Technology

And legal regulations around the deeds for land ownership are different laws than the legal regulations for how you can use the land.

But conflating the two as the same thing is the purpose of this lawsuit, even though it's clear as fucking day that they are regulating the deal-making-instrument (the NFT) and not the art itself, which, once again, is a separate entity from the NFT.

Let’s assume you’re arguing in good faith here so we can understand why land deeds and URLs are completely different.

Deeds are managed by a central authority. There is an agreed-upon way(s) to view and search those deeds. There is a single authority to update or remove deeds. The items the deed refers to also are controlled by a single authority and changing them has a single process.

URLs are registered (loosely) with a central authority but the similarities end there. I can impersonate a URL on a network (even up to large chunks of the internet if I’m able to confuse DNS in a large enough attack). So just because you’ve bought the domain referenced in the blockchain and set up some name servers doesn’t mean any consumer of the blockchain or even the internet is guaranteed to hit your instance of the domain. All a URL is is a reference to something so let’s assume for a minute we can have a global reference. What’s behind it? Again, completely uncontrolled. For now it could be your NFT; what happens if I am your hosting provider and destroy your instance? Move your hardware? What’s to prevent you, the owner of the assumed global reference, to change what that uniform resource locator is actually locating?

Land deeds and URLs are not analogous. Land and the content served at a URL are not analogous. Let’s look at NFTs quickly to see if we can actually do something about this!

Since we have a single-write, read-only database, why not store the full thing in the DB? Well, first you have to agree on a representation. It has to be unchanging so we can’t use a URL. It can’t ever duplicate so realistically hashing is out (unless our hash provides a bijection which is just a fancy way of saying use the fucking object itself). Assuming we’re only talking about digital artifacts (attempting to digitize a physical asset is a form of hashing meaning we get collisions so you can’t prove ownership), we’re now in an arms race for you to register all of your assets and their serialization methods before I brute force everything. Oh and this needs to live everywhere so it can be public so you need peta-many petabyte drives. But wait! Now we’re burning the sun in power just to show you have ownership of 10 and I have ownership of 01. Fuck me that’s dumb.

Don't recall... let's check the Blockchain!

blockchain where we buy hashes linking to the image library of babel.

You don't regulate the metadata, you regulate its trade as a financial security.

But you knew that, you're just being obtuse.

The SEC also regulates trading in stocks, which are contracts that show ownership, just of a portion of a corporation instead of a piece of art. They're both classified as securities because they can be bought, sold and traded as investments where people can stand to gain or lose large sums of money in said trades. They work in very similar, if not identical, ways. If the NFT did not function so much like a stock investment and was just something you could buy or sell as a regular good, then the implementation would not be so weird.

Guess what the SEC enforces? You guessed it, laws!

I see.

No worse than any other form of modern "art"

wait, what are you even buying then?!

I thought (i) at least served as a proof of ownership for (ii)...

Maybe to paper handed bitches it doesn't make sense.

LMAO I gotta do better at screenshotting shit for dopes who delete their comments.

"and not seeking to profit from their investment, they wouldn’t need a securities mechanism like NFTs to do it."

Sure, that makes sense \s