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by lgkk 905 days ago
At the risk of downvotes… and you did say ELI5…

An NFT is a scam. Designed to extract money from gullible and uninformed people’s pockets.

It was designed to be like a digital pass that entitles you as the owner of a digital asset. It could be something as simple as “oh that’s cool let me right click and save image as” or “only someone with this NFT can access this website that leads to a discord server where all the scammers I mean cool kids hang out”
1 comments
neontomo 905 days ago
While I mostly agree with you, you are describing the NFT art market not the technology itself. At its core, NFT is a technology to create digital scarcity and can be used for non-hype cases such as storing a contract or a wedding certificate. Right now that's not what it's used for, but perhaps in the future it can be a useful technology to store information in niche cases rather than being a modern day gold rush. As someone who has dabbled in NFTs, the current state of the NFT art market repulses me even more than cryptobros.
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ragmondo 903 days ago
^ This.

100% (yes the literal 100%) of media regarding NFTs is purely about NFT art and it annoys the shit out of me. The fact that there is free form data (with some generally accepted fields used for consistency), and that this data can be owned and provably traced back to the originator is remarkably powerful Re: the poster's above example of a wedding certificate is a great example.

The most frustrating thing about this tech was the goldrush that happened and the inevitable crash. I view myself as something of a "pragmatic visionary" (yes self-proclaimed) and to see this tech completely abused was both confusing and crushing. I'm on the verge of releasing a platform that, underneath it all, uses NFTs because they have great use-cases, but none of the marketing material mentions it due to the fact that the media have wrecked the public's opinion of NFTs.

If I had to come up with an analogy, I would say that NFT art was akin to the Model-T coming out and the only use was people driving around a track and having a picture taken of them driving around a track. Yes you can do that but you've completely missed the point.

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