Some are and they are overfitting those cases to an entire technology. It's understandable to see that nuance get lost on Twitter, but disappointing to see on a tech forum. It's like discounting email because it enables nigerian prince scams.
But good news! You can also get your star registered on the blockchain now. Whether that's any better than the ISR's legacy offering (a certificate and an entry in their own ledger) is up to you.
Really, both products are just selling a story- a physical ledger in a vault in Geneva in the first instance, now updated to be an entry on a distributed ledger. These blockchain NFTs just make it easier for people who don't have the infrastructure of a company like the ISR to share one big ledger and dump whatever they want on there and call it an NFT.
The equivalent of email here is the blockchain ledger technology, the equivalent of Nigerian email scams are NFTs.
I suppose there might be some genuinely useful or interesting non-fungible blockchain tokens, but entries on a ledger that say you own a jpeg or whatever are not any more interesting than entries in ISR's Genevan vault.
I view NFT as a technology that might one day find its particular true-niche use-case years from now...especially NFT's whose data are encoded into the blockchain itself.
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It might be the case, like with deep learning, that something that doesn't seem useful becomes so when it can be applied at scale. If on-chain NFT's can practically start containing large sized data buckets without resorting to external links,
Sure, they can be, but they aren't. "NFT" has become synonymous with "selling a jpeg", and that's what the big NFT marketplaces are doing. That's where all the money is. Nobody would care about NFTs if all they were being used for was as "an authorization scheme in dapps".
Like, imagine if JWTs were 99% part of an MLM scheme and 1% used for authentication. People would be skeptical!
By "nobody" I meant "nobody not deeply invested in the technical guts of how Uniswap works". In the same way nobody really cares about JWTs, people care about the stuff they enable. Solving problems inside the crypto ecosystem isn't per se useful or important unless the actual thing it's enabling (in this case Uniswap) is important. Which, okay, maybe it is. But NFTs are a technical detail.
It's when people started hyping up NFTs as their own thing that stuff got weird and stupid. Like, phone numbers are useful, but vanity phone numbers definitely aren't solving any problems other than proving you have one:
Recently heard Tim Ferriss/Naval discussing NFTs on a podcast and while I'm open minded to its potential, I haven't seen any useful ones yet. That said I don't think they're any worse than trading for video game skins or MMORPG collectibles. For whatever reason humans can invent a scarcity free environment in video games/metaverses but feel compelled to create scarcity anyway.
> For whatever reason humans can invent a scarcity free environment in video games/metaverses but feel compelled to create scarcity anyway.
I would encourage you to try turning on no clip or “god mode” for a game and see how much fun you have and for how long.
It was my experience that it’s fun at first but then gets boring real quick. There is value in constraints as it gives you something you can work at and achieve.
I don't get it, because of course the company running the MMO has total control over who gets to wear what hats, there's no decentralization introduced by NFTs beyond perhaps making it easier for people to use it for a bit of money laundering.
I’m not the parent but I have some thoughts on this.
I’m of the opinion that tokens when applied to digital art typically aren’t providing much value, aside from say bragging rights / social status since digital art can be copied and viewed without owning the token. One might argue that these tokens help pay artists but 1) if that’s all one cares about then donating to them directly will give them more money since transaction fees are cheaper and 2), I haven’t looked into this directly, but it would seem token resale fees given to artists are not enforceable since they could be worked around by having a holding contract that gets traded instead. It just doesn’t seem like digital art tokens are providing much value. Now if they start to be used in some enforceable way such as in a DRMd display then this would be a form of underlying value but why not use a non DRMd display? If it’s anything like movies and music then the answer probably revolves around convenience and risk.
Then there is the more general trend of treating tokens like these as investments where the value gets driven up and, appears to me, detached from any sense of underlying value. So the only way for the sale value of these tokens to hold is to have some one else willing to buy it. But if there is no underlying value then it’s not clear to me how this can continue indefinitely.
But if a token is providing some underlying value like when it is exchangeable for a service or currency and the token’s value is close to it’s underlying value then I don’t think they are scams or at least less likely to be so.
What are your thoughts on this yrral?
For context: I was initially quite interested in the whole distributed ledger stuff from a technical perspective but stopped keeping up with it for the past couple of years or so.
This is a pretty high resolution copy of the Mona Lisa. If I went to see it at the Louvre in person, I wouldn't be able to see this level of detail.
I've never even seen the thing with my own eyes, but I know it's a pretty big flex by the French that they own it.
