Item — HN Reader

You said this:

"Your example is one of a physical good. Of course you don't need an NFT to display a card physically. But what if you want to display it digitally? Your best option at this case is to take a photo, upload it to the web, then the consuming websites can hire people to scrutinize a bunch of grainy vaccination card photos from their users. Meh.

On the blockchain, you'd have an NFT representation of your card, and its origin (i.e. which authority gave it to you) could be easily programmatically tracked."

I'm saying we already have all of that and more without having to complicate it with an NFT that doesn't add anything.

1 comments

The QR code does not get you everything an NFT gets you and more. It gets you significantly less.

NFTs are stored on blockchains, which are distributed databases, which anyone can read from. Those serve as public APIs, basically. That means anyone can incorporate NFTs into their apps in whatever creative and innovative ways they want to. And since these blockchains are digital, NFTs can easily be accessed, browsed, filtered, and searched. Again, not so with QR codes.

For example, let's say there's a sporting event and the league grants complementary NFTs to fans who buy a ticket. And let's say this particular event goes down in history as being a legendary game. Everyone will now have blockchain-based proof that they were a ticket holder, in NFT form. In fact, anybody can look and see who all the ticket holders were and take action based on that. For example, the league could throw a celebratory 10th anniversary party only original ticket holders are able to attend, or send a memento to everyone who attended, or those tickets could become collectors' items that holders display or sell.

This isn't going to happen with real-world tickets or QR codes, unless every organization that issues them feels like building their own database of people it distributes QR codes to, and making it a publicly-accessible via API. Even then, that would still be worse, because developers would have to find the proprietary API for every distributor of QE codes and then learn how to connect to it. One API > n APIs.

And even then, those databases would lack functionality, because the holders of the tickets wouldn't have control over the data. If the original maintainers disappear and the database is deleted, everyone loses their data. And they can't exactly sell or transfer their data, since they don't own the database row it lives in, unlike with the blockchain.