The point is that property exists only insofar as you or someone else has the ability to enforce its existence through violence or threat of violence. NFTs are property in the same way that land title is property, with the difference being that the thing that's enforced is different. With land title, it's actual land. With NFTs, it's a string of numbers in a ledger. What a lot of people don't get is that NFTs don't correspond to any other form of property. You're not actually buying the copyright for something, just the right to say that you own a number in a ledger that notionally corresponds to something that has some intrinsic value, but doesn't actually confer ownership of that thing.
yeah I agree property requires violence to function and NFTs are not enforced by violence.
the stupidity of NFTs can however be used to highlight the silliness of owning land for example as well as show that property requires violence by highlighting the with and without difference
However, I'm not sure that NFTs show how silly owning land is, rather the opposite: holding land, or holding the violence voucher for a piece of land, shows how dumb NFTs are. With land, you can own the title and then call the police (or in some cases even legally defend your property yourself) if someone violates those title rights. With NFTs, the only right you have is to the number on the ledger. An NFT is like if you could buy the land title from someone, but they keep the land and all associated property rights. You get to own the piece of paper saying you hold the title, and no one else can own that piece of paper, but the paper itself has nothing else attached to it. That's the real reason NFTs are so stupid. They're property without the benefits of property.
I do agree that NFTs are a good way of showing the 'property as violence' concept, especially as scams and hacking and so on have shown that blockchain doesn't actually solve the problem of state enforcement of property, because without the state to enforce the property, you're left with enforcing property yourself. That might be fine with some folks, but it's not really a functioning argument that property ownership can exist absent some sort of centralized enforcement mechanism.
I maintain property law is analogous to NFTs. "Oh you own this land because of a piece of paper even though I can just walk on it"
The point is that property exists only insofar as you or someone else has the ability to enforce its existence through violence or threat of violence. NFTs are property in the same way that land title is property, with the difference being that the thing that's enforced is different. With land title, it's actual land. With NFTs, it's a string of numbers in a ledger. What a lot of people don't get is that NFTs don't correspond to any other form of property. You're not actually buying the copyright for something, just the right to say that you own a number in a ledger that notionally corresponds to something that has some intrinsic value, but doesn't actually confer ownership of that thing.
yeah I agree property requires violence to function and NFTs are not enforced by violence.
the stupidity of NFTs can however be used to highlight the silliness of owning land for example as well as show that property requires violence by highlighting the with and without difference
I quite like Matt Bruenig's piece on property as 'violence vouchers':
https://mattbruenig.com/2014/03/28/violence-vouchers-a-descriptive-account-of-property/
However, I'm not sure that NFTs show how silly owning land is, rather the opposite: holding land, or holding the violence voucher for a piece of land, shows how dumb NFTs are. With land, you can own the title and then call the police (or in some cases even legally defend your property yourself) if someone violates those title rights. With NFTs, the only right you have is to the number on the ledger. An NFT is like if you could buy the land title from someone, but they keep the land and all associated property rights. You get to own the piece of paper saying you hold the title, and no one else can own that piece of paper, but the paper itself has nothing else attached to it. That's the real reason NFTs are so stupid. They're property without the benefits of property.
I do agree that NFTs are a good way of showing the 'property as violence' concept, especially as scams and hacking and so on have shown that blockchain doesn't actually solve the problem of state enforcement of property, because without the state to enforce the property, you're left with enforcing property yourself. That might be fine with some folks, but it's not really a functioning argument that property ownership can exist absent some sort of centralized enforcement mechanism.