The most common reaction I've heard from people that have seen it is that it's surprisingly small.
It was insured in 2021 for $870M.
> 1) if that’s all one cares about then donating to them directly will give them more money since transaction fees are cheaper
It's not about donating to the artist directly, exactly. It's about putting a value on their work, which is likely more valuable to the artist than a direction donation.
> 2), I haven’t looked into this directly, but it would seem token resale fees given to artists are not enforceable since they could be worked around by having a holding contract that gets traded instead.
Maybe, but if you ever need to "really" own the piece for some reason, you'd have to reconcile to mainnet anyway, and the artist would get paid then. Everything else is just a promise.
For example, even today, you may need a previous NFT by an artist to get in on a new drop from that artist.
> Now if they start to be used in some enforceable way such as in a DRMd display then this would be a form of underlying value but why not use a non DRMd display?
Actually, most artists want their work to be widely seen. This creates a virtuous cycle. You buy an artist's work, which increases the value of that work, which increase the artist's exposure, which increase the artist's perceived value, which increases the value of the work you purchased, which leads to more sales for the artist, etc.
Instead of a one-time donation, the fan becomes quite literally invested in the artist.
It's the same reason a musician might want to trend on TikTok by giving away 60 seconds of their song "for free" in the hopes to make it up on streaming, merch, ticket sales, and influence later.
> Then there is the more general trend of treating tokens like these as investments where the value gets driven up and, appears to me, detached from any sense of underlying value. So the only way for the sale value of these tokens to hold is to have some one else willing to buy it. But if there is no underlying value then it’s not clear to me how this can continue indefinitely.
I remember being much younger and seeing people buy toys, instruments, and curiosities "as an investment". Most of these didn't work out, but occasionally I see something from my childhood on ebay and think "oh, well, obviously that was going to be important, i should have bought a couple of those and put it away".
Time causes some things to crystalize and other things to fade into obscurity. I suspect the same will happen with these "original" era NFTs.
Hey just wanted to first say thanks for taking the time to write a detailed response.
> I've never even seen the thing with my own eyes, but I know it's a pretty big flex by the French that they own it.
> It was insured in 2021 for $870M.
That's fair but I would argue that physical ownership of it is different than digital ownership in that physical ownership inherently has some fundamental copy protections built in (at least to a point).
Also I do think that the art market in general is a bit special in that it's kind of hard to assign an underlying value to the asset given that art is so subjective from both a personal and cultural perspective.
Some in this HN discussion have made the comparison to star registries and that seems apt as theoretically anyone can start their own star registry and naming a star in there largely has no effect outside of that [1][2][3][4]. If you want to pay a few bucks to "name" a star in some one's personal record of account then fair enough; I can see how that could make a fun gift, especially for a child. But if now you were to spend a couple thousand or millions of dollars then I'd really start to question the intent of the registry.
Maybe I misunderstood your point though.
> It's not about donating to the artist directly, exactly. It's about putting a value on their work, which is likely more valuable to the artist than a direction donation.
Also a fair point.
> Maybe, but if you ever need to "really" own the piece for some reason, you'd have to reconcile to mainnet anyway, and the artist would get paid then.
If the royalty fee is percentage of the resale value, which I believe is common [5], then ownership can still be had without paying the fee by any party by selling the token to the contract for free, trading the contract for some amount, and then triggering the sale from the contract to the contract holder for free. Since the amount the token is ever sold for in this scenario is 0 then no fees are ever owed.
Now if a fixed amount royalty fee were used then one party would have to pay the fee to put the token in the holding contract and then the final party would have to pay a fee to take it out but in between the contract could be traded fee free.
> Actually, most artists want their work to be widely seen. This creates a virtuous cycle. You buy an artist's work, which increases the value of that work, which increase the artist's exposure, which increase the artist's perceived value, which increases the value of the work you purchased, which leads to more sales for the artist, etc.
So artists want their work to be widely seen to increase its popularity and desire and narrowly owned so that value can be assigned and transferred.
I'm not sure how NFTs on their own accomplish this for digital assets. It seems to me the inherent fungibility of the digital art sets it apart from physical art or objects. Just because the token is non fungible doesn't make the asset it intends to represent non fungible. One would need some way to enforceably and meaningfully bind the two fully or partially (say with a limited view count per individual, restricted use, etc) to accomplish this. Without any restrictions on the digital art then all you have left is social perception as an enforcement mechanism.
Now that I think about it I think that's the crux of the argument.
