[roywiggins]

No, NFTs seem like a scam on the order of "buying a star".

https://www.wired.com/2001/12/buy-a-star-but-its-not-yours/

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.

https://nftevening.com/star-naming-registry-gets-an-nft-twis...

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.

[SubiculumCode]

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. [edit] 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,

[knownjorbist]

NFTs are just a standard. They can be a part of scams as much as they can function as an authorization scheme in dapps.

[roywiggins]

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!

[anon9001]

> Nobody would care about NFTs if all they were being used for was as "an authorization scheme in dapps".

Tell that to Uniswap: https://uniswap.org/blog/uniswap-v3/

[roywiggins]

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:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/world/wp/2018/02/13/feat...

[anon9001]

> But NFTs are a technical detail

NFTs are a technical detail, but they're exciting. I'm also excited about webrtc and webauthn. These technologies enable new businesses to exist, like Uniswap.

> phone numbers are useful, but vanity phone numbers definitely aren't solving any problems other than proving you have one

Vanity phone numbers aren't a terrible comparison to the current NFT art craze.

But also, vanity phone numbers have been popular for as long as I can remember, in every location around the world. This has been true since the invention of the telephone.

It used to be that having a 212 area code number was very prestigious. That was true because it created the appearance of doing business in NYC, which meant you must be important. After all, your business exists in NYC!

Also every possible analog of vanity phone numbers that I can think of has been wildly successful. Squatting domain names comes to mind, but also registering your nickname first on whatever the next hot tech service is. If your Twitter username is <4 characters, you're probably somewhat important, because at the very least it means you were early to Twitter.

The article you linked about phone numbers is exactly the reason why art NFTs are working and will continue to grow.

> “This number gives the impression that I am distinguished, which helps me get business, especially among officials in the state ministries who I am dealing with,” he said. “If I call them from a regular number, they wouldn’t answer my call, but when they see this number, they can’t ignore it because they know a VIP is calling them.”

> “It helps me with marketing the company,” he said. “After getting one for $100, it’s helped my business grow.”

> “He cherishes it,” Mohsen said. “Just like wine, the older it gets the more valuable it becomes.”

This all seems like very normal human stuff to me.