sigh

Look.

That's page 26 of the World Economic Forum's 2023 NFT report. I didn't come up with this. It became pretty obvious to me, though, fifty-odd economics books and several dozen books on luxury industries.

To your credit, I did invite you to fight me so my bad. This is on me. I can tell you're feeling charitable when you say "I don't think a blockchain is a fundamentally wrong thing here" because as with most people who know just enough to justify their contempt, you've never really thought about it before.

It depends not at all on your "threat model." It depends utterly and completely on your "trust model" and blockchains are really and truly the first trustless thing in the world. You get there yourself: if you can't trust the verifiers of your database (pawn shops in Lahore, for example), the admins of the database (Pakistani vendors), the iron (AWS) or the iron's owner (Amazon) then as you say yourself, you need blockchain.

So why not just skip all the bullshit

Yes. We've had car deeds for years without a blockchain. And the reason we don't have DMV-level verification on everything is you need to interact with the DMV to get it. That's what blockchains fix: there's no more DMV. If it'll hold a serial, I can track it cradle-to-grave every time it changes hands without needing to stand in line for an hour to fill out a form in triplicate to be typed in manually by a state employee that hates their job. Because all that shit? Is a trust mechanism and the whole purpose of blockchain is it solves it away. Your solution is to invoke AWS. My solution is to invoke a Raspberry Pi. How am I the extremist here?

You agree with Rusty because you also refuse to question your assumptions and your knee-jerk assessment of the situation. Know how I know? Because you just flatly state that you can 51% attack a proof-of-stake blockchain. And you presume Rolex would attack their own network for some reason.

You're not ready for this shit. I say that as a professional courtesy. When it hits you in the face you'll be playing catch-up. 'cuz lemme tell ya. Databases are not trustworthy. I deal with two or three database corruptions a week - and that's in the land of PHI! And the owners of those corrupt databases? They're reliant on 3rd party contractors to un-fuck them. And nobody trusts that shit. That's why my office goes through a few hundred pages of fax transmission a day.

As of last year, Nike had made $91m in royalties on 2nd-party sneaker sales using NFTs for authenticity.

Thank you for stating what you think. I am telling you what I know. I suspect you'd freely concede I know more about watches than you do. I suspect you'd grudgingly concede I know more about blockchains as well. Is it really a stretch, then, that I have a better handle on the intersection of watches and blockchains?