[jakemauer]

The only way that NFTs make sense to me is in some sort of impossible to implement DRM-like system where ONLY the current owners of the media can display it or utilize it. If buying an NFT of a piece of art meant that I could digitally display the file in full resolution, or if it otherwise afforded me some tangible benefit during the period of ownership, I could see it making sense.

As of right now NFTs are basically donations to the artist with more steps and about 1000x the carbon footprint.

[gnopgnip]

The utility of art or collectibles is a very small portion of the value. A game worn Michael Jordan jersey you paid $100k for has essentially the same utility as a <$100 jersey. It is valuable because it is scarce, and the provenance

[jancsika]

Sure.

But suppose you ripped that jersey into a thousand pieces, and sold each separately. People might still buy it, because those pieces as a whole were in fact a Michael Jordan jersey at some point. A piece of that history is cheaper to own than the entire thing.

Now suppose you rip it into 100 million pieces and create non-fungible tokens where each tiny piece could be scanned with a phone, identified, and associated with an arbitrary blob of data.

Now it's a race of a savvy PR team against the public's hazy and soon-to-be waning interest in what-- if anything-- is the value of one of those microscopic jersey specs. "Something something Michael Jordan," got you to distract a captive audience from Candy Crush for five seconds. What happens next has absolutely nothing to do with Michael Jordan, and everything to do with P.T. Barnum.

Edit: clarification

[sbhagat]

It's not impossible, and we completely agree that this is needed. We're building this over at masterfile.co via our OpenDRM technology.

[jtsiskin]

No, it is impossible. Just take a screenshot