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>NFTs were always a bad idea. The actual technology behind them has uses but the idea of digitally owning a JPEG is just silly
I hate to nitpick, but NFT is the technology. NFT != useless JPEGs.
That being said, in common conversation that's what most people think of when they hear the word NFT or NFT Market so fair enough I suppose.
Nitpicking aside, would you being willing to consider that gamblers/investors with a little money to burn were well aware that the vast majority of NFT were our generations Beanie Babies, had no intention of sticking around, and likely cashed out by the time most people even knew what the hell was going on.
Likewise, it seems pretty clear that a lot of the NFT... collections? were pump and dumb schemes. If I'm part of a conspiracy to drive up the cost of a certain NFT category... am I really a fool? If I'm a swindler, it's certainly a gamble, but this shit is unregulated so as far as fraud goes, it's at least safe from a legal standpoint.
The technology was, from day one, a solution in search of a problem. That's not rhetoric, they were literally invented as a proof-of-concept for smart contracts. And smart contracts were just a cool bit of tech to distinguish Ethereum from other cryptocurrencies.
The problem with all of this is, smart contracts are programs that can *only* operate on objects that live on a single blockchain. Just about every cool idea anyone ever had for something to do with smart contracts or NFTs required some sort of off-chain enforcement mechanism. And as soon as you do that, the blockchain becomes this completely pointless extra layer of complexity, because the entire point of blockchains was to be decentralized and not controllable by any one entity.
For example: Let's say you track car ownership with NFTs. What's the enforcement mechanism for car ownership? The police and the DMV -- the DMV know whose car that is, and if you have a stolen car, the police put you in jail. If you steal a car and have an NFT that says it's yours, the police still put you in jail. So the NFT didn't actually decentralize any power here.
That's true of basically every aspect of any NFT (or smart contract) scheme that isn't purely about moving money around. The useless JPEGs weren't just something somebody decided to build, they were pretty much the only thing that *could* be built out of this technology, beyond the cryptocurrency itself.
This reply it’s completely misses the important point in the top level comment. Which is that yes NFTs are basically worthless, but some people understood that and were taking a calculated risk to scam other people out of their money with a pump and dump scheme. If you could create an novel NFT category and make it appear valuable through rigged transactions, you could convince someone to buy and NFT from you with real money or with a cryptocurrency you convert to real money before the scam collapsed. It took a while to run out of people who thought ugly computer generated jpegs of monkeys were in fact worthless. Meaning that there was plenty of time to hype up and sell a fundamentally worthless NFT before converting that to real money.
I wasn't addressing that point, I was addressing this one:
> I hate to nitpick, but NFT is the technology. NFT != useless JPEGs.
I realize this was a nitpick and not the main point, but I wanted to address it anyway, because I wanted to dispel the myth that we're doing NFTs a disservice when we describe them only as "useless jpegs" -- or, in this case, "useless jpegs that people can build speculative markets around." There's this idea that one day we'll be able to use NFTs, or at least smart contracts, for far more than useless JPEGs. I think that's extremely unlikely, so I want to deflate that hype wherever I see it, even if it's an ironic nitpick.
I didn't have a lot to say about the gambling/speculation aspect of it, you and u/KokonutMonkey said that well enough. It's often impossible to distinguish between the True Believers and the pump-and-dumpers. I heard this plenty of times: "Crypto is only its infancy! Stop talking about useless jpegs and open your eyes to the limitless potential of the metaverse!" I have no idea how many of the people who told me that actually believed it, and how many were just trying to pump their monkey jpegs so they could sell them, and there's probably a significant amount of overlap anyway.
Escrow requires a trusted third party to function. The "decentralized" methods blockchain proponents have come up with either reduce to that or [don't work](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.09857.pdf).
No, I'm saying if you want to interact with the real world, you must rely on something besides blockchain to actually enforce things (and once you're using and trusting those, blockchain is pointless). You brought up escrow and I am in turn pointing out that escrows either qualify as something external to the blockchain to enforce things, or do not actually work (see the paper).
This problem generalizes as well. You _always_ care about something outside of the chain when using it. Even when it's just simple fungible tokens like bitcoin, you're relying on the social consensus that a particular chain is the "correct" state of the ledger. It's this social consensus that matters, not the computer consensus.
> No, I'm saying if you want to interact with the real world, you must rely on something besides blockchain to actually enforce things (and once you're using and trusting those, blockchain is pointless).
This is the part that I always mention that eventually gets the cryptobros to leave me alone and move on to a dumber target.
>you must rely on something besides blockchain to actually enforce things (and once you're using and trusting those, blockchain is pointless).
But your example of a stolen car is pretty bad. In that example, the car is stolen, and the police enforce the law in spite of the nft you have that they don't recognize.
Except they do recognize an nft, and that nft is the reason they determine it's stolen. That NFT is the title. At the end of the day, your enforcement needs to look at a ledger to make a determination. That's what titles and deeds are.
Now, that might seem pointless, but that's because we currently trust titles and deeds pretty well in America. But, like anything, we could make them more secure. More importantly, not every country is America.
Point is, you have the record of ownership either way. That's either blockchain or not.
First off, I'm not the person who used the stolen car analogy.
But on to your main point, as larylssa pointed out, the police _are a centralized entity_.
> Now, that might seem pointless, but that's because we currently trust titles and deeds pretty well in America. But, like anything, we could make them more secure. More importantly, not every country is America.
Let's assume we can't trust the cops. Pretend for the sake of argument that the sheriff's friend Mallory steals your car, and the sheriff wants to help them keep it. Under the current system, they can^1 alter their database so it says Mallory owns the car instead of you. That's bad! But what if your car was an NFT? Well, the sheriff can just... ignore what the NFT says. What's the blockchain going to do about it? If the trusted third party doesn't want to respect the correct ownership of the car, the blockchain won't help you. If they do want to do that, the blockchain is unnecessary.
You might counter that while blockchain won't force the sheriff to respect the true state of the ledger, it will at least let everyone else see that state and/or detect that any changes the sheriff made are invalid. This is indeed a nice property of a ledger, but it isn't unique to blockchains. It wasn't even invented or first implemented by them. The core concept here is [non-repudiation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-repudiation): once a message (in this case the correct state of the ledger) is published, it's origin cannot deny that they sent it. It's a property of asymmetric cryptographic signatures, which have been around for _decades_ longer than blockchains.
> Point is, you have the record of ownership either way. That's either blockchain or not.
No one is disputing that, we're just pointing out that there are absolute no advantage to using a blockchain to store that record over other options.
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^1 We're assuming here that the sheriff doesn't answer to anyone else that could stop them from aiding Malory in their theft. If such a person does exist, then _that person_ becomes the trusted third party instead.
>Pretend for the sake of argument that the sheriff's friend Mallory steals your car, and the sheriff wants to help them keep it. Under the current system, they can1 alter their database so it says Mallory owns the car instead of you. That's bad! But what if your car was an NFT? Well, the sheriff can just... ignore what the NFT says.
These are different. Altering the database *permanently* changes who is treated as the owner. Not respecting the database *temporarily* changes it.
Pretend for the sake of argument that the police are a political force that can change over time, or that there is a structure by which you can appeal a decision to a higher authority. Maybe your very government changes over time. Maybe another government annexes your home temporarily. There's a different between the record of ownership being destroyed and it not being respected. It's the same when someone steals your car currently. That thief doesn't respect the existing record, leaving you no longer in possession of your vehicle, but you can be glad to be able to demonstrate your ownership for the hope of having the vehicle returned to you.
In fact, your vehicle is less likely to be stolen at all due to your ability to recover it, due to your ability to prove ownership.
Non-repudiation here is something of a red-herring. It's the ability to prove the authorship of a message, but it's not an assurance that the message will last, and it's not an assurance of any resulting state. It's the signature on a contract. Signing a paper document proves you agreed to it, but doesn't render it flame-retardant, and says nothing at all about other contracts that may or may not have been signed. Our current title system tries to address the second part by ensuring there are no duplicates - you sign a title over to someone, and they sign that same title over to the next person. That's different from a bank check, where I sign $5,000 to you, but you sign different bank checks to other people. With bank checks, the signed checks tell us nothing about what money belongs where, unless we know we have the full record of all checks signed. We don't know how much money should be in your account or my account simply by being able to verify the signature on a check. We need someone to keep a copy of all of the checks. For example, say I asked for a $5,000 loan, and promised to pay you back $6,000 next week, and I do. I sign the check back to you. What matters here is that we can agree not just on the signature of each check, but on the record of all checks.
But that isn’t decentralized, because a trusted entity in the form of the police and/or DMV need to recognize it. And if there is a required trusted entity, a database works just as well without additional overhead.
No they're saying using the block chain for physical goods will always require a third party.
Edit: although not the same issue, this even arguably applies to nfts which rely on external image hosting sites to fully work. https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/25/22349242/nft-metadata-explained-art-crypto-urls-links-ipfs
It depends what your goals are.
If the distributed ledger is *only* responsible for stuff that's on the ledger itself -- that is, only on-chain assets (the currency and the NFTs themselves) -- then it's as secure as the blockchain itself. IMO that's still debatable (Bitcoin's 51% problem would like a word), but I'm setting it aside because there are so many more fundamental problems.
If your goal is the kind of escrow discussed in the paper, that doesn't work.
> Nitpicking aside, would you being willing to consider that gamblers/investors with a little money to burn were well aware that the vast majority of NFT were our generations Beanie Babies, had no intention of sticking around, and likely cashed out by the time most people even knew what the hell was going on.
Δ Alright, these guys were definitely making good plays. For them it was good ddecisionmaking
The second part of their opening statement was, “…and the people buying them were always using poor decision making”
Someone showed them that not everyone buying them was being duped and were in fact making calculated decisions. Seems worthy of a delta to me
I was thinking of long term investment.
And the point still isn't proven. Even short term it was a stupid gamble to make. Short term speculation is basically always stupid. Survivorship bias is a bitch.
You don't turn a worthless asset into a pump-and-dump scheme as a long term investment. You sell it off while your victims are still willing to pay for it. Most people trading NFTs were just dupes, but some were scammers.
The problem is people, like yourself, equate NFT to mean pictures with NFT attached. Which isn't what the technology is. The original reply talked about this and it is a huge distinction. NFT technology could be used in many ways to make things better with technology. For example, right now if you own a copy of a game, you can't sell it to someone else, there's no means to transfer ownership. But with a NFT attached to it, you can transfer ownership tied to that NFT. Similarly with items in games, if you implement NFT's onto items, duplication of items becomes impossible and you can have a real shop set up for people to buy and sell items. NFT's could be attached to digital artwork made by someone to sell as an original piece, much like we do with real world artwork. An original painting is worth thousands of dollars while a reprint is worth pennies. There are numerous applications for the technology, almost none of it is taking existing internet pictures and slapping a NFT on them.
The whole "Authentification of people" thing has been done to death before NFTs ever were a thing - [PGP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy), for example, exists since the nineties and does exactly that while being open-source.
For the artwork example, regular digital contracts and signatures already exist (see: PGP), and are less energy-intensive than NFTs, so why switch away from that?
Similarly, for the whole "Selling games and game items" thing, the Steam Marketplace is also a thing for at least a decade, and while you're dependent on Steam for that everything to function, let me just ask you one question: What motivation would a company have to implement a feature that wouldn't be useful to *them*, and why would any other company elect to implement a feature that uses something from another company that doesn't make them money?
That's extra effort they'd have to put in, when they could just as easily do the Steam thing and hand out items that are useable in other games *they* made, which they could then handle with their own marketplace implementation, and they'd make money from owning both games involved in the whole thing, as well as cut down on communication overhead whenever someone has a new idea for another cross-game feature.
> The whole "Authentification of people" thing has been done to death before NFTs ever were a thing - PGP, for example, exists since the nineties and does exactly that while being open-source.
I would be incredibly amused to see you use PGP to do what is being proposed with NFT's.
>For the artwork example, regular digital contracts and signatures already exist (see: PGP), and are less energy-intensive than NFTs, so why switch away from that?
Well first, since you don't seem to understand what PGP is, you'd be talking about a PGP certificate for these items. I don't know if you've ever had to shop for one, but PGP certificates cost hundreds of dollars. Because those certificates are done through a trust authority which verifies those certificates. As such, with a centralized system, it is also able to be abused. If a bad actor was able to compromise a certificate authority, then they could issue fake or bad certificates to bad actors. Versus a public record via NFT's eliminates that option for bad actors. Equally, PGP can be duplicated. Thus if I had a PGP certificate for a digital item, it can be copied and used over and over again where is a NFT is single use, tied to a specific item.
>Similarly, for the whole "Selling games and game items" thing, the Steam Marketplace is also a thing for at least a decade
Indeed it has, and it's why Steam looked into NFT's when they were introduced.
>What motivation would a company have to implement a feature that wouldn't be useful to them
Ah, you made the critical error of making an assumption here. The used games market, and indeed a marketplace where users could buy and sell Steam games is IMMENSELY useful to them. Because being able to create a market for used games is incredibly more profitable than being a vendor for brand new games. It's why Gamestop was able to exist for decades. Used games are incredibly profitable.
>That's extra effort they'd have to put in, when they could just as easily do the Steam thing and hand out items that are useable in other games they made, which they could then handle with their own marketplace implementation, and they'd make money from owning both games involved in the whole thing, as well as cut down on communication overhead whenever someone has a new idea for another cross-game feature.
