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Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

Except the company that sold Moon shares had no authority to offer ownership over any part of the moon. The blockchain does have authority to offer ownership over particular tokens on that blockchain. Those are valuable so long as there are enough people that agree they are valuable and are willing to exchange other goods and services for them. Oh yeah, kind of like fiat money.

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What do you mean "except"?

Within the moon share ecosystem, moon shares have the exact same kind of authority.

Value's always worth what someone will pay, sure. But blockchain authority isn't more special than any other database. It has some fancy properties, but they don't affect the authority.

What does it mean to own something? It what sense does a Moon share give you any ownership over any part of the moon? If someone else goes up to the Moon and builds a lunar base on "your" piece of the Moon, does your Moon share give you any way to stop them? Can you sue them in any court? Does it prevent anyone in any way from doing whatever they want with that piece of the Moon? No, it doesn't.

Contrast with a token in your wallet on the blockchain. As long as your private keys are secure, nobody else but you can transfer that token anywhere else. Nobody else can convincingly represent that they are the owner of it. The blockchain proves irrefutably that you own it. The blockchain, as represented by the consensus of thousands of nodes, is the ultimate authority of who owns what on that blockchain.

The blockchain equates to the Moon Shares company. Outside of the company/blockchain, the ownership means nothing.

Outside of the blockchain, a token on the blockchain means nothing. Outside of the Moon company, a piece of the moon is still a real thing that means something. You can only "own" a physical object if you either have sufficient physical force to assert your ownership of it or the government recognizes your ownership and will exert force on your behalf to assert it.

Neither of those are necessary for the blockchain because nobody can assert ownership of the blockchain tokens without the private keys to your wallet.

And my moon certificate proves that I own that part of the moon. Control over transfer is not the same as control over other uses.

It doesn't prove that you own part of the moon at all. The moon is a physical object. To own it, you need to be able to prevent other people from using it, or have an authority that can do so recognize your ownership and do that on your behalf. The Moon shares don't do that. The NFT on the blockchain does prevent other people from using that NFT without your authorization.

What do you use an NFT for? In another comment, you say it's not the image. So what is it?

It's an entry in the blockchain. A record in a database.

Let's say you go to Sotheby's and you buy Van Gogh's Starry Night at auction. Along with the actual painting, you'd get a certificate of authenticity showing the provenance of the work. Basically, a record showing everyone who owned it before you and certifying that this is, in fact, the real Starry Night that Van Gogh painted. The real value of the painting is not in the painting itself, but in that certificate proving that it's the real original. If you tried to sell the painting without it, you wouldn't get many buyers. There's lots of people who could paint an exact replica of Starry Night, but there's still only one real Starry Night. Likewise, anyone can make a copy of a piece of digital art, but there's only one NFT, and if you don't have the NFT in your crypto wallet, you don't actually own it.

So, think of it as a certificate of authenticity for digital artworks, although it can be used to represent ownership of other things as well, if people agreed to it. It can also do neat things like transfer a portion of the sale price back to the original artist every time it's sold, which isn't currently done with regular artworks.

Except the real value is in the painting. If it were destroyed, then the certificate would be worthless. If the certificate were destroyed, you could have experts inspect the painting to see how old it is and compare minor defects to those found in duplicates to show its authenticity. No one would want to buy the certificate from you but let you keep the painting in your vaults

> Except the real value is in the painting. If it were destroyed, then the certificate would be worthless.

Not true. Banksy sold a painting for $1.4 million and it shredded itself right after the auction ended. Three years later the shredded remains (presumably with the certificate of authenticity) sold for $25.4 million[1]. So, no, the value is not in an intact painting.

Forgers can artificially age paintings. It's amazing the lengths they go to. Maybe something like Starry Night has been analyzed enough that it could be verified, but other works are not. It's not really known how many works of art on the market are forgeries.

> No one would want to buy the certificate from you but let you keep the painting in your vaults

Actually people do this all the time. They pay millions upon millions of dollars for a work of art and it gets loaned to a museum and possibly sent all over the world. They still own it though. There's also freeports[2] around the world with warehouses full of art. You can buy an artwork and it never moves from the warehouse, just the record of who owns it changes.

[1] https://nypost.com/2021/10/14/shredded-banksy-artwork-could-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_economic_zone

Banksy is gimmicky.

The value of art is art. If we disagree then you are admitting that both the art world and crypto are heavily used for money laundering.

Of course art is heavily used for money laundering. Nobody ever claimed otherwise. That is a simple fact and has nothing to do with what we’re talking about. Nothing that you claim about value is going to change the fact that art is used for money laundering.

> It what sense does a Moon share give you any ownership over any part of the moon? If someone else goes up to the Moon and builds a lunar base on "your" piece of the Moon, does your Moon share give you any way to stop them?

In what sense does a Token give you any ownership over any part of the image? If someone does a copy&paste operation and starts selling "your" image on a t-shirt, does your NFT give you any way to stop them?

You don't need to stop them. You don't own an image, you own a token. People can copy the image all they want, that doesn't give them ownership of the token.

I can go to the Louvre and take a picture of the Mona Lisa. That doesn't mean I own the Mona Lisa.

Similarly, if you buy a certificate implausibly claiming that you own a bit of the moon, well, you own a certificate implausibly claiming that you own a bit of the moon.

Heh, that reminds me of these ads I kept seeing some time ago, that claimed to offer some sort of title in Scotland that was based on owning some minuscule plot the company was selling.

In that case, while the title's not real, you may at least _actually_ be buying a very small amount of land (though some of those things are just scams).

Save this comment so you can look back on it in ten years.

As a crypto-punk owner myself, I feel that that NFTs are the future. Look at this baby. 250k. https://openpuddle.io/?id=328wfloxyf

Authority on the blockchain is validated by a bunch of different actors, none who trust each other but reaches consensus anyways.

Authority within the moon share ecosystem is validated only by the people who own the company.

That might matter in a niche case where the ownership of my moon share database entry is in dispute. (And each system has positives and negatives, blockchains aren't a strict upgrade.)

But the potential authority over the actual moon is the same under both systems.

Ownership only ever matters when there's a dispute. If you go build a house on a piece of land, and nobody ever comes along and disputes whether you own that land, does it matter whether you do or not? I mean, we even built into our laws that if you do that and nobody disputes it for long enough, then you get to officially own the land.

> Ownership only ever matters when there's a dispute.

Right.

And a blockchain only solves a tiny percentage of ownership issues. It solves those issues with powerful mathematical certainty, and if you could live inside a blockchain your problems would be solved*, but don't confuse that sliver with the full set of real-world ownership issues that exist with or without a blockchain being involved.

* if there are no bugs or hacks

Moon Shares were legal ownership over particular tokens that signified (but not enforce in any legal way) ownership of land on the moon. Just like NFTs are legal ownership over particular tokens that signify (but not enforce in any legal way) ownership of JPEGs.

The JPEG is incidental. What you own is the token. You don't need the legal system to enforce your ownership of it because it is essentially impossible for anyone else to assert ownership of it without your private keys.

But whatever, think whatever you want. Just know that you're the guy in 1995 ranting about how this silly Internet fad is just something nerds waste time with.

Owning the token representing a claim on a JPEG is equivalent to owning the token representing a claim on moon land.

In 1995 most of the uses of the internet were stupid. Eventually, they became useful. Hopefully the same happens with crypto

Is it really equivalent? Are you sure you can't think of any differences between a JPEG and a piece of land?

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