this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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At the very basic level NFTs programatically enact contract law in a perfectly transparent way that cannot be faked
The use cases for this aren't normally apparent to the average consumer because of habit more than anything. I will give some use cases
A limited access club can mint NFTs for membership, allowing the holders to personally trade their access in a transparent way and provides an encrypted method functionally equivalent to a One Time Pad (One of the most, if not the MOST secure encryption method in existence) so building access can be transferred instantly between rights holders, as well as providing a secure inherent messaging between members
This can also be generalized for apartment access. Need a place to stay? You can purchase the tenant NFT from the current renter, and have access to the property securely within seconds
I use these examples because they are human friendly but the BEST use of NFTs is programatic resource management for automated purchasing systems (which are going to be a FUCKING HUGE THING now that LLMs have got access to the big money), for example:
Lets say a LLM is tasked with constantly sourcing the cheapest source of tin for industrial processes, and that all the tin producers set lots of raw material as NFTs. (In this case it isn't an ideal use as the lots are not unique, but the underlying programatic contract execution doesn't care and treats them as unique) so the LLM calculates shipping and price and automatically buys lots of NFTs to match the need, which ship out from a port halfway around the world that afternoon
Now 2 days into the 12 day shipping time, the LLM notices that there is a sudden need for tin closer to the current ship location than the initial destination and contacts the LLM of the company that posted the tin need, and offers the lots of NFTs on the ship, the other LLM agrees and the contract is made, the ownership of those lots are altered, the shipping manifest of the cargo vessel is updated and the shipping route may or may not be altered based on the judgment of the LLM handling the cargo ship. All of this happens in a matter of seconds. Once the transaction is complete, the original LLM now goes and searches for another source of tin
The biggest benefit of NFTs is reducing the friction of complex logistic changes allowing companies to find advantages that pass too quickly for humans to notice or make best use of in a way that can be legally as binding as any other signed contract in a court of law.
There are other benefits and use cases, some silly and some abstract but NFTs are so much more than a link to an png on a file server somewhere but that's ALL people like you will ever know them for because scammers ruined the name while real devs were still working on useful products.
You can do this with a database.
You can do this with a PIN code.
You can do this with databases.
In any situation where you might be tempted to call an NFT "legally binding", it's not the NFT that's binding, it's a contract, and the NFT is just a proxy for the contract. The NFT adds no value.
Blockchain is a database. One that everyone automatically can access. The advantage is that you don't need an admin console. There is no complex on-board and control of users.
FUCKING THANK YOU!
Yes because blockchain is a database. What it brings that other databases CANNOT is 1) Unfalsifiability baked in to the product at a fundamental level and 2) A universal framework for enacting contracts that are secure enough to use in court as a legally binding document (adobe paid and passed on to the customer a ridiculous cost to make their product compliant with this, for blockchain it is already baked in
A horse will take you to the grocery store too, but the NFT of the apartment also comes with the legal documents that show you are the valid resident unlike just a pin code. This also protects the customer from brokers and services from using illegal subletting as you can only get the 'pin' from the last valid owner, and that access can be traced back to the initial moment the property entered the blockchain. Also in court, discovery is stupidly easy as all transactions are public and secure
Yes and every company has their own database system and almost NONE of them talk to each other and none of them are public ledgers and absolutely none of them operate on consensus polling, meaning trust needs to be established directly, custom APIs need to be crafted for every paired trade instance. Nearly every blockchain comes with that baked in, and has been actively tested and attacked for a decade and a half with zero failure of the underlying blockchain technology.
The NFT IS a contract, this is what you are missing, and the value it adds is immense which I have demonstrated thoroughly in counter to every weakass claim you have made and you still adamantly refuse to admit your failures
You are so welded to your meme identity it blinds you to a useful and functional thing
Great. You know what, I agree that those are, at least in theory, real advantages.
Question: how much value would this realistically add? When was the last time the Average Joe had a problem with illegal subletting or a complicated discovery process? I know I've never had these problems.
Also, this is all coming with a new attack vector---malicious smart contracts. In a court of law, I can go before a judge and argue that the terms of a contract are unfair, and they're more likely to side with me, a non-sophisticated actor. "Smart contracts" do not give you any such recourse. I don't want to live in a world where cold machine logic overrides human judgement, and I think most ordinary people feel the same way.
No, it is not. A signed piece of paper is not a contract, either. A contract is a legally-binding agreement. It may be represented and recorded in some form, but it doesn't have to be. There's no formal specification for legal contracts. Lawyers/businesses like written contracts in standard legal language because it helps with reliability and predictability, but nothing says a contract has to look like that. Two parties can meet and agree verbally on some terms, without writing anything down, and that can count as a contract.
Yes, NFTs have this thing called "smart contracts", but the relationship between "smart contracts" and actual legal contracts is not one-to-one: not every smart contract is a legal contract. More importantly, though, if crypto advocates' claims are valid, then it shouldn't matter whether a smart contract is a legal contract. A legal contract has an external enforcement mechanism---namely, the courts. In contrast, a smart contract is supposed to be self-executing. This is the whole point of the "code is law" slogan.
If code is law, then the courts aren't necessary, and it doesn't matter whether an NFT is a legal contract. If code is not law---in other words, if the law is law---then the courts are still the ultimate enforcement mechanism, and the NFT itself is pointless. It could have just been a digital record stored in two databases, and it would have been equally legally binding with much less hassle.
In order to prove that crypto is not nearly as useful as crypto advocates have claimed, all I need to do is point to generative AI. I think the value of generative AI in the short term is overblown, but nonetheless, just look at how it's been adopted by basically every tech company in the world just a few years after ChatGPT's release. Now look at how many companies are using crypto in mission-critical contexts more than two decades after Bitcoin was invented. Sure, a few companies hyped crypto adoption in order to pump their stock back when crypto was The Thing, but how much do we hear about all that stuff these days?
Crypto is a solution in search of a problem.