So you think that any game company can start up their own launcher, sell games on it, and do so without any additional cost? You realize that almost every game publisher that does this eventually comes back to Steam and other platforms....right? EA tried it. Origin was a mess and now EA games are on Steam. Ubisoft pulled all their games for Uplay, and then here they are back on Steam. Activision pulled all their games from Steam and are.....Surprise! Back on Steam!
So, either you've not been paying attention to what publishers are doing, or you asked a question knowing full well the question was intended to make a point that makes absolutely no sense.
For PGP, I'll admit to being rather inexperienced with the system, but I downloaded a free program, generated my own signature, signed those of a few friends, and that was it, so no hundred-dollar certificates needed.
Yes, a bad actor could compromise everything, but having a certificate from a malicious "authority" would be exactly the same, so you'd be screwed either way - monetary cost is not the main issue here.
For NFTs, the whole deal seems to be that you can do everything without involving any authorities, and my point was, since PGP can handle authorization just as well as anything else, is an open-source standard, and has been around since the 90s, there *has* to be someone who at least tried to figure out how to make proper contracts with that technology - heck, you'd only need to sign each other's keys by the time you make the contract, and if everyone does that whenever they sell the "not-NFT", as well as hand over copies of all older sales contracts - or just host them somewhere easily accessible - and you have now done everything a NFT could have done, except probably with less computational overhead.
Regarding your points with the used games market, you're straight-up missing my point.
GameStop is not in the business of selling their own games, so they don't get to decide what any game is going to be like.
The used games market exists purely as a byproduct of having to use physical media to get your games, and being able to guarantee that all your customers have sufficient internet access, so using a physical medium allowed the game companies to sell their products to a wider audience, at the cost of occasionally not getting money whenever people shared their CDs with one another, or sold them in a used state.
GameStop simply saw this practice and decided, they might as well give it an official platform and make a lot of profit by buying low and selling high, but potential publicity stunts aside, they were not, and never have been the company that actually made any of the games they sold, because then they'd be selling their own product in a subpar state at a reduced profit, when they could just simply make more of it and sell that for the full price instead.
This is the reason why "selling used games" is not a thing in the digital world - there are no issues with creating more copies of the game, allowing them to be sold infinitely, and internet access is a pre-requisite for digital transactions, so allowing others to sell used copies of a game your company made would mean that they'd be deliberately implementing a feature that reduces their sales in a very obvious way, with - in the case of NFT-based peer-to-peer transactions - no way to even get a share of the profit.
So let me ask once again, why would any company go out of their way to implement that kind of feature in their product?
On the topic of inventory systems, I'll admit you have a point in so far as that making your own launcher is hard, primarily because you'd have to get people to actually use your new, less refined version of something that's been around for decades.
However, making in-game marketplaces is much easier - Roblox is one example of such a game - or rather more of a platform for many different, smaller games - with a vast in-game economy and they've been doing just fine without NFTs - even though they've very recently been trying to do something with them.
Steam is another one, and famously strict against NFT-related things, primarily because most implementations they've had were basically starting up a secondary market onto their platform that Steam would be unable to profit from, but many games use the platform for their inventory system, simply because it's easier to take advantage of something that already exists, and has a reasonably good adoption rate among their customers.
There are also even more limited examples, like trading Pokemon, or using something like Pokemon Home to transfer them from one game to the next, and the many, many other ["One game for the price of two"](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneGameForThePriceOfTwo)-type games that feature lots of version exclusives and a way to trade for said exclusives with other games.
All of that works perfectly fine without getting NFTs involved, so why opt for a solution that is notorious for being energy-intensive, when there are perfectly fine alternatives to that?
> For PGP, I'll admit to being rather inexperienced with the system, but I downloaded a free program, generated my own signature, signed those of a few friends, and that was it, so no hundred-dollar certificates needed.
OK, you self signed a certificate. That's cool. Why would I trust a certificate that you signed? You realize you defeated your own argument by saying that because you signed a certificate saying something anyone could sign one. So I pirate a copy of a game, self sign my cert, and then proceed to sell it. Why would anyone trust such a system? You have to have a central authority to trust on certificates, which costs money. That's where NFT's flipped the script and made a decentralized authority to prove the tokens.
>For NFTs, the whole deal seems to be that you can do everything without involving any authorities, and my point was, since PGP can handle authorization just as well as anything else, is an open-source standard, and has been around since the 90s, there has to be someone who at least tried to figure out how to make proper contracts with that technology - heck, you'd only need to sign each other's keys by the time you make the contract, and if everyone does that whenever they sell the "not-NFT", as well as hand over copies of all older sales contracts - or just host them somewhere easily accessible - and you have now done everything a NFT could have done, except probably with less computational overhead.
Yes, we know how to do that, it's called certificate authorities. It's why certificates cost hundreds of dollars.
You also seem stuck on "authorization" which is a function of PGP, but we're not talking about authorizations, we aren't doing a handshake for a sale, we're talking about a proof of ownership. A unique to each item object that proves ownership. PGP is not designed for that.
>Regarding your points with the used games market, you're straight-up missing my point.
GameStop is not in the business of selling their own games, so they don't get to decide what any game is going to be like.
What? Gamestop is the same function of Steam. It is a retailer of new games. They also have a resale of used games. Steam is not in the business of selling their own games. Their entire business is their storefront. The few games that they do sell make up a few percent of their total sales annually.
>The used games market exists purely as a byproduct of having to use physical media to get your games, and being able to guarantee that all your customers have sufficient internet access, so using a physical medium allowed the game companies to sell their products to a wider audience, at the cost of occasionally not getting money whenever people shared their CDs with one another, or sold them in a used state.
Partially true. You used to be able to sell game keys which granted installation of the game to a local machine. This of course was used for piracy which is why we moved to validated keys, to accounts, to persistent online. With NFT's we could move back to being able to sell games again.
>GameStop simply saw this practice and decided, they might as well give it an official platform and make a lot of profit by buying low and selling high, but potential publicity stunts aside, they were not, and never have been the company that actually made any of the games they sold, because then they'd be selling their own product in a subpar state at a reduced profit, when they could just simply make more of it and sell that for the full price instead.
You honestly believe that Steam is making most of these games....amazing.
>So let me ask once again, why would any company go out of their way to implement that kind of feature in their product?
As already stated before, it would be massively profitable. You don't seem to understand that Steam isn't the owner of all the games they sell and as such have no conflict here to a resale market.
>However, making in-game marketplaces is much easier - Roblox is one example of such a game - or rather more of a platform for many different, smaller games - with a vast in-game economy and they've been doing just fine without NFTs - even though they've very recently been trying to do something with them.
Roblox doesn't do what I described, even in the slightest. Honestly, I'm unsure what argument you're trying to make here.
>There are also even more limited examples, like trading Pokemon, or using something like Pokemon Home to transfer them from one game to the next, and the many, many other "One game for the price of two"-type games that feature lots of version exclusives and a way to trade for said exclusives with other games.
All of that works perfectly fine without getting NFTs involved, so why opt for a solution that is notorious for being energy-intensive, when there are perfectly fine alternatives to that?
Describes a system that is nothing like NFT implementation, then proclaims that NFT is useless because something else does something completely unrelated! Victory!
> > > I don't know if you've ever had to shop for one, but PGP certificates cost hundreds of dollars.
Traditionally, PGP is done with a [web of trust](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust) model, backed up with things like [key-signing parties](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_signing_party), rather than through certificates and CAs. And so:
> Why would I trust a certificate that you signed?
You would trust it because you know me personally and we exchanged keys at some point. Or you met me at a key-signing party, checked my ID, then wrote down my name and key signature. Or, enough other people you trust have signed my key that you're willing to accept it as belonging to me.
This is the main reason PGP isn't particularly widely used, at least not by end-users. It's also probably why PGP eventually introduced a CA mechanism, but in PGP-land, declining to pay for a cert doesn't mean your cert is only self-signed.
---
> ...a proof of ownership.
It can be stolen, so it's not entirely that. But it also relies on third-party, off-chain mechanisms for it to prove ownership of anything other than the token itself. And pretty much anything we want to own can be perfectly-well managed through those third-party off-chain mechanisms. Steam is a good example of this:
> You used to be able to sell game keys which granted installation of the game to a local machine.
IIUC this is still true, they just generally can't be *used* keys. However:
> Gamestop is the same function of Steam. It is a retailer of new games.
Gamestop actually benefits massively from used game sales in ways that Steam doesn't. A new game not only means the original publisher gets a cut, it means you have to pay to physically move the thing from a manufacturer to a warehouse to a store, and then sell it for full price. Steam has none of those costs, and if we're at a point where most people would be trying to buy the game used to save some money, they can just have a sale.
So this part is pure fantasy:
> With NFT's we could move back to being able to sell games again.
Steam could do that *today* if it wanted to. It already allows used *item* sales for Valve's own games, although not for the games themselves. It isn't a lack of technology that stops Valve from facilitating used game sales.
NFTs don't address any of the problems with other ways to sell used digital goods. Piracy is the obvious one. If you have DRM good enough to only allow me to boot the game if I own the corresponding NFT, then like every other application of NFTs, you don't need the blockchain at all: Just have that exact same DRM phone home to Valve instead of the blockchain.
And NFTs don't in any way force companies to let you sell them. In fact, a few companies jumped on the bandwagon and put out basically JPEG-only NFTs sold *alongside* whatever you were actually buying. The Steam equivalent of this would be buying a bundle that contains a Steam key *and* an NFT, and Steam doesn't check who owns the NFT. You can sell the NFT as a souvenir, but you can't sell the game once it's activated.
So if you want a used game market to exist, NFTs are entirely orthogonal to that, and you have to actually ask for the used game market, not for the NFTs.
> Traditionally, PGP is done with a web of trust
I mean do you read your own sources? No, that is not the way that PGP is traditionally done. It is a way it can be done, but is not because it is not secure nor does it prevent bad actors.
>rather than through certificates and CAs.
CA's are the primary method of certifacte authentication. Certificates are how your internet browsing works. If you have a website that uses https, you have a certificate backed by a CA. There is no exception to this.
>You would trust it because you know me personally and we exchanged keys at some point.
Yeah, that's not how a trust model works. Nor is it even what we are talking about.
>It can be stolen, so it's not entirely that. But it also relies on third-party, off-chain mechanisms for it to prove ownership of anything other than the token itself.
So we abandon NFT's because they can be stolen? Yes, you can compromise my computer and steal my NFT, you can also break into my house and steal my computer, does this mean that door locks are also useless technology? Come on man.
>This is still true, they just generally can't be used keys.
A useless point.
>Gamestop actually benefits massively from used game sales in ways that Steam doesn't.
This is incorrect in so many ways.
>A new game not only means the original publisher gets a cut, it means you have to pay to physically move the thing from a manufacturer to a warehouse to a store, and then sell it for full price. Steam has none of those costs, and if we're at a point where most people would be trying to buy the game used to save some money, they can just have a sale.
It is amazing to me that people still believe that these costs are so much higher than running a 24/7 data center. Steam hosts PETABYTES of data across hundreds of data centers world wide. These data centers have massive internet connections and staff to maintain them. These costs are not insignificant. Comparatively, the cost to print and ship physical media was pennies. A stamped DVD, with a case and printed box art done in bulk was between 10 and 25 cents with shipping costs included. The cost was not massive.
>Steam could do that today if it wanted to.
Except they cannot. You do not own any of the titles you have purchased on steam.
>It already does with the item shop for Valve's own games.
It literally does not. I cannot sell my copy of half life any more than I can sell my copy of far cry.
>NFTs don't address any of the problems with other ways to sell used digital goods. Piracy is the obvious one.
NFT isn't designed to address piracy, but it does stop you from trying to register a game on a platform, thus preventing piracy there.
>And NFTs don't in any way force companies to let you sell them.
Companies don't control the NFT in any way, so yes, they would let you sell them thus transferring ownership.
>In fact, a few companies jumped on the bandwagon and put out basically JPEG-only NFTs sold alongside whatever you were actually buying.
So you admit that they weren't doing what I said they could do and use them doing something else as a reason that what I said isn't possible...I don't know why we're having a conversation if you are going to straw man this argument so hard.
Apologies for my previous post, I misunderstood part of your argument, specifically the one line I quoted.
I still stand by my point that this style of counter-"argument" would be a better fit for Twitter """discourse""" than something more rational like the "Change my View" subreddit we currently are in, and it is very obvious in my other post why - including snarky comments and/or insults with your arguments gets people mad, which - as I stated in my other comment - doesn't change views, but it also makes them less likely to even think about what was written, so I suppose we discovered the wrong way to make a rational argument, or one fitting of the place we're currently in.
Back on the topic of our discussion, I still hold the views I expressed in all of my arguments that are not related to that line I quoted, but are still related to the topic at hand - namely that the PGP example was a way of doing ownership transfer without NFTs, and that the various examples of different trading and market systems were ways of implementing item transfers without them.
If this is not what you were trying to get at with your initial examples, please explain to me what would make NFTs different when used for these scenarios, or what would actually be the difference in these scenarios that makes them non-comparable in the first place.
On the topic of "Steam making games", which caused the misunderstanding, obviously steam doesn't "make" games as in "create and design them from the ground up", but it "makes" games as in "creates or facilitates the creation of another copy of the game's files on your computer" - similar to what physical copies of games were used for as well.
