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.
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.
> 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.
Have you ever tried to convince someone to not buy second hand Windows 10 keys?
Your argument relies upon other people acting in the way you describe. As opposed to the way I've seen them act for the last 20 years.
EDIT: Scalpers exist because they're the only ones who can sell seats after a show has been sold out. 2nd hand Windows 10 keys exist because when a Corporation buys 1000+ licenses but only uses 500 of them, they wanna recoup the costs by selling 500+ of those keys onto the 2nd hand market (even for a loss).
You can't beat economics with just saying "encryption" or "safety". Encryption/safety just changes the economics, and the price will adjust as appropriate. Fundamentally, scalpers (or at lest, more expensive tickets that are sold "after" a sellout is announced) is just an economic reality.
I think you've got it, so I'm not sure why you don't understand the value of NFTs. It's entirely about economics.
In the case of Windows keys, if Microsoft issued them as an NFT, then the only way to get a valid one would be from Microsoft or via secondary market resale.
Obviously, if Microsoft sells the key, the user paid for the key.
If the user resells the key, Microsoft can now also get paid a transfer fee baked into the NFT contract. Plus they have traceability for where every key went.
Now instead of policing secondary gray markets, they capture additional value from resales. The purchaser of the resale is 100% sure it's a valid key, and the sellers with surplus licenses have a marketplace to unload them.
The NFT in this scenario facilitates Microsoft getting paid for this trade without the trouble of setting up a secondary license trading site. As long as the fee to Microsoft on the NFT transfer is less than the 20% or so that the escrow (ebay) takes, it makes good economic sense for all 3 parties.
> If the user resells the key, Microsoft can now also get paid a transfer fee baked into the NFT contract.
Not if people just swap NFT accounts and sell their keys+accounts in their entirety.
IE: Microsoft sells LicenseKey to NFT-Account#1234. The owner of NFT-Account#1234 sells the *ENTIRE ACCOUNT* on the secondary market, for a lower price than Microsoft's official price.
What you don't get is that human consumers don't like people locking them down, and people will find extremely easy ways to avoid the "trap" you hoped to put them in. And the reason this happens is economic incentives. You can't beat microeconomics on this one.
> Not if people just swap NFT accounts and sell their keys+accounts in their entirety.
There's a cost to doing this. Usually as an escrow fee paid to ebay or g2a or wherever you're selling keys. As long as the NFT transfer fee is lower than the escrow cost, I don't see how it wouldn't be cheaper and safer for everyone.
I'm not saying this is a solution to piracy or violating the regionality of the licensing agreement, just that it would allow buyers and sellers to trade; with the original licensor taking the fee instead of ebay, because the NFT cryptography takes the place of the reputation+escrow provided by existing platforms.
I haven't ever actually bought Windows, so I wasn't aware the discrepancy would be that crazy. I just assumed it was a reputation/escrow problem as there's no shipping information and no way to validate who used the key.
I wonder why Microsoft doesn't region lock them or do some kind of audit if they don't want that market to exist. I'm also not sure why someone would buy an obviously grey market key when there are KMS activation solutions on github.
If Microsoft did want to allow for resale at any price and at least capture the fees, an NFT solution would let them do it without a lot of effort (building an exchange, processing payments, handling fraud, etc in each locale).
That's the sort of problem NFTs solve, generically, for digital ownership and transfer (licensing, tickets, club membership, etc).
With some amount of network effect and ease of use (the web3 wallet experience is actually quite good), I think NFTs will look like the obvious answer.
In practice, Microsoft doesn't really care because they just tie the Windows license to your physical motherboard (that's why you can reinstall Windows on your laptops over-and-over again without a license prompt). This only matters in hobby builder circles where you build your own computer
So yeah, its not really a thing NFTs solve, and something that a very simple chip on a motherboard solves perfectly.
People don't really "buy Windows" in practice. They buy a laptop, or a Dell computer. And they sell the laptop, or Dell computer, in its entirety.
Why would Ticketmaster ever go along with that? What's in it for them? They already have a centralized platform for selling and reselling concert tickets. They're not going to give up any of that revenue.
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.
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.