Readit NewsBUT, I had trouble getting to sleep my whole life and for about the last 7 years I've been able to get to sleep in much more normal timeframe. After trying most of the other things in this thread (cutting caffeine definitely helped). Two things that have seemed to really work for me:
I have a 7" tablet on my bed and I put on the SAME EPISODE of the SAME tv show each night (currently Psych S4 E1 - though it does change occasionally). I keep the volume low enough to not really hear unless I'm trying to listen to it and the brightness at almost the lowest setting. This is contrary to most advice on the subject and I write it here not to recommend it as a first choice. It is however what seems to work for me when other things didn't. The goal with the content is something that the plot doesn't matter and that you know like the back of your hand so it won't keep you awake to find out what happens BUT it's enough stimulus to pull your attention from your anxieties.
I added a ton of pillows to my bed (11 total). I put 3 on top of my body like a weighted blanket and have pillows to hug on either side of me. I can change to several different sleeping positions without significant pillow re-arrangement.
Additionally, a lot of the community are against upgradeable contracts because they theoretically can be upgraded to something totally different, and they prefer immutability, with all its potential warts. Some projects use upgradeable contracts and don't have to do what Premint did, and some people don't.
But regardless, if you're going to offer an organizational service that's not on the blockchain, then inherently, by definition, it can't be strictly enforced just by the presence of an NFT, because people aren't computers and their physical actions aren't guaranteed to happen by lines of code like a computer program can (at least not yet).
Tickets for a concert were a meatspace analogy, not me arguing to put all tickets on the blockchain. One difference, though, is the NFT 'ticket' can be proven for any organization that wants to incorporate it, without a prior agreement or API access created by the original organization. Like I know some NFT projects allow people who have NFTs from other specific projects in their wallets to have early access in their own projects, or grant access to private Discord rooms, or let them into events, etc. and it can be granted via software, without people checking or verifying anything.
Yes a REST API and a centralized database can provide that, but not if that organization goes defunct.
As an example from my own history, there's a game I worked on once that the company once debated on buying servers to host the multiplayer aspects of it, but eventually I just incorporated the general async turn based api of Apple's for the game. The company went defunct not even six months later. If we had gone the server route, the game would have been unplayable as soon as the company folded, but since we used the general protocol provided by the platform, the game was playable for many years afterwards (might still, I haven't checked in a while).
That's a very real (to me, anyway) benefit of building on a blockchain. As long as the blockchain platform is still up, those smart contracts can still be used, and its support doesn't have to be constantly justified by the parent company / count on the company not going out of business to keep running. Like Nintendo is getting rid of its Wii and 3DS shops here in a few months because they can't justify keeping it up. If the blockchain existed then and those things were stored on there (like files are stored on IPFS or Arweave for web3 today) they'd still be accessible without any continued expenses from Nintendo.
Right now I'm having to decide which of my digital games I need to make sure are downloaded and on my device before I lose the opportunity to redownload in a few months (technically I can hack the device and download stuff from torrents, but I'd rather not have to do that for a while, if ever).
Another benefit, to me, is similar and legacy related. Like my Facebook profile, website, games, journals, etc, when I die, all go away the instant that Facebook stops being a thing, and more importantly when I stop paying for web servers or cloud computing. My SO already made it pretty clear they're not really going to do anything to perpetuate them, so if I want those things to exist and be available I'll need to find something that can withstand not actively paying AWS, Azure, DigitalOcean, etc. to keep it going. Putting these things onto the blockchain would allow for that, and at the very least will outlive anything put onto cloud services, and possibly even the current crop of social media websites (definitely a few of them, maybe not all of them).
Some things I worked on are probably also circulating in some torrents of Flash games or console games also, but a lot of it isn't. And I have some physical copies of things I've worked on also (a lot of board game prototypes, some journals, etc), but I have a feeling a lot of that is just getting thrown away not too long after I die unless I something of mine becomes a big hit, maybe not even then.
You might not personally care about these things, but other people do. Or at least will once the infrastructure and supporting software is built out more.
FWIW I also think general protocols on long lived platforms and IPFS are great.
BUT, I really don't think the blockchain has a role to play solving any of the issues you laid out. The reason the game you mentioned was able to continued to be played was because Apple was providing the network. The minimum ETH write fee is almost always at least $1 and frequently cost $3.50. Would people still be interested in playing the game if each write cost that much? Same goes for your archiving plans. IPFS is great but it's not a guarantee that that data will be seeded forever. For that you'd need to write it to one of the chains you're confident will survive. ETH data costs somewhere in the thousands of dollars per MB range? I'm not sure it's a real solution to that. I'm not dismissing the issues of very long term code and data longevity. They are real issues but in my opinion still quite unsolved.
It's up to the organization or society or code written in smart contracts whether they want to honor, and how much they honor, the promises made for having possession of that NFT. It's really no different than any other organization out there for any service.
I can buy a ticket to a concert and be denied entry as well, or the concert be cancelled, or the company goes out of business, or any other manner of things. I still have the ticket, but it no longer provides the benefit associated with it.