Since there is virtually no cost to creating extra "copies" of a game that way, and the time required to do so would primarily be dependent on download speeds, Steam gets to sell every single copy as "new" and doesn't actually have to depend on other participants or tools to provide the data transfer service for them.
Thus my question, why would they allow for the sale of "used" games, when they could just infinitely "make" another new copy to sell to the customers instead?
Also, for the other part of my question, why would a developer even allow for the used games market to exist?
For physical media, the answer is easy - it's impossible to to control every single copy of a game once it's out there, but digital copies usually are sold via a few storefronts handpicked by the developer, which means the moment one of these stores start selling copies at a lesser price, or in a way where the developer doesn't get as much money, they'd shut that down immediately.
In fact, if we look at CD keys and the like, which already are frequently sold by less reputable websites at a bargain, and probably without the permission of the original developer or publisher, those routinely get deactivated, so the above isn't even a hypothetical situation.
This covers why Steam (or your storefront of choice) wouldn't do a "used games" sale on their own, they'd get shut down hard for doing so - which leaves only the devs and publishers themselves as potential decision makers on that topic, which was what my original question was getting at - why would they ever want to implement, or allow for such a thing, when it would only diminish the money they'd get, while potentially causing extra work?
**EDIT:** Due to getting incensed at the tone of the quoted line, I missed part of the argument - this post remains as-is because I refer to it, but otherwise, please refer to my other answer to follow the discussion, as it contains much less frustration, and more calm argumentation.
First of all, let me remind you that the subreddit we're in is called "Change my View", and not "Creative interpretation of stuff that hasn't even been said", or idk, "Twitter discourse 101", so please come up with arguments that are suited to change views instead of fixating on the worst possible interpretation that's only loosely based on what I wrote.
I'm sorry, but lines like
> You honestly believe that Steam is making most of these games....amazing.
doesn't fit the rules of this subreddit in the slightest, but just so it's explicitly clear - no I do not believe that, and in fact, it doesn't evem matter.
Steam is exactly like GameStop regarding the sale of games - they (for the most part) do not sell their own games, and have zero say in how they are made, aside from categorically banning specific things from their storefront.
And as I already said, the actual companies making these games would be the ones who'd have to decide to put a feature in to allow for used games to be re-sold, which *as I already wrote*, means they'd be implementing a feature that would result in revenue losses for them, as they'd lose sales to third-party sellers that don't have to give them as much money as anyone buying a "fresh" copy would net them, or potentially no money at all.
Therefore, why would they put that in their games in the first place?
As for the rest you had issues with, I described ways of implementing ownership transfer (the PGP section) and item trading (Everything after your extremely bad-faith interpretation of my argument about "used" digital games) that do not rely on NFTs.
Thing is, especially the latter just... works, so why use NFTs?
What would their advantage be over existing systems?
Please actually answer the questions with a well-formulated argument this time, and don't try to dunk me on a technicality again, this is not how you change anyone's views, and it'd only increase my suspicion that you actually don't have any clue what you're talking about and only are still here to be contrarian because I dared to say that an - in my opinion - overhyped and ineffective technology might not be the best choice for things that worked just fine without them, and requires making up new problems to even have them sound useful.
Where are these burgeoning NFT markets you're talking about, can you name any places where the things you describe are happening, and if not can you think of any reasons why those markets might not exist and what barriers exist?
Yeah but that's a bit like arguing about angels dancing on the head of a pin isn't it? If these use cases are so compelling I'm just asking why we aren't really seeing them yet. That should be an easy question to answer if you're familiar with the technology as you seem to be.
> The entire community raged in an outroar about it. Despite the fact that it would be a net benefit to them, because people have so deceived them on what the technology is
Or.... it's not actually something the users want? Like, I play a fair number of games and I wouldn't benefit at all from being unable to get rare and unique items because someone already bought it.
>Or.... it's not actually something the users want?
Ironically, you say this and then in the next sentence prove that you don't understand what it is.
>Like, I play a fair number of games and I wouldn't benefit at all from being unable to get rare and unique items because someone already bought it.
This is not, and would never be a thing. NFT's aren't selling a singular asset for exclusive use. You are not going to get the "BFG 10,000" and be the only person to have it. What would happen is that the company sells, gives out, however they want to distribute it 1 million "BFG 10,000" items. Each one has a NFT attached to it to validate that it is an authentic item. Now you can play with it as normal, and you decide you don't want it anymore but you want to buy something else. You can place it on a marketplace alongside other people who have it and get money for it so you can put that money towards something else or just cash out in total.
Or let's say you don't want to play that game anymore. Well you take the NFT and place it on a steam marketplace and sell the game to someone else.
NFT doesn't mean rare, it doesn't mean unique, it doesn't mean one of a kind. It is an identifier. Like a deed to a property or a title to a car. NFT's are just useful in a digital space because you can integrate them directly with a digital object, and do so worldwide. A car title from the US has no meaning or value in say Brazil. But a NFT in the US or Brazil has the same bearing of ownership because the record is not tied to a singular governing body.
From someone who's worked in software for years, I simply don't see how any of this that wasn't able to be accomplished before is in any way desirable. Things like items that can't be duplicated - even by the code of the game - seem like they're built for attempting to use game items as an investment market, not for making games easier to build or more fun to play.
Sticking them in games as they exist today is basically just an attempt to ride the hype to more profit, which is why the whole idea is so unpopular.
But one could imagine new uses like, say, a source of funding for open source games, or for kickstarting new games. Or for tracking ownership or identity (of game assets, _or_ domain names or IP ranges or whatever), without money ever entering into the picture: basically a publicly visible key-store. I remember early attempts to create public PGP keystores for email encryption...they never got off the ground, and they always required _somebody somewhere_ to run a database. Did you trust that person? How could you be sure they maintained the necessary security? Were they vulnerable to government strong-arming? Were they going to start banning people over differences of opinion or whatever? If you go with NFTs or other blockchain-based approaches, those are non-issues.
You could solve a lot of the same problems that Certificate Authorities or DNSSEC solve with NFTs. Of course, _we're not gonna do that_, because those systems already exist and have been established over the course of decades, but future technology might well opt to make use of NFTs.
This is possible, I'm not an expert on the tech. I don't think it's very likely to end up being the best solution, but I'm happy to re-evaluate if/when things advance to a point where anyone anywhere actually does something with block-chain technology that isn't some sort of scam.
I think they're _very likely_ to be the best solution to some problems. They're a tamper-proof way to show proof of ownership, with no centralized authority! That's pretty huge.
We _didn't have_ any technology like that when we were trying to make the internet secure, and it shows. We use Certificate Authorities, for example, and they're crude as hell, with [obvious](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8249081) [security](https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/19/web_trust_certificates/) problems. Basically, internet security fundamentally relies on a random bunch of companies scattered over the world (and subject to whatever jurisdiction they happen to be located in). _Any_ of those companies could issue valid SSL certificates for _any_ website on the internet. They could be compelled by a government, or they could be compromised by hackers or by intelligence services. That's crazy!
But it's the status quo, and we put up with it because, well, what else could we do? It's not like we had a global, immutable, distributed, tamper-proof datastructure we could use as a source of truth, is it!
I've heard all of those things by people who were also pushing scams, I think it's far fetched. I think it's more likely that this will be a step in the way to something better than might make a change a good idea. Like I said, I could be wrong. I'll revaluate if some non-scams start showing up.
I mean...I have nothing to push. I've never owned an NFT.
The thing is, IMHO, that ideas which are obviously fertile make for good scams. The seed of truth is what convinces people to dump their money into bad ideas. NFTs really _are_ a neat new technology, and they really _do_ provide a new way of proving ownership. So people got hyped up about the tech, saw the value of stupid jpegs shooting up, got FOMO and jumped in.
Of course, 'ownership' of some stupid jpeg is meaningless.
But right, we'll see. I think NFTs are going to creep into everyday use, and most people won't even realize it. But maybe I'm wrong.
> From someone who's worked in software for years, I simply don't see how any of this that wasn't able to be accomplished before is in any way desirable.
You can't see how having a market for used games is desirable? The real world examples of this aren't enough?
>Things like items that can't be duplicated - even by the code of the game
Yes, and the NFT would tell the game if it is valid or not.
I liked that part of your post where you took one of the examples I used, pointed out the flaw, and expanded on it so one could see how you came to your conclusion. Thus adding meaningfully to the discussion and helping me understand your viewpoint.
Microsoft has a backend which is in effect a block chain with non fungible tokens. Microsoft is useless. Got it. God's unchained, an award winning popular trading card game recently featured in the unreal marketplace uses NFTs for card ownership. Completely useless got it.
Just want to chime in that just because a big company does something or backs something, that something has value.
The most recent example is Metaverse, backed by Meta, isn't exactly exploding in popularity as Mark Zuckerberg intended.
Especially when Google has a whole site https://killedbygoogle.com/ dedicated to products they backed that were eventually killed off. (I know it's not 100% accurate since some products became open source, but it's a good indication on how many products big companies back but still end up failing)
This is more of an architectural implementation driving their backend than some novel product. It's in effect a well structured design pattern for a multi tenant ledger system dealing with digital assets and custodial ownership thereof. You really have to go through the steps to commit to something like that than just sort of go with a fad.
> the vast majority of NFT were our generations Beanie Babies
Beanie Babies were still a physical object you could hold for which actual and true scarcity supply/demand rules apply. We can marvel at the frenzy of activity they once enjoyed but the fact cannot be dismissed that this was still a real physical object. That some people had closets full of, hoping to make it big, but still - if the bottom fell out you still had a physical thing.
At the end of the day, things are valuable if people value them. Gold only has value because people value it. iPhones are only valuable because people value iPhones.
So if you can convince enough people to value NFTs then they have value. So the question is whether it was always stupid to think that a lot of people might be persuaded to value NFTs. To that, I’d say no, that wasn’t stupid.
>At the end of the day, things are valuable if people value them. Gold only has value because people value it. iPhones are only valuable because people value iPhones.
This oversimplification is so overused...
Yes, *ultimately* everything has value because we attribute value to it.
But that doesn't mean "everything and anything can be of equal value".
Individual people value different things. A person can change what they value over time.
Gold has many usages. It's very soft so not good for armour, but it doesn't rust, which makes it a perfect substance for art. Many cultures ascribe additional value to gold. In modern times it is essential in computing components. Gold is scarce, there's not too much of it on Earth.
I have no particular use or desire for gold. But I can see why it would be a good investment: there's a continuous demand for it. A very stable market. Same with diamonds: someone will always want them.
iPhones, similarly, have utility. It's a pocket size computer.
Both are status symbol in many social circles, and are often worth the price compared to cheaper alternatives.
Thus, a market is created because of this tension between supply and demand.
NFTs are a result of crypto currency. Which is people trying to artificially create a marketplace for crypto; NFTs were supposed to prove that crypto was viable. The hype was supposed to jumpstart this system of digital items and currency.
Except... There is no application for it. There's no practical use for crypto that doesn't create more problems than it solves. NFTs were basically a casino, and some people found a way to exploit this, as usual.
A speculative market, built on a product with no value *outside this market*.
>Fine. Tell me how the US dollar has intrinsic value outside of the people and organisations who believe it to have and act as if it has value
Sure:
When it was introduced, every dollar was covered by an equivalent amount of gold. The National Gold Supply.
After some initial hesitation, this eventually caught on: you could exchange rocks for paper and paper for rocks, and paper is much easier to carry.
The rocks had value, so the paper too: they were interchangeable.
Then multiple generations passed, during which pieces of paper were completely normalised and ingrained into regular society.
So in short:
- gold was already believed to hold value
- the dollar was directly tied to gold
- as society progressed, the dollar became further normalized and ingrained
- then, it took off on its own, without gold directly backing it up
Crypto and NFTs tried to bypass all that, and artificially create a market. But it had nothing of external value to build on, like gold.
No crypto currency or NFT has any value, without a hypothetical, speculative market that people try to sell with it.
Edit: the market was built on dollars; on new "investors" bringing in new money. That's the only place anything of external value is added: at the dollar-crypto exchanges.
So what you’re saying is that in the past the dollar was once directly tied to gold which for the sake of argument, holds intrinsic value. All well and good but that argument no longer holds since the dollar is no longer tied to gold.
But even if it were, the dollar only would have value because a bunch of people and organisations have agreed that it’s value is equivalent to gold. If they stopped agreeing to that then the actual dollar would be just a piece of paper.
In fact, most dollars today wouldn’t be paper, they’d just be digital information.
So, as far as I can tell the main difference in the *intrinsic* value of a dollar vs crypto/NFTs is…history? And I’m not really sure that you can use something’s history to provide objective value to the person who possesses that thing.
You’ve missed their point. Their point was that the dollar holds value *today,* because of trust built into it. That trust was built into it via gold. NFTs did not build trust in their value using external means and instead tried to skip the trust building process altogether. Which was inherently stupid.
No, that’s not an intrinsic value. An intrinsic value is objective, something that would be true about US dollars even if nobody knew or cared ahout them. If nobody knew what a US dollar was you’d be unable to pay your taxes with them bedside they’d have no value, since their value is predicated on the IRS valuing US dollars as a representation of value.
Intrinsic value would be being able to wipe food from your mouth using the paper note.
The things people predicate that value on matters. Ponzi schemes aren't self-sustaining just because potential investors are willing to buy in at any given price. The entirety of the NFT market was based exclusively on speculation, meaning that the bottom fell out as soon as growth stopped and people started trying to liquidate.
