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Comment by baby | Hacker News Reader

Interesting thing I've read today: real estate is becoming really expensive because it is slowly becoming more liquid on the liquid scale. Back then, it was hard to buy and sell a house, but as it's becoming easier and easier people treat it more and more like an investment. I think NFTs are trying to do the same for EVERYTHING. But, big but, not everything can be linked "loosely" to a blockchain. There's a lot of people talking about supply chain on the blockchain but so far I'm not seeing any convincing application. On the other hand art is really just about status and signaling, and it makes sense that they would convert more easily into this world.

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> art is really just about status and signaling

I am convinced that crypto people know literally nothing about the world other than making numbers on a screen go up.

Charitably, they were probably talking about the high-end art market, where that is definitely the case.

There is some evidence that a decent amount of the transactions in the high-end art market are disguised money laundering

There’s a lot of economists and finance people working in the field.

> There's a lot of people talking about supply chain on the blockchain

More and more I wonder if the answer to Fermi's paradox is that all sufficiently advance civilizations discover blockchains and subsequently destroy their planet.

>I think NFTs are trying to do the same for EVERYTHING.

I really fail to see how adding lengthy processing logic to transactions makes anything more liquid.

I can see how it would make _some_ things more liquid. Imagine if the average residential real estate transaction didn’t require a titling agency. You’d be able to buy a house on a Sunday, or after 6pm. People might be more inclined to buy the $85k North Little Rock House [0] if they didn’t have to sign 2 hours of paperwork and pay $7k in fees.

[0] https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/723-W-23rd-St-North-Littl...

You can sign pretty much everything required online at pretty much any time these days.

Last time I bought a house we needed a solicitor or conveyancers to do a title search. That info could be on a blockchain as an nft amd a smart contract could handle it.

What would be the improvement over a database?

Trust.

A blockchain copy can be better verified than a database.

If the content of an NFT or what have you disagrees with the government's records - e.g. the database you would otherwise be querying - the government's records win. The government is the source of truth for title ownership.

Well, the Government could still be the one who writes the smart contract (or commissions one or uses a global standard) and has oracles with all the data required. I know many purists wouldn't like that, but I'm just bullish on the technology, and see it going further than NFT images and the FUD that people keep arguing about, i.e right click save and ponzi schemes. There's a use-case for this tech, and it's in discovery mode at the moment. Writing it off now feels a little premature.

Really? Imagine trying to sell a piece of art. People need to authenticate it, then you need to transport it while having some escrow solution for the transaction. With an NFT you can do the transfer instantly (depending on the blockchain) and with no trusted third party.

A blockchain solves none of the issues you listed, though. You still need to transport it, most cryptocurrencies still have escrow solutions, and a blockchain is fundamentally a third party you have to trust (and the more established currencies are decidedly not instant). You can sell a piece of art instantly for cash if you wanted to, the problem is all the other logistics surrounding it.

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