Additionally I can go to the concert, and then try to sell the ticket to someone else, possibly claiming that it will let them get into a future concert, and that buyer needs to verify that the legitimacy of the ticket before purchase.
Or someone who buys a video game that's basically just a case with a code to download the game from a store that then redeems the code but sells the game to Gamestop with a no longer valid code, and Gamestop puts it back for sale even though it's basically useless at that point. That's kind of what's going on with people putting those old Premint passes up for sale on the secondary market.
You could argue that organization should not be trusted with future NFTs or be sued and punished, or the person who sold the now defunct NFT be punished, and that's fine, people no longer patronize or sometimes sue organizations or people all the time when they've been wronged somehow.
As for Premint, they do want you to buy directly from them and not from the secondary market. That's what they are directing you to do. I don't know too much of the details of Premint but they probably wanted to upgrade their service and used older smart contracts without update capability built into it, so the contracts were immutable and limited in some way.
So they needed to issue new smart contracts that had better capabilities, and in the process it rendered the old contracts obsolete. I'm guessing, I don't know, I'm not a customer and I don't work for them, it's just a service some people I know were considering using at one point since it's huge and has a large network of users and one of the things their service helps with is limiting access to bots, which is something the people I know cared about preventing, and is difficult to prevent, at least currently, in web3.
And calling read-only functions (doesn't write anything to the blockchain) doesn't cost anything.
I didn't think of this with my original post, but there are NFTs that are used for access to things that people already say "don't buy these on the secondary market, legacy, no longer used". Not too dissimilar of an idea. Those NFTs are still in those people's wallets but it no longer provides the benefits associated with it.
Like the old Premint pass, which gives you access to tools to help launch NFT projects. The description for the old pass says "DO NOT BUY THIS PASS. This pass has been replaced with the PREMINT Creator Key" and the banner image says "THIS PASS IS NO LONGER VALID": https://opensea.io/collection/premint
“NFTs create a frictionless easily exchangeable market for goods… BUT make sure you check with the people, project, company or government that has authority over this good as to whether this particular NFT is actually a useful representation of anything. Because, at any arbitrary point they can just decide to not honor any of these.”
Why not buy the good directly from this party? Then at least the government has authority and can enforce your right to the product or service or at least a refund?
So I imagine they can either legal pressure on the illegitimate owner to transfer the NFT to the other owner (which has worked with some bitcoin transactions in the past), or if that doesn't work, then the system of smart contracts created for something like houses would most likely have something in it that allows the smart contract owners to mark that NFT as void in the blockchain (while it remains in the perpetrators wallet, it would no longer be associated with the physical benefits) and have a fresh NFT minted based on the data in the previous one and sent to the legitimate wallet.
Barring all that, they could just not recognize the owner and send police to physically remove someone who thinks they own it because the have the NFT. That's one reason why some people like bitcoin so much, the government can't (easily) take it from you by force (because there's no physical aspect to it) like they can a home or gold.
If this were to happen and the blockchain and the physical world diverge, how would potential house NFT buyers know whether the physical house purportedly linked hasn't been overridden by local government? If the answer is for local registries to publish a list; then that list is the only thing that matters. The entire blockchain component becomes completely superfluous and a centrally managed electronic exchange would be faster, easier and cheaper.
The analogy I like to use is what's harder to buy a $1 million house or $1 million of Microsoft stock? The former process takes weeks, and dozens of man hours from lawyers, realtors, escrow agents, bankers, county property registrars, etc. Whereas a buy order to execute Microsoft shares happens in microseconds. That's because we've built a highly streamlined autonomous system for executing stock transactions. Yes of course, there's a trusted layer built on courts and fiat law at the bottom. And occasionally for a corner case, real lawyers have to get involved. But the vast majority of the time, this layer is completely abstracted away and trading stocks are just bits flipped on a computer.
When somebody says something like "let's put houses on the blockchain", the idea isn't to get rid of the fiat law system completely. At the end of the day, you still need courts and sheriffs to enforce property rights. But the idea is that we can wrap the house in an LLC, whose bylaws state that it's governed by on-chain contracts. (Which Delaware Chancery courts will absolutely recognize and enforce.)
Now instead of directly transacting at the very low-tech county property registrar we can transact using an on-chain NFT that grants the equivalent of ownership rights to the house. (This is very analogous to how Cede & Co technically owns almost all the stock shares in America, and holds them under your name for you.)
That NFT is way more powerful and efficient to transact with than the county property record. It lives on a credibly neutral level that already has billions in native capital and liquidity and exposes a fully Turing complete smart contract system. You can sell your house atomically and instantly to anyone in the world with no lawyers or escrow agents. You can pledge it as collateral and borrow against it. You can fractionalize it and sell a portion. Or roll it into a larger portfolio and slice into tranches. All with no more than few dozen lines of code. Without blockchains all of those operations would take hundreds of pages of legal documents and weeks of back and forth.
Now I want to upgrade to a proper OAuth wall. Some server needs to act as a reverse proxy that has permission to access the private resource but checks your identity as a, say, Google Apps user.
Assuming a private bucket on S3, what's the easiest way to accomplish this today?