all the states share a blockchain, then they could just as easily share a database and web interface that you can look up. If they don't share a blockchain, then I don't see how its any different from each having their own system. I mean, even if its a blockchain, how well it works is then up to each state and if there's a centrally mandated blockchain they should be using, then there could also be a centrally mandated database they could be using. It just moves the goal posts around, it doen't in itself solve it. The person checking (bar staff in your example) still need a website or app that they can input the data to derive the hash (as not to leak personal data) and check the hash against the blockchain, this could just as easily work against a central or state database and how well it works, in either case, is still very much dependent on each state.

It seems overly complicated to build this on or as a blockchain.

Then every agency would have to trust some central authority. Maybe doable for interstate queries (with the associated federal bloat, but that's hardly anything new), but once you go international that becomes a lot harder.

> Also, who would run the blockchain?

Who runs Bitcoin? Ethereum? Cardano? Dogecoin?

> If they are the only ones who can issue tokens and they have to trust each other anyway, why does it need to be a blockchain anyway instead of some shared database?

The amount of trust required for "I'm reasonably sure this agency issued this driver's license" is far lower than the trust required for "I'm okay with this agency having control over my agency's records".

> Or if you want to keep it distributed, a peer-to-peer distributed hash table or other peer-to-peer database of ID tokens that only the DMV's have write access to.

A.k.a. a blockchain. You don't even need to restrict write access; DMVs can readily ignore transactions by non-DMV entities.

> If all the states share a blockchain, then they could just as easily share a database and web interface that you can look up.

That ain't anywhere near as easy, both politically and technically. This is already something they struggle do to, and distributed ledgers make that struggle entirely unnecessary.

> if there's a centrally mandated blockchain they should be using

There wouldn't need to be a mandate. States are perfectly capable of making agreements with one another, and could opt into a public blockchain at their leisure. CCW reciprocity is a good example of this; states have on their own come to recognize concealed carry permits issued by other states, and a blockchain would be a natural fit for recording and authenticating said permits under that dynamic.

Even assuming the need for a mandate, it's a hell of a lot easier for the federal government to say "hey, all states need to use this public blockchain per this standard" than for the federal government to roll out a whole central database that's scalable enough to handle queries nationwide and say "hey, all states need to use this central database".

> The person checking (bar staff in your example) still need a website or app that they can input the data to derive the hash (as not to leak personal data) and check the hash against the blockchain, this could just as easily work against a central or state database

Yes, and that would - again - require either:

1. a central authority that each state's agency trusts to be the record of truth, or:

2. 50 separate databases with 50 separate APIs.

A public blockchain absolves the need for either; agencies can maintain their licensing data autonomously (and, for that matter, data pertaining to those licenses; e.g. recording traffic citations, additional endorsements, etc., even for licenses issued by other agencies) without needing to deal with all that infrastructure.

They already have to do that! The central authority has to issue the licenses in the first place. Unless you are suggesting some absurd, decentralized driver's license issuing? Even that is begging the question though, as there has to be some centralized process to decide who is allowed to issue driver's licenses.

> A.k.a. a blockchain. You don't even need to restrict write access; DMVs can readily ignore transactions by non-DMV entities.

Alright, you are really stretching the definition of blockchain. Like, lets say someone just mirrors the database. So there is a web interface, and someone else copied the whole thing down.

Does that now count as a "blockchain" lol? Having more that 1 copies, of a mysql database, is a blockchain now?

The US federal government is not at all involved in issuing state drivers' licenses, last I checked. Nor is some international agency at all involved in issuing drivers' licenses within any given country. That's what I'm getting at with "central authority" - specifically, a central authority external to the issuer and/or validator.

> Like, lets say someone just mirrors the database. So there is a web interface, and someone else copied the whole thing down.

Is that person going to continually copy it down? What about data from other agencies? How many people are going to be using your web interface?

What I'm getting at there is that this all seems like an awful lot of work compared to just, you know, including some data in a transaction on any ol' existing blockchain (even Bitcoin or Dogecoin or what have you is good enough for this, let alone something that actually supports NFTs like Ethereum or Cardano) and using any ol' blockchain client/explorer to lookup whatever transaction got printed on the ID card.

> What I'm getting at there is that this all seems like an awful lot of work compared

They are literally the same thing.

The definition of what a "Blockchain" is has stretched so much, that having 1 mirror of a database would now fit people's definition of what a Blockchain is.

Once we get rid of proof of work, and transactions, the only thing we are left with is "a database which has mirrors".

Neither of which I suggested getting rid of above (though to be clear, proof of stake and proof of burn both exist). Transactions are especially handy when you move beyond merely recording the drivers' licenses themselves and actually start recording things like, say, traffic tickets or new endorsements or what have you - and that handiness is significantly improved further when agencies are sharing a single public blockchain instead of trying to maintain umpteen different internal databases explicitly tracking each other.

Even taking your assumption that a blockchain and a database mirror are "literally the same thing", you're still missing the key difference: that the former gives you the benefits of the latter (or at least the ones relevant to this context) with significantly less effort. It's similar in comparison to, say, using IPFS v. mirroring an FTP server; yes, you can create a bunch of FTP mirrors, and reinvent a poorly-specified ad-hoc substitute for half of IPFS, but it'd be a heck of a lot easier and more robust to... just use IPFS.

