memes

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

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.

The NFT IS a contract

No, it is not. A signed piece of paper is not a contract, either, even though we often refer to it as such metonymically. 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.

You are so welded to your meme identity it blinds you to a useful and functional thing

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.