this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
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Besides the obvious of your door lock needing to be connected to the internet, and that could be a problem, what else do you see as being an issue with using it for door keys?
Another question is: why would you need it for a key?
Long-established public/private keys and signatures are used in this way all the time to control access to servers around the world. No blockchain needed. Blockchain is helpful when we all need to agree on a series of events.
Homes are a nice example of where you can have an isolated system which knows what it needs to about you (e.g. a public key) without sharing or cross-checking anything with the world.
The chain would be used to establish who owns the home.
That sounds more like a land registry system, than a key.
That isn’t required for a key. What if I want to let my family member access the house tomorrow while I’m out? Do I have to sell it to them?
The key/lock relationship is not connected to ownership. Ownership could be connected to the ability to issue new keys, but even then the ownership doesn’t need to be logged in a blockchain for that - it can simply be signed by a key held by the land registry.
If you want to make an argument for using blockchains for the land registry then… go ahead, but it’s another discussion with a whole different set of arguments.
Just like the NFTs in the article! Great idea
Lol
How exactly would that work? Keep in mind that the blockchain is by necessity not secret.
Right, but all the lock is doing is checking whether you own the NFT or not. If your house was in NFT, people could see that you bought a house, but not where it was as long as it was generic like house #40000
So, you'd need a method to verify who "you" are. And once again we've come up with a way to use NFTs that actually works better without NFTs.
Fair enough. I will say that I am not well enough versed in the topic to discuss it in depth.
No offense, but this is literally the problem with almost everyone who says they have a perfect usecase for NFTs. I also don't know everything about everything either, but I know do know that we don't tend to make existing systems complex just for fun.
Every time someone wants to fix something with NFTs, they're either slapping an NFT on top of the existing system, making it more complicated, OR they want to start a new solution from the ground up, throwing out decades or centuries of experience and edge-case solutions to replace them with nothing, leading to major problems.
This post is about the second thing happening, your example is the first.
NFTs are a solution looking for a problem. But all the problems have already been solved without NFTs.
How would that work in reality, how would the lock know that the NFT in question is the actual legal ownership of the house?
The only way to guarantee that is to change the law that deeds of houses can only be an NFT.
Otherwise someone could sell a house on paper, but retain the NFT to have access to the house.
An NFT lock would also have the following problems, excluding the trust of ownership in the real world.
Power to the lock is required, if your backup battery is dead then you might be locked out during a power cut.
Internet access is required, during a powercut your router will probably die as well, so even if a battery backup is working, you'd still be locked out.
Your ISP could have service interruptions, no internet, no access to the latest blockchain updates, meaning that the lock can't trust that you actually have ownership/access, that would be an insanely easy way to hack the lock.
I can't really address the first part about selling the house on paper and not transferring the NFT.
I figure this thing would have cellular access as well as Wi-Fi. So if your Wi-Fi was to go down, then the cell network would be used instead. And those generally use different ISPs for fiber and often get restored first or dont go down at all since they are commercial contracts. In the event of a total internet cut, it is well known that a house does not change ownership very often, so the lock could be programmed to not accept any new keys for a period like a day. The lock would accept only the old key during that time like a cooldown period
Ok, lets disregard the regulatory issues, are you really asking people to sign up for a completely different ISP just to unlock their house with an NFT key?
As for a delay to update ownership, fine that would add some leniency and is not an unresonable feature.
But I just can't see what problem an NFT key would solve, we don't usually lock/unlock our front door with the deed of the home, what would the advantage be of doing that?