Now, mind you, I am only so initiated myself.
I have a weird theory that I'm going to try and lay out (imperfectly) and I am feeling more full of shit than usual, so humor me. Gedanken! (who sneezed?)
After literally centuries of all manor of "intellectual property rights", where the use of force is necessarily the way in which they are enFORCED, people think they have a pretty good understanding of what it means to "own" a game, say. Or "own the rights" to a song. Real obvious stuff.
No? Not force? Okay, can you name for me just one such scheme that did not? All you have to do to put a serious wrench in my theory is find a single example of an "intellectual property" scheme that was voluntary. A voluntary law.
You might say that theft is theft. Well, I would agree with you as far as that goes, but 'what is theft?' is an important part we're glossing over.
It's possible for just plain old cultural shame to be the enforcer for such things. "You stole Bob's rake!" or "You plagiarized Bob's code-poem!". I think we agree that that's a thing and that has probably a net-positive effect. If 80% of people feel harshly about a thieves, then hopefully thieving is less of a thing. And that's good. And that's also how we got to the 80%+ territory. It's reasonable. People agree. No throwing anyone in anything.
I don't know that I'd argue that any kind of physical property theft is justified. Of course there are fuzzy edges. Loaf-of-bread and all that. And thinking those things through and treating people right requires human minds to think and sometimes bend. It ain't perfect. There's a boatload we haven't figured out.
When we blithely categorize words and ideas as property we get into straight up, airliner-eating pea soup.
So before, a song was "protected" by a bunch of laws and people with sticks and guns. Folks kept their noses clean for fear of going to jail or having a judge take their gaming machine; an act that is just "just" without having to really think on it. Serves you right, kid.
But now, thanks to blockchains, we can literally own a digital good. If I buy a song from 𝜏ΉϓⲦΉϻ then it's MINE and PROTECTED BY CRYPTOGRAPHIC MAGIC!
Ok. Well, let us examine what you own, "digitally".
You own a particular number in a particular instance of a data structure (probably. implementations vary.) That number is all yours! You can send it to someone else, you can fractionalize it. You can use it as collateral. You could swap it for a helicopter. All just because you OWN that number and can prove it!
Exactly what is missing from this? I'm sure there are subtleties. But who is going to knock down the door and recover and destroy the copy of your cyber-ape-pump.jpeg ? You can prove that you snatched up hash(cyber-ape-pump.jpeg) before anyone else. But what else can you do? You could send it to your aunt.
The fact that someone else will buy it from me for seven million dollars, does indeed mean that it is now worth that much, at least by my definition of "worth".
But what is Yacht Billington going to do with it other than sell it to another bored billionaire?
You can do things with NFTs, but how many folks know what kinds of things and with what constraints?
For reals, we all get things wrong. I won't be the first guy to say "well I just don't get it" and completely miss the point (which, interpreted literally makes total sense, but if interpreted as a slight to your ego is laughably naive.)
Is it possible buyers are going ape-pump and those in the know understand that it's best just to keep quiet.
I'm not in the know, so don't look at me.
I genuinely look forward to a productive argument in the comments.
[BTW, I totally stoled the thumbnail for this article.]
