Ownership is a legal concept and the blockchain says nothing about that. It merely records transactions and says nothing about the right to do those things.
For example, if the court orders you to turn over your Bitcoin holdings to creditors in a bankruptcy proceeding and instead you transfer them elsewhere, you are probably going to jail. When you transferred them, the coins were in your possession, but you weren't the rightful owner.
Correct, blockchain itself doesn't mess with ownership.
But NFTs and certain smart contracts are meticulously designing a custom form of ownership for themselves. That's what changes things. And this would be true even if they didn't use blockchains!
If you throw out all that custom ownership logic, you lose the core of what makes an NFT an NFT. Now it's just a few dozen bytes that anyone can mimic.
> smart contracts are meticulously designing a custom form of ownership
Not sure what you mean by custom form of ownership. If you are talking about fractional ownership, even that isn’t new.
Contracts around ownership are built on top of legal system. Smart contracts provide automation around defining and execution the contracts. That’s cool and can be super low cost, but apart from the automation, there isn’t much that’s different from traditional contracts. They can still be challenged in court.
For example, if you had a contract that, upon your death, transferred all your money to your nurse, your spouse could still challenge that in court if the contract was created under duress or created when you weren’t of sound mind.
Ownership can’t be defined outside of the law. Ultimately these are boring old contracts in a digital form and they may or may not be valid. The validity can’t be determined within the NFT, smart contract, or blockchain. Some code may initiate a transfer of something and that gives you possession of it, but ownership isn’t guaranteed.
For example, you can write a smart contract that would watch for divorce papers being filed by your spouse and upon filing, you would transfer your Bitcoin balance or NFT to some other wallet. A court isn’t going to fall for that. You will be found to have hidden community assets (ie assets you don’t entirely own).
If it goes from a wallet you control to a different wallet you control, neither system would say ownership changed, so I'm not sure how that example helps.
Another point of comparison I'll bring up is cars, where if you let someone have your keys then you have limited or zero recourse in many situations where they do something bad.
I think most of our disagreement is about the word ownership. I think many of the times you've used that word, it would be more accurate to say possession.
Your car example is a good one. If somebody has your keys (either with permission or stolen) and they take your car, they have possession of it but at no point do they own it.
Another example - lots of companies have crypto wallets and own Bitcoin and other currencies. Corporate wallets are controlled by agents of that company. The people who know the keys don't own the crypto, the company does. If an employee transfers from a company owned wallet that they control to a wallet they own, that's theft the same as if they had wired money to an overseas account of theirs.
Possession and ownership can align, but they don't have to. Smart contracts can be legally binding, but that isn't guaranteed. None of this exists outside of our legal system.
> I think most of our disagreement is about the word ownership. I think many of the times you've used that word, it would be more accurate to say possession.
But also I'm saying that a foundational pillar of NFTs is that possession on the blockchain is the only thing that matters.
It's possible to disagree with that pillar, but removing it would destroy a huge chunk of what NFTs are.
If you want me not to say 'ownership' for that concept, that's fine.
Also I'm not making this claim about crytocurrency in general. It's only specific subsets.
For example, if the court orders you to turn over your Bitcoin holdings to creditors in a bankruptcy proceeding and instead you transfer them elsewhere, you are probably going to jail. When you transferred them, the coins were in your possession, but you weren't the rightful owner.