[babelchips]

Indeed! On that note, if Douglas Adams were still alive he’d have cleared this entire situation up years ago. And it’s NOT that NFTs are themselves worthless…

Reading below it’s clearly a perception problem.

The fundamental concept of NFTs is profoundly useful. The fact a trivial use case (to represent ownership of JPGs) is all anyone here knows or talks about is the real problem.

[CPLX]

I’m pretty sure the fundamental concept of NFTs is totally useless for anything other than financial speculation.

[fragmede]

That's like saying the Internet is totally useless for anything other than sending bits around. There's entire industries dedicated to financial speculation.

[acdha]

The Internet immediately solved problems people had which were unrelated to selling internet service. Even before the web launched, things like email, FTP, telnet, etc. were generating real value for organizations around the world.

NFTs haven’t had that because they solve a problem almost nobody actually has: complete trust less processing of transactions small and slow enough to be handled on a blockchain. Most real world applications necessitate trusted third parties and at that point you can use a much simpler system at considerably lower cost.

[babelchips]

Those original internet services didn't solve problems for the vast majority of business (or people) immediately! The technology was solid from the start, but the adoption curve was far, far slower than you suggest. By a long shot.

The difference with NFTs is the concept is sound - trusted, immutable transactions recorded on a public ledger without a third-party intermediary. The difficult part is making it work efficiently and securely. Until very recently NFTs have been slow and expensive (in cost and energy) to transact. The most visible use cases being trivial (proof of ownership of JPGs). But the answer to those technical limitations IS already here and getting better, speed and costs are not a problem if you stop referring to Bitcoin and Ethereum.

The problem is, most people dismiss the entire venture (tokenisation and the larger benefits of public DLTs) because they are only looking at the mainstream projects and agreeing with lazy journalism to have their biases validated.

[acdha]

> Those original internet services didn't solve problems for the vast majority of business (or people) immediately! The technology was solid from the start, but the adoption curve was far, far slower than you suggest. By a long shot.

I was there and, no, it wasn’t. It’s true that it wasn’t universally accessible on day one but that actually makes the comparison even less favorable for NFTs because even with far lower barriers to entry they’ve had far lower adoption. Businesses got online because it was profitable within months, not decades!

[CPLX]

I’m old, I’ve been using the internet since the late 1980’s.

The web was spectacularly useful right from the beginning. You could look up airline schedules and buy tickets instead of going downtown to a travel agent. You could email someone instead of sending a letter or making an expensive long distance call. And like a million other things.

NFTs on the other hand are fucking useless. Unless you’re counting “scam others out of money with bullshit stories” to be a use case.

[babelchips]

I too am old. I hear you. But just because you could do those things back then doesn't prove your point. Businesses took the large part of the 90s, at the very least, to really get on board with those technologies. And it wasn't though lack of desire - a lot of other factors need to come together to make the web viable in the mainstream (broadband, browser standards, TLS, countless components). None of which happened overnight.

Reading all the comments here, the sentiment over NFTs is clearly reductionist ("just monkey JPGs") and based on a very limited understanding of the fundamental benefits of the technology. Most of the real world benefits are overshadowed by this kind of sentiment and shows a clear lack of knowledge and research from the wider community.

If you truly are technically literate, you'll know the mainstream view of any nascent technology is always very weak and sensationalist (the headline in the OP a good example). If you were well versed in NFTs and DLT technology you'll know there is new ground being broken here. Your last sentence tells me that you are not well informed on the subject. If you were, you would not be saying such things and understand the computer science behind the core concepts.

So yes, whilst the NFT space is largely full of scams and is apparently useless, that doesn't mean there isn't a viable technology at play which has major benefits in multiple industries.

[babelchips]

How come?

[MBCook]

In multiple years despite huge amounts of hype and investment and trivial access to the technology by anyone on the internet no one has managed to find a single one besides “selling” “rare” “art”, which bombed spectacularly?

NFT art didn’t work. NFTs in games didn’t work. NFT shares of things didn’t work.

Enjoy your intangible beanie baby. At least those had a (small) intrinsic worth.

[babelchips]

I am not interested in collectibles, I am talking about something much more interesting and practical.

But to entirely dismiss the category because you are only privy to slow & expensive implementations or trivial use cases is like saying no one will fly across the Atlantic or be able to transport heavy goods because the Wright Flyer can barely do 30mph.

There is a fundamental technology here that goes beyond trivial collectibles. If you need examples just ask rather than throw the baby out with the bath water.