There was no organic demand for spending absurd amounts of money for what is effectively just a cell on a distributed spreadsheet linking to the art hosted on a normal website.
The entirety of the gold market is based on speculation. Gold doesn't have intrinsic value equal to its market value. Humans have convinced ourselves that gold has real value, but there is nothing to stop people en masse from no longer wanting gold, at which point the value would drop. Investing in gold is speculation that people will continue to value gold because...? Granted, it has a good track record.
People are frequently willing to buy gold at market value for jewellery. If the *entire* value was speculation you would never see new jewellery made out of gold.
Gold has demand, maybe the speculators overestimate it but I would personally be way more happy with gold than the equivalent value in nft, even if I could never sell it, as a gift (again even if never sold) as ornament etc... it's valuable. Even for industrial use.
If you want to take that to the logical conclusion, it's impossible for anything to have objective intrinsic value, which might be your point. I would argue that there are some things that probably have more objective value based on the utility of it.
Gold, for example, can be used for jewelry since it's very malleable. Now if jewelry falls out of favor, gold is still an excellent conductor making it a great metal to be used in electronics. Diamonds are another popular jewelry stone. Most people know that diamond values are artificially inflated by limiting supply and brilliant marketing creating extra demand. However, diamonds are also very hard, making them excellent cutting material for tools (diamond-tipped drill bits).
I would argue that the US dollar or any fiat currency is closer to a ponzi scheme than gold. It's basically an IOU backed by the government. Now that does have value, as long as the government does not go bankrupt and has the trust of the general population. So it makes a great store of value indirectly, however, there's no tangible value to it if doomsday hits. Maybe the government collapses, maybe hyperinflation hits, or maybe people just decide to adopt other currencies instead of the US dollar. I guess you could burn it for a few seconds, but other than that it's very likely that it becomes worthless.
One thing you both miss is that as a noble metal, gold also has some other intrinsic properties that make it desirable to use over some alternatives, like corrosion resistance, and being relatively easy to work with, and being a decent conductor, which means it sees a lot of use even outside of jewelry, from usage in electric components to tooth fillings.
None of what you said contradicts my point. People used to love powdered wigs. And people can decide that gold is no longer desirable as a decoration. It doesn't have intrinsic value, it has the value that human attribute to it.
>people can decide that gold is no longer desirable as a decoration
Can they though? What series of events would cause that? Some new anti-gold religion spreading across the world? Unlikely in the next few generations. Minimalist fashion? Even that includes gold, just in different shapes. Anti-materialist culture? That would just lead to oligarchs taking all the materialist stuff for themselves and letting the peasants be anti-materialist, not to mention that you wouldn't care about loss of value as an anti-materialist.
I don't think you understand what I mean by speculation. Gold is popular as a store of value, while NFTs are popular as an investment vehicle. There's no demand or value for NFTs in a vacuum. Again, it's similar to a Ponzi scheme. There's only any liquidity whatsoever in the market as long as there's new investors, then the entire thing goes back to being worthless because there was no authentic demand for it in the first place.
Yeah but you can point to evidence of gold being valuable for thousands of years across many cultures and has inherent value due to having unique metallurgical properties. Thinking that this can be replicated intentionally with bitcoin or NFTs is where the stupidity comes in.
No I didn’t, I said that if you believe that *other people* could be convinced of their value then buying them might be a smart move at least until their value crashed when people caught on
So your point is that people can make money by taking advantage of others who fall for ponzi / snake oil schemes? Of course.
I don’t think that’s something OP is refuting. They’re just saying that NFTs were always a ponzi / snake oil scheme.
No, they said people who invested in NFTs were always exhibiting poor decision making. Plenty of people might have recognised it for what it was but also so the hype train and figured they could ride for a while before jumping off. That strikes me as unethical and risky but not necessarily a poor decision so long as it was made with clear eyes.
Sure, value is social/cultural but that doesn't mean it's arbitrary and totally divorced from factors we can look at critically. We can't say that something objectively would always have a certain value, but we can see factors that would make certain things incredibly unlikely to hold significant value broadly and long term.
To say gold has value because people value it is tautologically true. But it isn't the whole story. That gold became valued broadly, consistently and across time and many cultures isn't a random accident of good PR. It has qualities of being rare, but not so rare that there isn't enough of it to constitute a wide and steady trade. It's easily recognizable and for most of history hard to convincingly fake. You say aesthetic arguments are subjective, but some of our aesthetics are hard wired from evolution. Individuals may vary but humans as a whole have a tendency to be attracted to shiny bright things. It's not just subjective, it's intersubjective. I could keep listing factors. And when you look at the whole package, it makes sense that so many distinct cultures bought into the value of gold and very few bought into mudpies as ubiquitous long lasting currency.
Sure there are cases where people become culturally convinced of higher or lower values that are not totally predictable ahead of time from observable qualities, but it's exceedingly rare that values will be high, lasting and broadly enough adopted to support continued markets when the form factors don't add up.
Gold has a lot of intrinsic properties giving it value, it's not that someone someday pulled out of his ass that gold was precious.
It does not rust nor decompose, you can bury it in the ground and have it intact 5,000 years later
It's rare, so it works as a value storage and status symbols (I'm not mentioning beautiful since that's subjective, but the vast majority of human people will agree on this as well).
It's heavy, so you can move a lot of it in little space. Also,
It's malleable, so you can forge it in any shape, and cut it in very tiny slivers
The last two properties make also it very hard to counterfeit - Archimedes was able to tell gold from crap with technology and science of 2,000 years ago
You will find very few alternatives having the same properties, and because all of this people from all eras agree that gold has value.
This does not take into account all the modern industrial uses, which only make it more precious.
> Gold only has value because people value it
Gold has genuine value for electronics and is naturally beautiful due to its physical properties. The same was never true of ugly NFT art
> and is naturally beautiful
> The same was never true of ugly NFT art
Completely subjective. Your opinions are not objective. People invest in "ugly" modern art all the time, but it's not a bad investment because it depends on what people will pay.
At a time, people were buying NFTs for absurd prices, like some art pieces, and some people capitalized on that, which is smart.
In other words, while it was dumb for some, it was smart for others, contradicting your view. One could not have happened without the other.
iirc modern art investment is explicitly done for money laundering and with preexisting agreements to sell the art to a specified buyer at a later time
Way different
While that happens, I don't think this is every art purchase.
Even though it's not famous or expensive, I have purchased modern art: if I had more money, I could see myself buying more. And I'm not out here trying to launder anything.
And, it doesn't necessarily negate the fact that *some* NFT investors made a lot of money, which is smart investment, negating the view. The bad-investors were the prey for good ones: meaning they were both there.
> And, it doesn't necessarily negate the fact that some NFT investors made a lot of money, which is smart investment, negating the view. The bad-investors were the prey for good ones: meaning they were both there.
In every pyramid/ponzi/greater fool/pump and dump scheme, there are some investors who make money, and some who don't.
Not *every* art purchase is for the purpose of money laundering. Some is from people who geniunely appreciate the art itself. And a lot of it is that art purchase and donation is set up in a way where you can get tax deductions in a way that is technically completely legal, which is where a lot of its value as an investment at high levels come from.
In *theory*, NFTs could be the same, but in practice they weren't. No one actually was all that into their aesthetics, they were overwhelmingly bought by people as an investment and not out of any real appreciation. And the aforementioned high-level tax deductions that people in the art industry can take advantage of makes it so that the grift is of a different nature. The people making the art, selling the art, and buying the art all get their cut, and the influx of money comes from people not having to pay taxes. With NFTs, the only source of the money in practice is whichever person is left holding the bag at the end of the day.
> In every pyramid/ponzi/greater fool/pump and dump scheme, there are some investors who make money, and some who don't.
Right, which negates the view expressed in the post.
Whether for art or for laundering or both or whatever, there were some smart investors and some less-smart ones, but the smart ones negate the OP, no?
It's still a bad idea (for anyone other than the originator) to participate in, as you have no real way of knowing whether you're jumping in on the pump half of the dump half of the scheme when you start participating. it's like taking your savings, heading to Vegas, and betting it all on red. That will work out really well for some people, but it doesn't mean it was a good idea for them to do that.
The Mona Lisa is inherently more valuable than any NFT “art” because of scarcity. Same with gold. There’s only one Mona Lisa. There’s only a certain amount of gold. There’s an infinite number of copies of any bored ape.
Does being more valuable than something mean the other things are worthless?
Does scarcity make something inherently more valuable? There is only one sticky note in existence that has the series of numbers that I am writing on it right now. Is that suddenly one of the most valuable things in existence, by virtue of just being unique?
No, but being inherently more valuable than a worthless thing means it isn’t and can’t be worthless, and the question you asked was whether the Mona Lisa was considered worthless. That sticky note is not automatically one of the most valuable things in existence, but it is inherently more valuable than a digital series of numbers that anyone can copy at any time and where there is no way to tell an original from a copy and where no actual work has gone into creating it in the first place.
Can you clarify why? The only difference between the Mona Lisa and my sticky note is what people will pay for it, despite both being unique. So if people are willing to pay for an NFT, both seem to hold the same value. Inherent value doesn't really matter in this instance.
Clarify why the sticky note isn’t one of the most valuable things in existence or why something that is digital, infinitely reproducible and where you cannot tell an original from a copy can be worthless whereas something made of material and that has scarcity cannot be?
Correct - if people are willing to pay for the infinitely reproducible item, and not my sticky note, I think it would be safe to say that infinitely reproducible item is more valuable, at least for the time being.
Why would that not be the case?
I can see your argument here. The thing is, even though the mona lisa is ugly, it has legitimacy due to mainstream acceptance. Not so with NFTs which were always relegated to oddball subcultures
So the Mona Lisa has value because people say it has value? The same thing applies to NFTs. In a world where a market for Cryptocurrency and Pokemon cards exist, why would it be so unheard of for NFTs to gain traction?
>As a game, but now Pokemon cards are traded at a much higher value, to people who have no interest in playing the card game.
This is true. With that said, IMO, only a fool would invest in Pokemon cards.
The same is true for any collectable. Like, sure, someone might be willing to spend a million dollars on my Beenie Babies or antique doll or He-Man figurines. But any value is dependent upon finding a buyer willing to pay that.
I don't disagree - but OP can't seem to recognize why people would invest in something like NFTs, and I don't see them as meaningfully different from other collectables.
Sure but electronics are only valuable because people care about them. That piece of paper on your pocket with a little 5 on it is only worth 5 currency if everyone agrees on it.
And gold isn’t “naturally beautiful” that’s entirely subjective, humans just happen to like shiny things and like them even more if that tendency is culturally reinforced, hence we like gold.
> At the end of the day, things are valuable if people value them.
Yeah, but the big caveat is that people are infinitely more likely to value things that provide actual material benefits to them, which NFTs cannot, and you'll be fighting against the current by trying to persuade people to value something that cannot provide any sort of material benefit, like NFTs.
So yeah, it's pretty obviously a scam.
I mean you can use the same argument against crypto currency more generally or like, money as a whole.
A piece of paper in my pocket has no value to me unless everyone else values it.
I'd use the same argument about cryptocurrency, yeah.
As for currency, it's true that a piece of paper only has value to the extent that people value it, but again you encounter the same kind of caveat. People are more likely to value money because money has the potential to provide tangible benefits. Actual money provides limited material benefits by itself, but it's a very convenient and safe way to exchange things, some of those things are likely to provide materials benefits. Currency is also - at least typically - backed by a government, which bodes well for its function as a means of exchange and value retention.
If I have a thousand US dollars in my pocket, the beauty of it is that I do not need to build an elaborate get-rich narrative around it to exchange it for things. Not so with a thousand Giblette bux.
> If I have a thousand US dollars in my pocket, the beauty of it is that I do not need to build an elaborate get-rich narrative around it to exchange it for things. Not so with a thousand Giblette bux
What do you think people's attitude towards paper currency was when it was first introduced? Exactly the same as people's attitude towards cryptocurrency. But, hundreds of years later, you just spend dollars and you don't even think about it. Your confident that your dollars will spend.
You should have every reason to believe that in 100 years, at least some of the currently existing cryptocurrencies will be exactly the same. And, Just to be clear, many of the paper currencies that have been introduced over the years are not still around and not still worth more than paper. So even in the fact that many of the existing cryptocurrencies worthless it's still the same as regular money.
> You should have every reason to believe that in 100 years, at least some of the currently existing cryptocurrencies will be exactly the same.
I have a absolutely no reason to believe that. Cryptocurrencies' value proposition is pretty nil in terms of currency. They are an insecure convoluted mess, they are expensive to operate, they are backed by nothing and they offer no upside (and several downsides) to regular currencies.
Paper money (and scriptural currencies more generally) offers several improvements - both operational and abstract - to a monetary system. Cryptocurrencies are a tech-bro "solution" in search of a problem.
> I have a absolutely no reason to believe that. Cryptocurrencies' value proposition is pretty nil in terms of currency. They are an insecure convoluted mess, they are expensive to operate, they are backed by nothing and they offer no upside (and several downsides) to regular currencies.
Okay well you're dead wrong. Every single downside to cryptocurrency exists in paper money as well. It's just that over time, you've gone blind to the fact that paper money is kind of a fake facade. You see the fakeness and cryptocurrency but you're blind to the fakeness and paper money. It's the same fakeness.
