this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2026
307 points (98.7% liked)
Fuck AI
6040 readers
1282 users here now
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don't think any of your examples are actual improvements - they just open up exciting new opportunities for inefficiency, fraud, grift, and graft, while creating a new barrier to entry (technological literacy regarding cryptocurrency) for anyone who wants to safely use them.
I mean, for example, blockchains are trustless systems, but land ownership isn't a trustless system - the government, generally through the judicial system, is the final arbiter of who owns land. So either the government manages land records on its own spreadsheets, or you use a blockchain, which is just a spreadsheet with extra steps, and has to have a judicial override allowing land tokens to be transferred without the owner's consent, which eliminates one of the biggest reasons to use a blockchain in the first place.
And besides that, if all homeowners are publicly known and identified on that blockchain, all homeowners immediately become targets for identity and private key theft. Somebody forging a deed to my house and selling it to a third party who shows up expecting to move in sucks. Somebody stealing my private keys because my 5-year-old downloaded an Italian brainrot generator with a malicious payload, and then selling those keys to a third party, who shows up expecting to move in, also sucks, and has much less of a paper trail that I can use to prove the fraud.
Same with auctions, with the stock exchange, and so on - NFTs don't offer any real improvements over online databases, and while they make certain types of fraud more difficult, they create opportunities for new types of fraud that the legal system has much less experience dealing with.
You are definitely right that 90% of the functionality of NFTs is already implemented in current systems. But the difference is that NFTs integrate cryptography in a way that makes these actions much more efficient. It's easier to plug a smart card into a computer and generate a cryptographic signature than it is to sign a document in person, and it's also harder (but not impossible) to argue that cryptographic signature wasn't generated by you. And when it comes to deeds, it's often times necessary to search up what encumbrances exist on the deed and what happened to it in the past. Blockchains don't turn this from impossible to possible (a land office can already just have a clerk find and deliver this information), but they do make it faster, and the blockchain's properties store this information and make it accessible in a way that we already know how it works.
I want to stress that while most cryptocurrency assets follow the principle of "code is law", there is no reason that NFTs representing real world assets can't follow the principle of "law is law". As in, human law written by legislatures and enforced by courts.
In a real world implementation of this system, private keys would probably be stored on a physical device, in a way that said keys are never exposed at all. The functionality already exists to embed the signing software onto a smart card, and that smart card can be one's ID card (smart ID cards are already used for this purpose in Hong Kong, where they can generate cryptographic signatures that replace physical signatures on contracts).
In addition to that, there is always the escape hatch where, according to an established legal process, a court or government authority can declare a token invalid and re-issue it.
While NFTs could, in theory, entirely replace paper deeds, the argument you make is one among many reasons why doing so would be a bad idea. Instead, deeds would probably only optionally be recorded as an NFT.