ENS & Digital Ownership

NFT's introduced the idea that anything in the digital realm could now be scarce, including your identity. Own it before someone else does.

Without scarcity there's no concept of ownership.

Think about it: if you hand out 200 cookies to 5 kids, the kids won't bother fighting over them. If you hand them out 4 instead, you'll either see some arithmetic or some screaming and crying. All to decide who owns the cookies now that they're scarce.

Scarcity in the physical world is easy to understand: "I'll pay you $100 if you transfer me the ownership of that desk."

In the digital world, anything can be scarce, so the question now becomes: what is worth owning digitally? With so many NFT projects it can certainly be hard to filter signal from noise. There are however clear-cut use-cases that benefit tremendously by this new concept of digital scarcity.

You can now own your identity.

Ethereum Name Services (ENS) is a project that dates back to early 2017 with precisely that goal. In the future, there isn't going to be the need to keep a separate username and password for each website you ever log into nor the need to have different types of ID's in your wallet.

These are old ways for proving your identity.

These old ways require us to keep a different identity for each time we encounter a gatekeeper (national borders, websites) because rarely do these gatekeepers communicate with each other. Which makes sense: why would you delegate the trust to your territory when you can verify for yourself? The cumbersome web of identities thus emerged.

Owning an ENS domain frees up this problem.

The trust for your identity is now delegated to the Ethereum blockchain, which is an extremely sound record-keeping mechanism. The concept of decentralized naming allows anybody to very certainly prove that you are you by just presenting a piece of digital scarcity that you own.