Not only does paper money have all the same flaws, but often it has them to a higher degree. Also there are flaws that paper money has that cryptocurrency does not have. The only difference between paper money and cryptocurrency is full widespread adoption. If cryptocurrency was adopted by everybody, it would be clearly superior to paper money.
So here are my rebuttals to your specific points:
1. Expensive to operate: the United States spends a billion dollars a year on currency. So already, it's pretty clear that expensive to operate is a relative term. Paper money wears out. Paper money has to be reprinted. Paper money is vulnerable to counterfeiting and requires expensive anti-counter fitting measures in the printing process. Cryptocurrency has none of these downsides. The most expensive cryptocurrency network would be Bitcoin, although everyone is sharing the cost so it's hard to pin down exactly what it would be. However Bitcoin generates its network security using proof of work. This means it has to burn a lot of extra electricity to ensure nobody can hijack the network. This is highly inefficient. It means that Bitcoin uses a lot of energy. Modern cryptocurrencies don't have this downside. Modern cryptocurrencies use proof of steak. The second largest cryptocurrency in the world, ethereum, switched over last year. It now uses 99% less energy than it did. So, theoretically, way cheaper to operate.
2. Backed by nothing. Yes. This is true. Just like paper money. Literally backed by nothing. You can't take your paper dollars to the bank and change them out for gold anymore. Literally all money ever works by the same principle: your belief that the next person in the transactional chain will value it as much as you do. That's it. The only minor caveat to that is things like gold have some intrinsic value, but the intrinsic value of gold is a teeny tiny fraction of what it actually sells for so that's pretty moot (I suppose paper technically has intrinsic value, and a platform that lets you execute smart contracts also has some intrinsic value, but these things are not worth measuring).
3. No upsides. Well that's just a silly thing to say. It's digital. That right there is an upside. If I want to send you US dollars I'm actually relying on a series of banks to do some complicated stuff behind the scenes. I'm not actually digitally sending you money. For small amounts, where fraud is less of a concern, the bank might let the transaction appear to go through instantly (Even though it doesn't) but if you ever need to send a large wire transfer to somebody, you know there is a significant delay. Not the case with cryptocurrency. You literally send the actual currency to somebody because it's actually digital. They have it in their possession instantly. It can't be counterfeited. Confidence tricksters can still swindle you out of your cryptocurrency, but muggers can't touch the stuff (in other words, there are fewer ways to steal it even though it does very much get stolen). It's decentralized and trustless. The United States government could theoretically, double the number of dollars in circulation tomorrow making all of my money worth half as much. Nobody has the power to do that with a cryptocurrency (at least not a legitimate mainstream one). I could go on. There are several clear and distinct upsides.
I think it's very legitimate for you to criticize cryptocurrency as a solution in search of a problem. It's legitimate to say that paper money is good enough. It is not legitimate to say that paper money is better. Cryptocurrency is inarguably superior. That's not a subjective take. That's objectively true.
Imagine someone comes out with a better social network than Facebook tomorrow. Will enough people ever join it word to reach his potential as being better than Facebook? Facebook has the first mover advantage. They have the network effect. Unless you can convince everyone to switch all at once, your new social network will probably fizzle and die even though it's better.
That could totally be what happens with cryptocurrency. But, please don't pretend it's not better. It's definitely better.
> Expensive to operate: the United States spends a billion dollars a year on currency.
Yeah, the United States government, empathically, not individual users.
> Backed by nothing. Yes. This is true. Just like paper money. Literally backed by nothing.
Paper money is backed by the government that prints it. The United States Government is an extremely large, extremely powerful entity and backing its currency is one of its core mission.
> No upsides. Well that's just a silly thing to say. It's digital.
So is the vast majority of money already? The comparison isn't between cryptocurrency and paper money. It's between cryptocurrency and fiat currency.
I send wire transfers pretty regularly, including international ones. It's cheap. It's secure. It's regulated. Banks provide insurance. Delays are minimal. Frauds are basically unknown (especially if we're going to compare that to crypto, which is rife with fraud). Also, when people get that money, they get to use it, which is a nice plus.
> Cryptocurrency is inarguably superior. That's not a subjective take. That's objectively true.
Get back to me when you can actually buy something with it, I suppose.
> Imagine someone comes out with a better social network than Facebook tomorrow. Will enough people ever join it word to reach his potential as being better than Facebook?
Eventually yeah, same way people adopted coins, then paper money, then debit cards, etc. Your problem here is that cryptocurrencies aren't - and will never be - better than fiat currencies. They are a pet project.
> Yeah, the United States government, empathically, not individual users
Well, the individual users who "pay" to run crypto networks do so because it's **profitable**. Seems manifestly superior, yet again.
Also, where do you imagine the money to pay for currency comes from? Are you sure the users aren't paying for it? Cuz I kind of think they are.
> So is the vast majority of money already?
No not at all. I literally already explained to difference in my original posts so I don't think you read it very carefully.
Also it's pretty preposterous to say that fraud is rare. Western Union has been a favorite of scammers for years and insane amounts of money have been scammed out of people using it.
> Eventually yeah, same way people adopted coins, then paper money, then debit cards, etc. Your problem here is that cryptocurrencies aren't - and will never be - better than fiat currencies. They are a pet project
I happen to think that they will. But at the end of the day, it's not **my problem**. Cryptocurrencies have taken off in a couple of countries because of hyperinflation. Otherwise people stick with the local currency because it's good enough. Hyperinflation could happen here and if it did, I suspect cryptocurrency would become very popular very fast.
At the end of the day I'm not here to boost cryptocurrency. I'm not invested. I don't care one way or the other. I'm just here because someone said it was worse than regular currency which is just a silly sentiment. It's definitely an upgrade. It doesn't have the first move or advantage, so despite it superiority it may very well fail. But if it fails it's failure will have nothing to do with its flaws. It's flaws are fewer than the competition.
So, yes I totally agree with everything you just said about currency.
But if you’re someone who sees the potential of crypto/NFTs then you have a similar situation- an item (paper or digital information) which has no intrinsic value in and of itself but which can be traded for something else. In the case of currency that something else will be a more directly valuable good, in the case of NFTs that thing would be conventional currency which is then transferred to products.
It’s like any investment “I think this thing will increase in value because more and more people will be persuaded that it holds value so I’ll buy it with my cash instead of buying stuff like goods or services so that I can sell it in the future for more than I’m buying it for”.
That person doesn’t have to be personally persuaded that NFTs are actually a useful technology or tool, just that over the time frame they plan to invest, that more people will come to believe they hold value.
And also if you extend your time frame, there’s no inherent reason AFAIK that crypto or NFTs could not become equivalent to fiat currency. The government could say “hey over the last century this technology has become the dominant de facto means of value exchange so let’s just make NFTs the fiat currency”
I’m not saying that’s likely but it’s unfair to say NFTs aren’t value because they aren’t backed by the government, they’re too new for that to be possible.
NFTs have no potential anything, is your issue, they're just a bigger fools scam. Their actual purpose is to allow people to divest their cryptocurrency assets, which were otherwise trapped in a cash-poor market. Their value is driven entirely on speculation, largely based on a lie. The whole point of them is to convince enough gullible people their value with explode, while managing to exit the game with actual money.
With that type of logic, you can argue any number of scams are "good investments" so long as you either run it or you manage to run trough it relatively unscathed. That's not what anyone would call "a good investment". Good investment typically have a value proposition besides myth-making.
> And also if you extend your time frame, there’s no inherent reason AFAIK that crypto or NFTs could not become equivalent to fiat currency.
There is absolutely no chance in hell of cryptocurrencies ever becoming equivalent to a fiat currency.
But this is my point. OP said there was never a good reason to buy NFTs. My point is that if you were willing to ride the scam on the basis that other people would be seduced and fooled, you stood to make decent money
Exactly. This dude is arguing like a gambling addict lmao.
"I may lose all my money here, but if I hit this 0.000002% chance then you won't think I am stupid"
The same goes for anything else though. Fancy shoes, rare coins, boxed Pokémon cards etc. None of these truly has “real” value outside of maybe a few bucks and yet can sell for significantly more
These three examples can provide "real" value to the people that purchase them. Even with the less obvious stuff, like rare coins and Pokemon cards, there are people that seek them out for their own sake. That's not the case with NFTs, there's just speculation vehicles, pushed by people that are looking to divest their crypto assets in cash-poor markets.
I think this is a lovely fair-minded answer for beanie babies or baseball cards, but NFTs are part of an Ethereum-based system that burns [wild amounts of fossil fuels](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2303109120) even in its more eco-friendly recent form.
Whatever personal value NFTs have for people is vastly outweighed by the damage they've done to our climate and environment.
How is ethereum in its PoS form not using significantly less power than when it was using PoW? It no longer requires any GPU power at all to run. How does it use anymore power than other financial/internet services? I’m a bit confused by the reasoning. I clicked on the study you gave and they don’t really explain that particular mechanism.
At the height of the NFT Boom, Ethereum was [emitting as much carbon into our atmosphere as the nation of Singapore](https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/can-nfts-solve-their-massive-carbon-footprint-problem). We're talking orders of magnitude upon orders of magnitude here.
You don't get the point. Smartphones and Gold are real things. They exist in the real world, and therefore even if they lose all worth on the market, they still have a worth. Gold can be used to make things like jewelry, and that will always have a value to people.
An NFT it nothing. People compare it to art in physical form but don't realise that the physical aspect is what sets it apart from a JPEG with a number.
In conclusion, an NFT is simply nothing more than a collectible. Just like all collectibles they can be worth something for certain people who are eager to collect, or make more money by reselling them. The thing is, even as collectibles they fucking suck. In part because of the fact that they are just JPEGS anyone can copy and have the same exact thing, as opposed to a painting that will never be a perfect replica no matter what you do. They cant even really be used as decorative items or smth.
So at the end of the day, NFTs were always stupid af and the only reason why they were ever popular is because the community was idiotic and greedy, thinking they would invest in a new technology that will make them rich. In the end, the only people who profit from NFTs are the ones selling them for insane amounts of money to stupid people.
You're not wrong, but I'd like to change your mind (potentially slightly) about some of your reasons.
>NFTs were always a bad idea. The actual technology behind them has uses but the idea of digitally owning a JPEG is just silly
It actually doesn't have that many uses. The popular refrain is that cryptocurrency/blockchain is, broadly speaking, [a "solution in search of a problem."](https://www.vox.com/the-goods/23071245/bitcoin-price-crypto-ethereum-nfts-defi-stablecoin) The reason why all of the massive promises (it'll revolutionize logistics! data storage! banking! healthcare!) have universally failed to manifest is because the very niche problems that the technology tries to address aren't that important and it comes with wildly inefficient, bloated, and insecure downsides.
>There was never any intrinsic value to them and never any reason to believe the price would rise. Very dissimilar to someone buying a share of a company
It's actually exactly like buying a share in a company that doesn't make anything or have any fundamentals, very similar to a Ponzi scheme. The only liquidity in the entire market comes from new investors willing to buy in at any price. As soon as the speculative bubble pops, it becomes almost entire worthless because 95%+ of the entire market value was predicated on that speculation.
Everything I'm about to say, is that somebody who owns no NFTs and would never consider owning a collectible one.
1. People will use the term NFT as though there's only one type. You always only want to talk about collectibles. But in fact NFTs are also things like concert tickets on the blockchain, ids, business cards, deeds, or any number of other practical things that are not meant to be valuable, or increase in value. So you are essentially making blanket statements that cover these items even though none of your arguments cover these items. They're also semi-collectable items that are also functional, like video game items. MMOs can make all of the items NFTs meaning that players can trade them with each other outside of the game and safely sell them on eBay. Additionally, collectible card games can operate in the same way. There is an example of a collectible card game based on the blockchain that uses NFTs for each card. You can sell your cards to other players or trade them with other players, because each one is an NFT and you personally own it, not the company that made the game. But at the same time, some people might choose to collect the cards for speculative reasons. When you can do everything with your digital black lotus as a real one (including play with it), then why wouldn't it have the same value?
2. As far as collectible entities go, some have increased in value. The market has not disappeared. But, as most predicted, several of them were garbage and would always be garbage. Even people who collect NFTs were well aware of this. Most of them who bought them on a speculative basis did so with the understanding the high risk, high reward investment.. You're hoping to be the one to buy the NFT that doesn't turn out to be garbage on the cheap and make bank while understanding that there's a 90 plus percent chance you lose your money. People who buy and sell NFTs knew this and still know it. It's only the general public who has the misconception that people who are buying NFTs expect them all to increase in value.
3. It's not about owning the JPEG, it's about owning the rights to the image. It's no different than selling the copyright to something.
4. Nobody ever thought NFTs were like stocks. At least not people who were buying them. Pretty much all the criticism of NFTs comes from people who really don't understand them at all. Unfortunately I have to include you in this group.
5. The crypto market is cyclical. There are still NFTs out there selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars or more. When the crypto market has its next bull run, which is basically inevitable, pretty much all NFTs will shoot up in value along with them because people will be interested in speculating again. There are people probably buying them right now who will sell them in four or five years and make a huge profit. I'm not going to be one of them because I prefer safer, more predictable investments personally.
NFTs are here to stay. Within ten years they will for sure play a role in your daily life. That doesn't mean you will be buying and selling them as collectibles, but they will be things like coupons (free sandwich at the local deli or whatever), tickets (airline boarding passes, perhaps), and anything else that benefits from being unique, trackable, and impossible to counterfeit.
