> An NFT is decent evidence in favour of you being the creator of a work, if there's no earlier evidence of somebody else being the creator of the work

It's really not at all reliable. I could create an NFT for the "Joeboy" HN account right now, and ostensibly become the owner of your HN account since such an NFT does not already exist. Obviously, this makes no sense, the NFT is meaningless.

No, you could create an NFT that supposedly represents that but unless people buy into the idea, no is becoming the owner of anything.

If instead Ycombinator would release each user as an NFT, and allow people to buy/sell then, then yes you could become the owner of an HN account via NFTs. But until then, the one who knows the password is the owner.

People seems to have some sort of problem with trying to understand NFTs were all thoughts and logic go out the window as soon as NFTs are mentioned.

As I understood their comment, they were pointing out the absurdity of the idea you are also pointing out the absurdity of.

If there was no evidence of the account existing before you registered the NFT, I think that would be a reasonably credible bit of evidence in your favour.

It's not at all there is rampant fraud in the NFT market. So much so Deviantart made some detection software to help alert artists their work is being stolen.

All that can be definitively proved outside of other methods is who created the token.

It sounds like you're talking about cases where, as I said, there's "earlier evidence of somebody else being the creator of the work". In the absence of that, I think the token would be a decent piece of evidence in favour of the token owner.

So would posting it anywhere online essentially. Twitter would work for the same usecase. Or the old sending it to yourself through the mail thing.

NFTs also don’t put the image on chain usually instead just linking from the metadata so a fraudster could register a bunch of placeholder NFTs and then later put stolen art where the link points to. Hey Presto you can steal art and “prove” the actual creator is the fraud.

Well, posting the actual content publicly would obviously make it public, which registering a hash on the blockchain would not. "Sending it to yourself through the mail" would probably be the competition, and I would say a cryptographic hash is at least as good as a postmark, as well as cheaper.

Anyway. I wasn't talking about NFTs as they exist today. I'm just saying the original concept (as I understood it) seemed basically reasonable, before everybody went insane.

The useful part of what you describe is called timestamping and predated (and inspired) Bitcoin.

> An NFT is decent evidence in favour of the keyholder being the creator of a work, if there's no earlier evidence of somebody else being the creator of the work.

The second clause shows why the first is not true: the other evidence is what gives you the information you need. In every context where it really matters it comes down to what a court would accept and … uh … I would not want to be the one having to tell a judge that something is proof of ownership when anyone on the internet could submit the same record.

I can't say for sure what a judge would make of a cryptographically secure hash of a piece of content that there's no record of prior to the hash's registration on a blockchain. I think if somebody tries to claim authorship of eg. a screenplay I've written, such a hash should be pretty good evidence in my favour.