Allow me to use your example if I want to explain the main advantage of Blockchain derivative technology. Most of people seem to mix up Blockchain and Bitcoin, and think that Blockchain is equivalent to Bitcoin.

I was just pointing out how it can be done or how it might make sense, if you needed it for something where blockchain did actually make sense, but in the case of drivers licenses, I don't think it does.

The blockchain space is just starting out and people try new things. But many can only see the crypto currency use-case.

transactions change the state of the database. they aren't limited to trading-related transactions.

Just think about all cases of fake liceses? This could be verified rather easily with an NFT while faking it would be quite hard.

Since drivers licenses are linked to individuals, and cannot be traded, the traffic cop that's checking your license will need to compare it to your government issued ID. Then they look it up to see that its valid and linked to you as a person.

How is doing this as an NFT (or other blockchain thing) any better than having a government database they look up?

This is a big problem I have with most blockchain tech: yes, it can be built on a blockchain, but it doesn't need it and alternatives tend to be simpler and cheaper.

I'm overall pro cryptocurrency and blockchain, but if we want people to still take it seriously in twenty years time, we need the use cases to actually make sense. I don't see how NFT's make sense here, unless I'm missing something.

If it's an out-of-state (or worse: international) ID, then the traffic cop (or, speaking from experience, some clerical worker back at the station) would need to deal with some bespoke interface for some external government database - and thus be at the mercy of that external agency. Such interfaces do exist, but they're clunky and antiquated, and it's pretty difficult to get authorization to connect to it. Even for intrastate lookups, a centralized database entails a bunch of infrastructure that's rarely publicly-accessible.

With a (public) blockchain, this becomes a heck of a lot easier and more accessible, since anyone from anywhere can query it with a common and publicly-known interface. Likewise, any agency can post to it without necessarily needing prior authorization and without needing to be at the mercy of other agencies; while there's obviously still a need for agencies to communicate with one another to exchange public keys (and therefore recognize/trust each others' blockchain transactions), that's much less complicated than coordinating a bunch of ad-hoc API connections.

Only if you assume that every country will actually collaborate and use the same blockchain. Much more likely, in my opinion, is that each country will have its own incompatible blockchain and the end result won't be any different than what you described.

I mean, I get what you're saying and its more likely that an international standard would come into use if no individual country has control over it, but I still think its unlikely.

It would more likely be something rolled out by the agency itself. That somebody could accordingly be the agency (preferably just a rebadged and customized version of some FOSS application) and "some reason" would be "not having to duplicate a bunch of effort just to maintain an ID database".

> using a more complex system that they have less control over

I think you're underestimating the complexity of building 50 separate databases and the connections between them, as well as overestimating the control an agency would have over 49 of those databases. And that's just for interstate lookups, never mind international.

Point being: in the grand scheme of things, a blockchain-based approach would be far simpler and offer more control.

I don't know police agencies well at all, but I suspect that if a local police force was deciding between "use the state system" and "use some frontend we built ourselves or needed to license ourselves and has no reason to have any tech support", they are going to choose "use the state system".

Or heck, just use a federal system.

But having a globally available, decentralized, and transparent database for some of these "certificats" could be a good thing.

Quote from statista: "In 2020, global gaming audiences spent an approximate 54 billion U.S. dollars on additional in-game content". But the players don't own their purchases. You don't play the game anymore, servers go down or you get banned and all your stuff is gone. Think about that.

Edit: Of course my comment got nothing but down votes again on HN. Was worth a try anyway.

With your example, if the game goes down, an NFT of the in-game purchase isn’t going to be very useful. What’s the difference between having a token or not of the content if there are still no servers for the game either way? Maybe the NFT still points to a screenshot? Great…

Why? The blockchain already does this. All you need to do is hold the private key to the wallet.

* Real charities, not those billionaire tax avoidance schemes.

There are a surprising number of bored rich people, especially when you consider all the new-found crypto wealth. Most of them probably haven't contributed any of their excess wealth to help the hundreds of millions of people who are still starving, so if NFT is one way to extract some of that, so be it.

Hate to burst your bubble, but that is 99.99% of the NFT market. There is maybe 5 people total who bought a NFT for art appreciation reasons, but aside from that rounding error the only reason anyone owns one is as a speculative investment.

No such thing.

If not, who would buy an NFT of your jam sessions? The pioneering garage rock band The Stooges released a remastered edition of 1970's Fun House some years back, and included 2 CDs of rehearsal/studio sessions and outtakes.

They were widely panned for it, with some reviews saying that even the most ardent Iggy Pop fan wouldn't need 5 versions of "TV Eye".

Except all these NFT stores require an invite from another artist. As someone who loves taking photos but isn’t socially connected because it’s a passion and not a job, it seems very elitist. Maybe it’s that way because I don’t have access to it and my brain is just playing tricks. But it seems like one of those “you aren’t good enough for this” kind of thing. Some of the online stores like Foundation app have become gatekeepers rather than outlets.

Most of the influencers are shilling something, obviously

But when some random guy without a story renders a thousand animated dogs from a script and the actual art is how to push it via Reddit bots, my support for artistic value creation has reached its limit.

The recent Met gala.. socialites and wealth parading the halls hanging Caravaggio and Van Gogh, who died destetute.