[yata69420]

I use all those types of cryptography too, but NFTs provide additional features.

The special thing about NFTs is that they're securely transferable on a public ledger, which isn't really the case with client certificates or ssh keys.

Let's say I buy a ticket to a show as an NFT and I want to give it to you. I can simply send it to your wallet address, and now you own it and can prove you do at admission time.

If I resell the ticket to you at a premium, perhaps the performer gets an additional cut to help them capture some of the resale value and reduce scalping.

I'm not sure how you'd do this with SSH keys or private certificates, but I think you would end up needing some kind of registration/directory/ledger service, and then you've just invented cryptocurrency again.

[dragontamer]

What's stopping from people from sharing accounts?

Scalper creates "Scalper Account#1234". Scalper uses Account#1234 to buy the NFT, then sells the account in it entirety to Alice. Alice then enters the show.

There's no way to prove that Account#1234 was legitimately purchased, or if it was from a "scalper". Honestly, it looks like you're just playing games with 1990s-era verification methods, none of which worked.

The "solution" today is to install a rootkit of some kind onto people's phones and/or PCs, to stop this kind of behavior. (Anti-cheat software for video games). Leading to TPM and so forth. But at no point is NFTs actually solving the problem (and many people online consider the TPM stuff immoral anyway, because it forces the ticketmaster to control your computer/devices).

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Perhaps this can all be solved with long-lived accounts. Its easier to trust a 10-year-old account with a long purchase history rather than a fresh 2-month old account. But there's ways around that too (see Reddit accounts: some dude in a 3rd world country owns an account for 2-years+ with basic posts and then sells the account to a reputation manager).

So its not like you can trust long-term accounts anyway, not as long as 3rd world countries are willing to sell legitimate long-lived accounts for $$$$.

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At no point am I seeing this "scalper problem" solved. Nor do I see how NFTs even help at all.

[yata69420]

> What's stopping from people from sharing accounts?

I guess if the ScalperAccount has a dedicated wallet that only has one asset, and that wallet's private key is sold, sure. Of course, there would be no guarantee that you're not being scammed when you send payment and never receive the private key. When done on-chain, there is a guarantee that you will receive the NFT you purchased.

People do this today with video game accounts, usually ones that have a single game or subscription obtained through gray or black market transactions.

But in an NFT-enabled world, you would need to be signed into the seller's wallet to attend the event and it wouldn't be your normal wallet. Identity could be confirmed cryptographically with an attestation or heuristically by having some amount of additional assets in the buyer/seller wallets (because everything would go with the wallet if private keys were shared).

Also if people traded private keys in this way, they would lose out of value adds like POAPs that contribute to your history, which could be useful for getting better tickets in the future or proving social status or whatever.

In this case, NFTs allow for a secondary market to exist with additional stipulations (such as revenue sharing) via smart contracts.

Of course, all of this can be done with centralized services, but decentralized protocols have much better interoperability and trust than centralized databases with web APIs, which is the whole point of a trusted distributed ledger.

[RyanCavanaugh]

This is still useless because there's already a single issuer of concert tickets: The ticket vendor. The vendor already has a plain-old database of the tickets which can handle transactions at a tiny fraction of the cost, and can capture the value of the transaction in fees itself. The vendor has no incentive to have blockchain miners/stakers capture that value instead.