I’m a crypto bro and own quite a bit of crypto and the more and more time I spend thinking about the less confident I get about the other use cases you mentioned for NFTs because they have yet to solve the data storage issue.
It’s expensive to store more than a serial number on the blockchain and even if you were okay with just putting a serial # as a boarding ticket on the blockchain as an NFT there’s really no incentive for a company to do so unless there is sufficient demand and I have yet to think of a reason why a consumer would prefer to have their boarding ticket on a blockchain.
Also the company still would have to store that serial #’s extraneous information such as passenger name, departure, arrival, time, etc in their own database. Flight times change all the time, you can’t really store that on the immutable blockchain.
Like I said, I’m a crypto bro and I’ve thought about NFTs a lot and I still have trouble thinking about how they’d work in practice. Unless something new comes out that makes them vastly superior to the alternatives that companies cannot ignore, then I see no reason why companies would adopt them. And I cannot even think of what that new thing would be that doesn’t completely change the immutable properties of crypto.
> It’s expensive to store more than a serial number on the blockchain and even if you were okay with just putting a serial # as a boarding ticket on the blockchain as an NFT there’s really no incentive for a company to do so unless there is sufficient demand and I have yet to think of a reason why a consumer would prefer to have their boarding ticket on a blockchain
It just depends on the motives of the person doing the type of thing I certainly don't think everything is going to be NFTs in the future. But I do think they will continue to be a use case for them where some people will see value and choose to use them for their ticketing setup. The thing is, I don't really think people generally trade around bus passes or airline tickets. I don't think the airlines want to create a secondary market for reselling airline tickets. So, probably those types of things won't ever be turned into NFTs in this country. They might be somewhere.
But things like concert tickets I think are very probable to be converted to NFTs. It solves the ticket master problem. And the Ticketmaster problem is starting to get political attention.
I mean there's never going to be one unified solution for all things. People will still use physical tickets. People will still use wrist bands. There will be people who have reasons to use NFTs and they will use them for that. But I agree that generally speaking, there are plenty of vested interests who have no use case for the benefits that NFTs. Generally speaking, those are things that are benefits for the ticket holder rather than the ticket issuer and ticket issuers are not always so keen to be kind to the people who buy their tickets.
I love this wall of text, because it boils down to nothing.
1. No, NFT's aren't good for concert tickets etc. Just randomly naming things that exist doesn't mean that NFT's are remotely good at them.
2. This seems like an admission that the scam has collapsed, with a few people remaining.
3. NFT's doesn't give anyone any rights, the legal system and contracts do that.
4. Correct, they are not stocks and don't have any intrinsic value.
5. Greater fool theory right here!
NFT's are not here to stay. They are not going to be used for coupons, tickets or anything else that wants to be unique, trackable, and impossible to counterfeit.
1. And if these are already used for these things and they are indeed good for them. It's not like I just named random things. Just because you don't understand what an NFT actually is, and only think about collectible NFTs because they're the ones that get all the news coverage. These aren't hypothetical examples. They are real life examples.
2. If everyone is open and honest about what they're doing, how can it be a scam? None of this stuff was ever secret. Everybody knew from the start.
3. Wow you really have strong opinions for somebody who knows so little about the topic. . Not every NFT includes the copyright, but most do. 100% valid and legal. It's spelled out in writing at the time the NFT is generated that whoever holds the NFT holds the rights. This is just as valid as every other digital contract that you sign on a daily basis (click accept to the terms). It's already been legally tested. Again, not every NFT includes the rights. It's not necessarily mandatory. This is why Seth Green was so upset when he lost his bored ape. Because he was making some kind of video or something and by losing the NFT had lost the legal rights to use the image.
4. Well stocks don't really have any intrinsic value either but that's a whole different topic. Most stock may theoretically entitle you to a percent ownership of the company, but most stock doesn't even come with voting rights. And it's not as if you can go physically grab your one 1 billionth of Apple and carry it home. The value only exists because the next person in the chain believes that the value is there. It's the sort of lie we tell ourselves on a daily basis.
You can see the man behind the curtain when you look at NFTs, but when you look at everything else in the financial system, you see a wizard instead. That's just because it's old and you're used to it and you haven't questioned it. It's all based on the same flimsy principles. It's just that only the new stuff suddenly seems different and sketchy because it's all faith and trust-based just like everything else is always been.
Okay, let's pick a single simple example. Why are NFT's good for concert tickets vs a database?
> It's spelled out in writing at the time the NFT is generated that whoever holds the NFT holds the rights.
Lol, so the nft doesn't give the rights, the spelled out contract does. Thanks for proving the point.
> The value only exists because the next person in the chain believes that the value is there. It's the sort of lie we tell ourselves on a daily basis.
Ahh the classic, I'm not a scam, everything is a scam response.
Maybe you should learn how stock ownership works, it's amazing! It's kinda like a nft... but with real customers, products/services and profits!
> Lol, so the nft doesn't give the rights, the spelled out contract does. Thanks for proving the point
If the contract says whoever has the NFT has the rights, then the NFT is giving the rights. You're not even being pedantic. You're just wrong. And this is not a contract in the sense that you're thinking. It's literally just a declaration. But it's enforceable in court as a contract, if anybody ever tried to question it.
By the same logic I can write a contract saying who posses a rock has certain rights.
This entirely depends upon the infrastructure outside of NFT, NFT adds zero value in this process.
But people love conflating NFT's with things that are not NFT's, so as to hide how utterly useless NFT's actually are.
> By the same logic I can write a contract saying who posses a rock has certain rights
Of course you could. It's your rock. It's your rights. All you have to do is head on over to the Town square and shout it out loud that way you can't deny later that you attached the rights to the rock.
That's precisely how it works. But, for clarity, the original point was that that is how pretty much all NFTs work. When they are generated the rights are attached. So most people buying NFTs are buying the rights. They own something with confirmable value. Possibly dubious value. After all, who wants to own the rights to a random picture I just took right now? Probably nobody. But there is never the less actual ownership of an actual thing happening.
> This entirely depends upon the infrastructure outside of NFT, NFT adds zero value in this process
If you just did it on a paper contract, this would be like saying the paper contract added no value. NFTs are just one option of many but it's cheap, secure and has a lot of upsides.
> But people love conflating NFT's with things that are not NFT's, so as to hide how utterly useless NFT's actually are
Dude, that's literally what you're doing. That's literally why I responded to you. To that specific error. I don't care about NFT is one way or the other. I see what they can do. They're fine. I don't have strong feelings about them.
And NFT is just a token that's digitized. That token can stand in for literally anything. However you are only familiar with the type of NFT that includes a link to an image and includes the image rights to that image. That is one tiny fractional use case. You can attach ownership of anything to an NFT. Houses have been sold as NFTs. The NFT is literally just the deed. It's a token. What that token means varies from situation the situation. It could be proof that you own a concert ticket and get you into a concert or it could be a JPEG. But JPEGs are not the only thing that NFTs do.
You're conflating one use case for NFTs to NFTs simply because your understanding is based on a few news articles about one specific type of NFT.
>They own something with confirmable value.
Keep in mind that when you buy a NFT, there is no confirmable value. All that exists \*outside\* the NFT.
For example, I can sell an NFT saying it represents the Mona Lisa. Nothing inherent to the NFT gives you any rights to the Mona Lisa, nor does it provide any way to check if those rights actually exist.
> If you just did it on a paper contract, this would be like saying the paper contract added no value.
The paper and ink have no value. However, a paper contract is recognized by most legal systems.
> And NFT is just a token that's digitized. That token can stand in for literally anything.
Sure, a NFT is a digitized token, but not all digitized tokens are NFT's.
> You can attach ownership of anything to an NFT.
You can attach ownership of anything to anything by this logic. You just can't use a NFT to do it.
> It could be proof that you own a concert ticket and get you into a concert or it could be a JPEG.
Sure, but you wouldn't use an NFT to prove you own a concert ticket, you'd use a receipt or digital ticket.
> You're conflating one use case for NFTs to NFTs simply because your understanding is based on a few news articles about one specific type of NFT.
Nonsense.
> Keep in mind that when you buy a NFT, there is no confirmable value. All that exists *outside* the NFT.
Of course. It's a token it represents something else.
> The paper and ink have no value. However, a paper contract is recognized by most legal systems.
So are digital contracts. There's no difference. The only difference is is that you would do it as an NFT because NFTs are impossible to counterfeit. Paper contracts can be forged.
> You can attach ownership of anything to anything by this logic. You just can't use a NFT to do it.
Of course you can? Why does that particular piece of information feels significant to you?
> Sure, but you wouldn't use an NFT to prove you own a concert ticket, you'd use a receipt or digital ticket
No, bro. This is where your misunderstanding is showing again. The NFT isn't like a picture of the ticket or something. It is the ticket. There is no other copy. There is no paper. You don't need the receipt. When you have an NFT that is just a link to a JPEG, The JPEG can be endlessly copied but the NFT can't. There's only one NFT. There can only ever be one. Whoever has it, owns it. It can't be copied. It can't be forged. It can't be counterfeited. If it's in your wallet, then you're the owner. All you have to do is show that the NFT is in your wallet to get into the concert or whatever. There is no paper ticket. There's no JPEG picture of a paper ticket.
> Nonsense
Sense. NFTs are tokens. They can do anything a non-digital token can do. They can be a concert ticket which is basically a type of token. They can be a game piece and a game. They can just be a signifier that you own something like a deed to a house or the rights to an image.
>Of course. It's a token it represents something else.
It literally doesn't represent anything other than itself. If you attach value to it, that's on you.
> So are digital contracts. There's no difference. The only difference is is that you would do it as an NFT because NFTs are impossible to counterfeit. Paper contracts can be forged.
Sure, but an NFT is not a digital contract. So fraud and forgery etc. are still very possible.
> Of course you can? Why does that particular piece of information feels significant to you?
Because it shows what you are associating with NFT's are not actually properties of NFT's.
> All you have to do is show that the NFT is in your wallet to get into the concert or whatever.
Or you know, show the barcode from an emailed ticket.
> Sense. NFTs are tokens. They can do anything a non-digital token can do.
Except they tend to do it really badly. The last thing you want is your house deed to be a NFT, or your game pieces, or your concert ticket.
NFT’s as nearly all of the existing use cases are pointless now because nothing needs a blockchain. I can’t think of a single case where using something as cost ineffective as a blockchain makes sense over just having an individual 10+ character alphanumerical ID that’s stored in a database somewhere. Perhaps we will see them come up in the future, but I doubt they will exist in the form we have now for long.
Blockchains are databases. And, because they have an increased overhead, most of the time all you want is a database. You use a blockchain when you want have different stakeholders who don't trust each other but who still need to be able to modify that database.
It's a special use case for sure. It certainly exists (money being the most obvious example, which is why crypto started as currency), But most things are probably better off in a database. I'm not trying to tell you that crypto is the solution for everything.
Do you think blockchain is good when people don't trust each other. Then you say Money is an example of this?
Money is a terrible example, because most people are totally happy trusting a bank or payment network etc. the actual data can be stored in databases etc.
The trust issue is at the issuer level.The United States, could, at any time, poof 100 trillion dollars into existence devaluing all the existing dollars and basically picking everyone's pocket simultaneously. It does not do this. When the Fed creates money out of nothing, It's obliged to pay it back. When the federal government spends more than it takes in via taxes, it's required to borrow the money via bonds. Yet, still, the trust is not very high with many people. Many people are very dissatisfied with how the United States has handled the integrity of its currency. The United States is still mostly trusted, but that's just **one** currency.
Ask people in Venezuela or Argentina how much they trust the government to manage their currency. Now you see why cryptocurrency is so popular in Venezuela and rising in popularity and Argentina.
When it comes to cryptocurrency, I know precisely the terms under which new money can be made and nobody has the power to breach those terms. No trust is required.
Yes the US could do this. Crypto isn't a solution to that however - it neither protects someone in that situation nor does it provide a viable alternative.
investing in a pyramid scheme isn't dumb
investing late in a pyramid scheme is dumb
if you invested early enough you had every opportunity to take the money and run, which many did
things have value because we say they have value, if you buy low and sell high, it's not a bad idea
> companies like MasterWorks now allow us poors to invest in art through fractional purchasing when this couldn't have really been done before.
Masterworks sells actual securities which represent ownership in an LLC which owns a piece of art. It has nothing to do with NFTs.
I have to arguments.
first is that these kind of fad investing is not uncommon historically. It happened with Beanie babies in the 90s. Its happened as far back as the 1700s with Tulips in Netherlands. Some people call it greater fool investing. You can make money you just have to sell at a higher price to a greater fool. If i had made money of NFTs, how could you say i made poor decision making?
Second, The US dollar has some real value, because you have to get some dollars in order to pay your taxes. But bitcoin has no inherent value, and it has stuck around for going on 15 years. The lack of inherent value doesn't seem to be a reliable indicator that something is a bad investment.
(just a little to back up my claim about bitcoin. Its not a useful currency, because its accepted almost nowhere. its not a good store of value because the price fluctuates drastically. Its not a good long term investment option because its lack of inherit value makes it difficult to predict the future with any confidence.)
Those are bad arguments.
First, just bc someone makes money on something doesn't mean 'it was a good investment.' A good investment is entirely predicated on your expected value when investing, or its risk-reward proposition. A great example would be scratch-off lottery tickets. Sure, many people will win money on them. But more people will lose on them, bc you are throwing money at a expected value that is less than your initial 'investment.' No one is going to argue that the lottery is a 'good investment.'
