this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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I think the article is fine. It's just the reality that makes no sense. A bunch of social media celebrities agreed to join an esports league where the celebrities would manage the teams. People could buy a pass for each celebrity that would let them vote on team decisions and give them other benefits. The company selling the passes used blockchain authentication for them. They were also, separately, involved in NFTs. People saw blockchain and NFT and thought "wait a minute, the passes are NFTs? Aren't NFTs a big scam? These passes are a scam!" Then the celebrities saw the outrage and said "What?! No one told me there would be crypto-blockchain-NFTs!" They then dropped out of the league and it was indefinitely postponed. Unless by "actual problem" you meant something that was meaningful in anyway to anyone not directly involved in this nonsense. In that case, no, there was none of that.
The problem with this is that NFTs, at their core, aren't inherently a scam. Like, this is actually the ideal use-case for NFTs.
It's when people try to make an NFT into an "investment" that it becomes a scam. But for authenticating an event pass? That's what NFTs were actually designed for. So it's a little weird seeing one of the first large-scale uses of NFTs for their correct purpose getting hated on by everybody.
Though, I guess there's an argument to be made about being against any form of blockchain tech, due to the amount of resources required to maintain it. But I feel like the responses we're seeing to this are a bit more of the reactionary, "investment scam" sort, which I feel is misplaced anger.
But this is an event pass for a league…as in, an organized and well-known central agency managing the event. You don’t need a blockchain for this, because you don’t need any decentralization. Just buy the shit from the trusted party who manages that transactional history in a database developed with 60 year old technology with none of the weirdness and problems of blockchains. If you don’t trust the event organizer, then a provable certificate that your pass is legit is worthless, because the event organizer can just decline to accept your pass anyway.
I think you just accidentally explained the advantage to NFT passes for this situation. You don't have to trust them, because the clockchain ledger validates your pass, irrespective of whatever party is managing it.
But you still need to show up at a gate with a guy in front of it who will either let you in or not let you in. And that guy is a trusted centralized authority. Just have him issue you the pass and be done with it.
An NFT only certifies that you have an NFT. Nothing certifies that the NFT can be used for any physical purpose. The nature of the physical world is that there's only one seat 1F at the concert you want to go to. I can sell as many NFTs as I want that all claim to represent the fact that you can sit in seat 1F, and you each have a cryptographically signed proof that that's exactly what I sold you. You still can't all sit in one chair, and there's going to be someone in charge of the venue who decides what happens. And once you have someone in charge of the venue who can decide what happens, just let that person sell the tickets. You all have to trust him anyway.