If you want to buy a bike, make sure it has a serial number (and if the number was filed off, then yes it was probably stolen), and look it up on the index.
How would an NFT be better than the above database in any way?
I do think the bikeindex could be run better (fewer regional websites, a database we can download for archival purposes, sharing of information between multiple registries), but all of those things seem like they're easier and cheaper to do without a blockchain or NFTs.
Rather than do something like NFTs, they could do what the certificate transparency project does, and just dictate "here's the data format, here's how you share data", and get all the benefits I can think of with none of the downsides or ecological waste.
For what it's worth, there is evidence that such a database can be made and work in a similar case, since car registrations, transfers, etc are all quite well handled with no NFTs.
It wouldn't depend on the benevolence of a third-party absorbing the cost of running the index.
It would be geographically and culturally agnostic. Zoom out here and notice how little of the World's population is involved: https://map.bikewise.org/#0/84/-77
It would be globally unique and would not require the cooperation of manufacturers. Neither of my two bikes has a serial number because they're 'too old'. Other bikes have conflicting serial numbers.
It would eliminate the privacy and security risks of maintaining a central database of PII and associated valuable assets.
Wouldn't you rather just have it run by an entity the legal system can point to?
If you don't trust the legal system...then I really doubt that having a third-party website is going to help you with a bike thief in anyway.
Who's to say everyone is using the same NFTs for this? We already see a variety of different platforms for NFT art.
> It would eliminate the privacy and security risks of maintaining a central database of PII and associated valuable assets.
How are there now fewer privacy and security risks when the entire blockchain is completely public? Where's the privacy?
And it would still require a third party to benevolently run an app to search and make sense of the data from the ledger, and also to verify that the data inserted was actually real and not poisoning the db.
There is the problem of correct data, but I don't understand how an NFT manages to make data correct. How do I prove to the NFT that I own the bike with SN 123? How do I prove it was stolen?
I'd love if we replaced the bikeindex with a certificate transparency project-esque system and each large bike manufacturer ran an instance.
That also seems like it would be vastly easier to create than having people use the bike-stolen-registry-NFT you're talking about, and as a bonus it would be far less wasteful.
I'd love it if these industries/communities adopted log-structured distributed datastores with digital signing to track provenance of things without wasteful "mining". But the fact is that they've shown no willingness to do so, and it's a lot harder to bootstrap a system like this - if your system relies on a trusted root then you need the trust before you can start to develop the system at all, but users have no reason to trust the system until it's all fully running and proven.
In the eyes of the law, the guy holding the bike and the receipt owns it. What the NFT says is irrelevant.
So how are NFTs useful again?
It would be like requiring every good sold to have a trivially electronically verifiably accurate original receipt that only someone who acquired it illegitimately would lack.
The advantage over something like bikeindex is that you could make the transfer process a lot more seamless. You could build things like escrowing into the protocol, so when someone sells a bike to you on craigslist, you have a nice clean transactional system which adds some nice anti-fraud measures and protections for you without necessarily requiring you to buy it from a store or marketplace to gain those protections.
The thieves can do whatever they want with the certificate -- use it to pay illicit debts and so forth. They can visit their painting at the museum, and brag to their friends about it. But the rest of the public still gets to enjoy the painting too.
Now closer to home, I'm a musician and play a modestly valuable instrument. I've thought of taking really high resolution images of it, because the grain pattern of the wood is practically like a fingerprint, and would be difficult to conceal without destroying the instrument. A database with hi-res pictures of valuable instruments would be like a serial number database for bikes.
With an NFT I don’t even know what you’re certifying, except that this one chain says you own the object. In your example that’s not even true, the museum “owns” it, yet the thieves have it, and the NFT is now just as flawed as today’s understanding of ownership.
I love this answer because it's a perfect analogy to explain why NFTs are total nonsense.
Owning a one-of-a-kind, literally irreplaceable painting cannot be substituted for a certificate. The certificate has zero value because it does not allow the owner to restrict access to the original painting.
The core concept of ownership (control over a scarce resource) is violated as soon as you start trading a certificate instead of the original item.
It's like someone saying that owning the last remaining Michael Jordan baseball card is the same as owning Michael Jordan, and that both have the same value. It's ludicrous.
That’s entirely how our markets are run. Nearly all stock is owned by a few trusts and what everyone is trading everyday are “certificates” of the original stock certificates.
Even big ticket items like cars or homes, they really aren’t worth anything without a clean title or deed. On the other hand people buy deeds all the time without ever seeing the actual property.
Stock ownership gives you dividends and votes, too. You can sue for these things if they aren't given to you.
Cars and homes are things I can physically interacg with.
Digital certificates of digital goods have none of those qualities. If you do get any legal rights when you own them, it's not any different than copyright, which we've already seen is essentially impossible to enforce for digital works.
Honestly I didn't even think about a definition of ownership when coming up with my idea.