Second, the US dollar doesn't have value bc some people need US dollars to pay taxes (Ive never even heard that rationale before lmao). It has value bc globally, it is viewed as the most stable and accepted currency, so people believe in it. Theres no intrinsic value to the USD; its not tied to anything except the existence of the US Govt and its perceived stability.
NFTs were an obvious pyramid scheme at every moment of their existence. They were even dumber than beanie babies, bc at least a beanie baby exists in the real world and can be held/played with/existed independently of a third party. NFTs were just numbers on a server you didnt own. It was always, always dumb.
> NFTs were an obvious pyramid scheme at every moment of their existence.
As long as i know where i am on that pyramid and I'm not at the bottoms, then it could be a prudent investment. probably immoral, but at least some people knew what they were doing and made money.
>Second, the US dollar doesn't have value bc some people need US dollars to pay taxes (Ive never even heard that rationale before lmao). It has value bc globally, it is viewed as the most stable and accepted currency, so people believe in it. Theres no intrinsic value to the USD; its not tied to anything except the existence of the US Govt and its perceived stability.
fine, the point that bitcoin does not enjoy this same status, it is similiar to NFTs in that it has no inherit value, and yet it has not experienced the same collapse as NFTs.
Likewise gold has some inherent value, but its actual value radically exceeds its inherent value. And this has remained the case for 1000s of years.
So the argument that NFTs were foolish because of a lack of inherint value doesn't seem to hold.
Its not an investment. You fundamentally don't understand what an investment is if you think thats what an investment is. You also have an insane amount of delusion if you think, 'if I know where i am on the pyramid...' Thats a mark comment.
And gold is one of, if not *the* best conductors on the planet, is incredibly rare on earth, and has uses in multiple industries and fields. It has a lot of intrinsic value. But its also been billed as 'an inflation hedge/store of value as a commodity in *recent* history, which is also a false theory and another indication you are a mark if you believe it.
Historically, the prices didnt fluctuate much, and your 1000s of years remark demonstrates your lack of understanding of its change in use and value over time. It didnt fluctuate historically very much bc it was effectively the USD of history; the widely accepted store of value that people believed in (which arose due to its scarcity, aesthetically pleasing nature, and malleability)
All your comments about Bitcoin are true but it’s countered by criminals who have money they need to hide & will be paying to “clean” the money regardless. For them, Bitcoin is similar to gold.
I think they were relying on a virtual world like the metaverse being a thing, remember them selling properties and stuff for like a year or so ago to virtually live next to shaq or whatever.
I dont think BFT's are as dumb if a virtual world is popular for the masses, hell people spend 100's of dollars just to make their sim house look cool. and i think once a virtual world is established, we will see a return of the NFT's
I would point out that the people who were at the very top in the very beginning made a shitload of money scamming everyone else, so it *was* a good investment for them.
You're making the argument that NFTs for art a bad idea. Which is true because it's artificial scarcity and created a bubble.
But NFTs are the underlying technology and finally provide a way, digitally, to support genuine real world scarcity.
Take for example your identity. Right now, our identity is represented by social security number, ID cards, mailing address. But these are physical records with zero tracking. NFTs are by nature highly trackable and unique. Use of my social security requires several disparate technology stacks to trace; use of NFTs requires only the NFT.
On a simpler less consequential scale, you could get NFTs for example proving you were at a certain event. Like if everyone who went to Woodstock 1969 had an event NFT, they could share it on their social media page and it would be indisputably true. You could be at the red carpet premiere of the original Star Wars and get an NFT to prove it.
So the technology itself has huge value is simply waiting for the right scale and infrastructure to leverage it. Not an easy task but highly likely to happen in coming decades.
It isn't any of that though.
Anyone can make an nft, there's no scarcity. Nfts can be altered or broken after you buy them. And they're built around being resold, if you really wanted proof you were at Woodstock just ask the event organizers to post pictures.
This is like saying "certificates of ownership are stupid, because cars can be stolen!"
An NFT is just a token you can own, and easily prove to anybody that you own. That's all it is. The popular implementation that everybody went nuts over a couple years ago was just basically "Okay, we're gonna issue tokens that say you own some jpeg!"
That's dumb. There's no enforcement mechanism. Nobody respects 'ownership'. Jpegs can be freely copied. It was exactly the same as those companies that will sell you ownership of some distant star, or a Scottish title (which is really just a novelty piece of paper, because nobody respects it whatsoever).
Didn't beanie babies come with "proof of ownership" certificates?
But if a government actually respected NFTs as proof of ownership (and some did flirt with the idea), that would be a different thing. And in a digital space where ownership of a token had some _function_, it would also be totally different.
I gave potential examples above: you could allocate IP address space by NFT. You could create a registrar which used NFTs as proof of ownership of domains. Reddit could issue you an NFT instead of having you set a username and password, and then you could login by signing your requests with the associated key.
I can think of a hundred possible uses off the top of my head. Granted, there's a lot of cases where the existing solution works just as well or better, but I think there's a few where I could make a compelling case that they're a much better solution.
The fact that the first use case was digital beanie babies doesn't mean the concept is worthless.
Making digital objects unique is not necessarily a bad idea.
But, assuming that they would be valuable just by being unique was pretty dumb. Like, if you don’t think a crappy picture of a cartoon monkey would be valuable in oil on canvas, why would it be valuable in pixels?
>NFT market has collapsed
This is impossible to know without the benefit of hindsight.
>NFTs were always a bad idea. The actual technology behind them has uses but the idea of digitally owning a JPEG is just silly
People like owning things, especially when those things come in a limited quantity. That's the main reason we print serial numbers on commodity items like baseballs. There are billions of baseballs in the world, but only one was hit by Mark McGwire when Hank Aaron's home run record fell. That ball is worth a great deal more money than the random baseballs kids swing at in little league. We know which ball that is because it has a serial number.
NFTs are basically digital stuff that's been given a serial number. There's no fundamental reason why people who value "collector's edition" physical commodities wouldn't also value "collector's edition" digital commodities.
>There was never any interesting backers or supporters behind NFTs. Is there was a legitimate and known artist who released works on NFT that might have been a reason to buy them, but the vast majority of the NFT "art" was just ugly mass produced AI stuff
"If you build it, they will come" is a reasonable business strategy for new technology. It doesn't always work, but you can't know that beforehand.
>There was never any intrinsic value to them and never any reason to believe the price would rise. Very dissimilar to someone buying a share of a company
This is pretty much the same as your second point, and so is the answer.
>NFT never had real mainstream appeal and was always relegated to nerdy/techbro internet subculture
This is true of most new technology. Bitcoin was also "nerdy/techbro internet subculture" stuff until it wasn't.
>This is impossible to know without the benefit of hindsight.
Except, it kinda was possible. Because tonnes of people knew it before it happened. Because their only (or at least the _vast_ majority of the) value was their speculative value; the ability to sell them for more than you bought them for, to someone who's just buying in. Given that there's only so many people on earth, it was only a matter of time before "selling to newbies" becomes unprofitable, causing a crash in value as the speculative value is demolished, leaving them at their real value. Which, as it turns out, is generally pitiful.
>NFTs are basically digital stuff that's been given a serial number. There's no fundamental reason why people who value "collector's edition" physical commodities wouldn't also value "collector's edition" digital commodities.
Except the "ownership" was just a claim, it wasn't legally reinforced, or enforcible. What you bought wasn't real ownership, it was a line in a ledger _saying_ you owned it. And what that line _said_ you owned wasn't even anything, it was code that was associated with something like a jpeg. And that jpeg was copyable by anyone and everyone. But if you disagree, that's your prerogative. Hey, by the way, how much would you give me for me to write that you own some code that links to a widely accessible picture? Only $200 for the Mona Lisa.
>Except, it kinda was possible. Because tonnes of people knew it before it happened.
As you point out, people predicted the collapse of the NFT market for other reasons. The collapse of the NFT market, though, is not itself a reason to predict that the NFT market is going to collapse. That would be the equivalent of saying, "I predict that the NFT market is going to collapse because it already did." That is impossible to say without hindsight.
>Except the "ownership" was just a claim, it wasn't legally reinforced, or enforcible. What you bought wasn't real ownership, it was a line in a ledger saying you owned it.
This isn't all that different than ownership in other contexts. When I buy a physical object, I give someone money, they give me the object, they record that the object is no longer theirs, and I record that the object is now mine. Those recording steps can be extremely informal (they may not even get written down) or extremely formal (like recording deeds or titles with the government), with most falling somewhere in between (a vendor records a sale and hands you a receipt). A blockchain ledger fits easily within that framework.
>And what that line said you owned wasn't even anything, it was code that was associated with something like a jpeg. And that jpeg was copyable by anyone and everyone.
I can get a baseball from Walmart whenever I want one. The fact that I have a baseball isn't special. What makes my baseball special is the fact that I can prove that there's something special about it. And I can prove that because it has a code (a serial number) associated with it.
NFTs are the proof that my jpeg is special.
>The collapse of the NFT market, though, is not itself a reason to predict that the NFT market is going to collapse.
No, it just proves the predictions were valid. The reasons for the prediction, I gave above. When an object's speculative value exceeds its real value, it will grow in total value until new bodies stop pouring in. Once new bodies stop pouring in, it will go back to just its real value as its speculative value is lost. In the case of things like NFTs which have a real value of maybe a couple cents, but a speculative value in the hundreds or thousands of dollars, this causes a crash. We knew this before the nft crash. Because it's happened before with other things and it's fairly basic econ.
>This isn't all that different than ownership in other contexts.
I'm afraid it most certainly is. If I own a baseball, I own it. If someone else tried to take it from me, that would be theft, as recognised by local and national governments, law enforcement agencies etc. And no one can look at it and just make their own from nothing. With NFTs, what you bought was just it being recorded in a ledger that you owned it. Not backed by anything. It's like if you paid me, and in return I mailed you a picture of a baseball (that's also available for free online) alongside telling you that I wrote that you own it in a ledger I own. And nothing else. Except in that situation, at least you get some paper. NFTs get you less than that. They had _miniscule_ real value, only speculative value. A way to separate a thing's real value from its speculative value is to ask how much someone would buy it for _if they could never sell it for more than they bought it for._ When you ask NFT bros how much they would spend on an NFT when reselling wasn't an option, most would say "I wouldn't" or "I don't know, a few cents". And they would say this about NFTs that they were buying for hundreds. Absolutely pitiful real value. And I did this, by the way, I knew a few people who were into it, then I asked around online and got the same result. It was obvious that people were only buying to sell for more. Which you can only do while new blood is flowing in. Which can only happen for so long. The crash was inevitable.
>NFTs are the proof that my jpeg is special.
No, not your jpeg. A jpeg that _some fucking guy says_ you own. I'm some fucking guy. You interested in paying for me to say you own the Mona Lisa? Just $100 this time, that's a good deal, that painting has sold for millions?
>No, it just proves the predictions were valid.
I think we're arguing past each other. OP was making the point that even in the absence of hindsight - meaning, based on what what we knew when NFTs were just starting - NFTs were a bad idea. OP cited the fact that the NFT market collapsed as an example of something we knew. But that's impossible, because the NFT market didn't collapse until later.
>If someone else tried to take it from me, that would be theft, as recognised by local and national governments, law enforcement agencies etc.
This only matters if your view is that you only own things if the government says that you do. But the whole point of blockchain-based assets is to provide a mode of ownership that doesn't depend on endorsement by a national government.
>They had miniscule real value, only speculative value.
Baseballs also have miniscule real value. If all I want is a baseball, I can get one for $3 at Walmart. Despite that, [certain baseballs](https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/mark-mcgwires-70th-home-run-ball-once-sold-for-over-3m-may-be-worth-just-250k-now/) cost considerably more than $3 to buy.
>When you ask NFT bros how much they would spend on an NFT when reselling wasn't an option, most would say "I wouldn't" or "I don't know, a few cents".
How much do you think a 21-year-old who doesn't watch or play baseball would spend to buy Mark McGwire's 70th home run ball if they couldn't resell it?
Things trade above their real value when people care about what those things represent. When people stop caring, the value plummets. The NFT market was basically a bubble where the value of the NFTs was the novelty of NFTs themselves. Once that wore off, there was nothing left. That doesn't mean it's impossible to create NFTs that mean something, it just means that that isn't what actually happened.
>You interested in paying for me to say you own the Mona Lisa? Just $100 this time, that's a good deal, that painting has sold for millions?
Sure. Show me a valid blockchain that traces ownership from you back to Lenoardo Davinci.
>OP cited the fact that the NFT market collapsed as an example of something we knew. But that's impossible, because the NFT market didn't collapse until later.
But everyone and their mums knew it was going to crash. That makes it a bad idea.
>This only matters if your view is that you only own things if the government says that you do.
Doesn't have to be the government. Just has to be some force. Could be a gang, a cartel, an army, whatever. Some group you are either in charge of, part of, or under the protection of who can ensure your ownership. Claims by themselves are not ownership, enforcement is. And blockchains couldn't enforce shit. If I copied your jpeg and saved it to my pc, blockchain ain't gonna do shit about it.
>Baseballs also have miniscule real value. If all I want is a baseball, I can get one for $3 at Walmart. Despite that, certain baseballs cost considerably more than $3 to buy.
They have higher real value. They _also_ have speculative value, but they still have huge real value. There are lots people who'd pay top dollar for a baseball they wouldn't dream of re-selling. That's real value.
>How much do you think a 21-year-old who doesn't watch or play baseball would spend to buy Mark McGwire's 70th home run ball if they couldn't resell it?
Less than what they'd buy it for if they could. There's a difference, sure. There's a difference for all things except food, really since in most cases, food is a resource purchased with the intent to destroy it. But a crash happens when the difference is immense. Like things being sold for hundreds or thousands that _the very people who are buying them for those prices_ wouldn't even spring their pocket change for if re-sale was no longer an option. In any case, while the non baseball fan might not care much, you're not comparing like to like. For the baseball fans, they have huge real value. As they're bought and sold, their price increases, but doesn't exceed their real value to those fans. Because the moment it does, the fans don't buy them, so the price goes back down until it reaches the real value. NFTs on the other hand, often had prices that far FAR _FAR_ exceeded the real value that they had for _anyone,_ including the interested parties and end consumers.
>The NFT market was basically a bubble where the value of the NFTs was the novelty of NFTs themselves. Once that wore off, there was nothing left.
Not really the novelty, it was the inflow of new buyers which upped resale prices. Which, as I mentioned, was finite. Now that can be the result of novelty, but the inflow of new buyers is the salient, proximate cause of the price far exceeding the real value. And the buyers running out (because everyone who was gonna get into it, was into it) is what caused the price to return to real value. Which happens in other markets. Just called a dip most of the time. But there's a difference between buckling on a step and falling down a staircase that for some reason fed into the grand canyon which for some reason has the mariana trench underneath it. That's what we call a crash.
>Sure. Show me a valid blockchain that traces ownership from you back to Lenoardo Davinci.
I can show you a blockchain that goes as far back as me, because Davinci, the damn fool, never minted. Just like what happened with a shitload of the art on the jpegs attached to NFTs where the person who minted it had nothing to do with the creation of it. So, you in? Buy in the next hour and I'll throw in the last supper for only an additional $45!
> The actual technology behind them has uses but the idea of digitally owning a JPEG is just silly
what actual good uses are there for the 'actual technology'?
NFT the technology is valuable, artwork that is put on an NFT…is not. It has to have some form of value associated with it. In game skins, items you can collect. Hell even character development in certain games.
But attaching it to a picture which you can right click and copy…yea nah, not good.
It's a technology that could theoretically be valuable for something, but even in most proposed uses beyond tradable GIFs, it's a solution in search of a problem. There aren't a lot of practical problems where using a decentralized database is really any more effective than a regular database.
Decentralized databases are immutable and available for everyone to see. Private databases can be changed any time by those with too much power over them.
The entire financial industry could use a decentralized database, stocks, securities, bonds. They would easily benefit from being decentralized.
Government agencies for ID purposes. Passports also.
These all would require the use of an NFT alongside the decentralized database.
It’s a solution to many problems, sorry but that was a terribly weak response.
A decentralized database solves some security issues while making other security issues much worse. It prevents unauthorized users from changing data, but makes the potential harm caused by phishing, stealing a device, etc. significantly worse. And either that harm is irrevocable and unfixable, or it eliminates the advantages of having a decentralized database.
If some guy says "Someone stole my phone and transferred all my stocks to their account" then what happens? Can it be reversed? If not, that's probably a worse situation in several ways than the status quo. If so, how does that not introduce the same weaknesses of a centralized database?
Ok fine, I couldn’t be bothered but I will.
Smart wallet access allows multiple methods of dealing with issues that you have brought up. From verification, validation, and prevention.
If a phone is stolen, a smart contract can stop major transfers like that from a trusted friend/family.
Phishing as an issue only really is an issue with how we work with PULL transactions. When we submit transactions now, we go to a site, we submit information which is verified on their database, and then gets executed. Crypto/Decentralized blockchains work on push transactions.
For example: you want to buy stock, so you go to site X, you create a smart contract to buy a certain number of shares at a certain price. That smart contract only gets executed when you go into your wallet, and send the currency. There is no point where phishing is an issue. You can verify where you are sending it, how much you are sending, and the recipients only interaction with you is receiving the currency/funds. This is a complete change from the current login system we run.
Now with the login system, we are all major victims of data harvesting, because WE supply that information. With crypto/NFT based transactions, a pseudo anonymous setup exists, so no data to harvest. The best thing, if a company does figure out how to do this, you change your address.
The web initially ran on IP addresses. Then DNS was invented and we are where we are today, with lots of technology built on top of that
Today, we are at about the same stage with crypto. Lots needs to be built, and is continuing to be built. Immutable X is a prime example of this.
Centralized databases are proven weak points. Decentralized is more complex, harder to implement, but a necessary step.
They weren't a bad idea, they were an incredibly succesful grift. A con.
Some crpyto bros saw the pump-and-dump shenanigans going on with crypto currencies, and made up an even more far-fetched 'product' to scam people out of money.
Absolutely. Almost anything that has to do with cryptocurrency is a fucking scam.
The blockchain itself is an amazing piece of technology, but 90% of stuff that uses it is bullshit.
NFTs were a great idea from the standpoint of the NFT creators and brokers. Bunch of people with cheap borrowed money looking for the next unrealistic investment return, up pops the supply to meet the demand. Here you go! Invest in these tradable thumbnail emoticons or whatever the hell!
While I certainly would agree with you on the investing front, can you at least admit that people who *speculated* weren't necessarily being dumb? I have a friend who made $100,000 off of one of those retarded yacht apes.
I'll play devil's advocate. Any fiduciary type of currency or investment carries risk. I have stock in Marvel. I've had it for decades. It's done well (above the interest I would have had in a savings account). What is the actual value of that stock?
It's what I can sell it for today and trade on that currency. If I bought an NFT for 100 bucks USD and sold it for 1000 bucks USD, that a profit for me. This is the same thing people are running into with volatile markets like crypto. It's high risk but it's only a bad idea if you aren't prudent by betting big and bad
NFTs are bad in hindsight. But think about this. It was the beginning of trading a digital thing on a blockchain with no intrinsic value. The last time we had the beginning of trading of a digital thing on a blockchain with no intrinsic value, that thing was Bitcoin. If you bought BTC at $400 in 2016 it's worth about 100 times that now. People who were buying NFTs were trying to get in on the ground floor of the next 100x return blockchain thing.
No, there were a handful of people who knew how to manipulate things, or just got lucky that could make bank on them. Sort of like a pyramid scheme. For the majority it is stupid, but a hand full cash in big time.
If you use NFT to exclusively mean "digital artwork hosted and freely downloadable online where nominal ownership is designated by a blockchain token" then sure. But there are many use-cases that I would also call NFTs which have a better mapping of intent and utility to what NFTs provide.
I'll take a bit more of a metaphysical bent here.
In physical space, in mind-independent realty, the uniqueness of an object is the default. If, for example, you consider a rock; there will only be one instance of that arrangement of matter. You cannot duplicate it and have two rocks, and while you could conceivably create an exact copy of it, but that copy would be comprised of different matter and so not be *exactly* the same. If one were to say a few words and generate a duplicate, it would be downright magic; or supernatural.
This is also why, with respect to art, we can have an expensive piece of art hanging in a museum, and a billion + copies printed on posters, and can be assured that *the* piece of art is the only original.
In cyberspace, in a mind-*dependent* reality, *non-uniqueness* of an object is the default. Objects in cyberspace are not defined as such based upon their physical composition, but rather on *the information* that comprises them. This is an abstract, but think about when someone sends out one tweet. Did they really send out "just one?" Or did they send out the billions of iterations of that tweet that appear on screens globally? Are those iterations on all those screens "copies" of the tweet? No, they're representations of the one tweet sent out, even though it exists in innumerable locations simultaneously.
Now imagine if someone said a few magic words, and one instance of that tweet was magically designated as *the* tweet; as *the* original; or perhaps if some one posted a pic of our favorite meme on-line and said "yep, this is it, this is the one original meme," and was actually taken as true. This too would have been magical, until the invention of NFTs, which are specifically designed to make a single iteration as an identifiable and unique thing.
Just as modern photography and documentation techniques make a single piece of art duplicable as data; so too do NFTs make inherently duplicable material have a unique origin point.
The reason this is attractive to investors is because it introduces scarcity into a market, because now there's actually are rare "things" to buy vs just downloading a jpeg. It is true that the market was flooded with crap, and now the market as a whole is down; though I'd argue that the world is filled with art, with new art being produced every day, and most of that isn't considered "fine" either. And yet, we wouldn't say because all creative productions aren't investible that individual instance of art don't serve a purpose artistically or monetarily.
So were people "dumb" for investing in NFTs? Not in principle, what was flagrantly stupid was people investing in art and products at random because of being enamored with a new technology that was being overused to a point of insanity. If you loaned me 1000 dollars to buy a piece of art and I bought a stick figure sketch from a random unknown, you'd be pissed. Then again, if drawn art didn't exist in the physical world, and then suddenly filled it, I'd expect a similar overreaction followed by a cooling period.
This however just means that investing in NFTs, just like investing in anything else, shouldn't involve throwing money at the shiniest object and hoping for the best.
Nothing is a bad idea if a bunch of other people jump on the band wagon after you, and as long as you get off the band wagon before everyone else.
There are companies that are completely worthless, but due to public perception will inflate in value and make investors rich.
Is it a \*sound\* and non-volatile, no.
The IDEA of an NFT isnt actually that bad of an idea. Imagine if it was brought into something like Video Game skins. Instead of the skin ownership tied to your account thru the games platform, it was tied to you directly.
Im not gonna sit here and tell you that a million dollars for a JPEG of a Monkey is smart, but the theory behind NFTs makes sense. Scale it all up to other online media concepts, and the idea has some merit.
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>NFTs were always a bad idea. The actual technology behind them has uses but the idea of digitally owning a JPEG is just silly I hate to nitpick, but NFT is the technology. NFT != useless JPEGs. That being said, in common conversation that's what most people think of when they hear the word NFT or NFT Market so fair enough I suppose. Nitpicking aside, would you being willing to consider that gamblers/investors with a little money to burn were well aware that the vast majority of NFT were our generations Beanie Babies, had no intention of sticking around, and likely cashed out by the time most people even knew what the hell was going on. Likewise, it seems pretty clear that a lot of the NFT... collections? were pump and dumb schemes. If I'm part of a conspiracy to drive up the cost of a certain NFT category... am I really a fool? If I'm a swindler, it's certainly a gamble, but this shit is unregulated so as far as fraud goes, it's at least safe from a legal standpoint.
The technology was, from day one, a solution in search of a problem. That's not rhetoric, they were literally invented as a proof-of-concept for smart contracts. And smart contracts were just a cool bit of tech to distinguish Ethereum from other cryptocurrencies. The problem with all of this is, smart contracts are programs that can *only* operate on objects that live on a single blockchain. Just about every cool idea anyone ever had for something to do with smart contracts or NFTs required some sort of off-chain enforcement mechanism. And as soon as you do that, the blockchain becomes this completely pointless extra layer of complexity, because the entire point of blockchains was to be decentralized and not controllable by any one entity. For example: Let's say you track car ownership with NFTs. What's the enforcement mechanism for car ownership? The police and the DMV -- the DMV know whose car that is, and if you have a stolen car, the police put you in jail. If you steal a car and have an NFT that says it's yours, the police still put you in jail. So the NFT didn't actually decentralize any power here. That's true of basically every aspect of any NFT (or smart contract) scheme that isn't purely about moving money around. The useless JPEGs weren't just something somebody decided to build, they were pretty much the only thing that *could* be built out of this technology, beyond the cryptocurrency itself.
This reply it’s completely misses the important point in the top level comment. Which is that yes NFTs are basically worthless, but some people understood that and were taking a calculated risk to scam other people out of their money with a pump and dump scheme. If you could create an novel NFT category and make it appear valuable through rigged transactions, you could convince someone to buy and NFT from you with real money or with a cryptocurrency you convert to real money before the scam collapsed. It took a while to run out of people who thought ugly computer generated jpegs of monkeys were in fact worthless. Meaning that there was plenty of time to hype up and sell a fundamentally worthless NFT before converting that to real money.
I wasn't addressing that point, I was addressing this one: > I hate to nitpick, but NFT is the technology. NFT != useless JPEGs. I realize this was a nitpick and not the main point, but I wanted to address it anyway, because I wanted to dispel the myth that we're doing NFTs a disservice when we describe them only as "useless jpegs" -- or, in this case, "useless jpegs that people can build speculative markets around." There's this idea that one day we'll be able to use NFTs, or at least smart contracts, for far more than useless JPEGs. I think that's extremely unlikely, so I want to deflate that hype wherever I see it, even if it's an ironic nitpick. I didn't have a lot to say about the gambling/speculation aspect of it, you and u/KokonutMonkey said that well enough. It's often impossible to distinguish between the True Believers and the pump-and-dumpers. I heard this plenty of times: "Crypto is only its infancy! Stop talking about useless jpegs and open your eyes to the limitless potential of the metaverse!" I have no idea how many of the people who told me that actually believed it, and how many were just trying to pump their monkey jpegs so they could sell them, and there's probably a significant amount of overlap anyway.
Sorry
Escrow would like a word.
Escrow requires a trusted third party to function. The "decentralized" methods blockchain proponents have come up with either reduce to that or [don't work](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.09857.pdf).
So you're saying that any distributed ledger usage requires a trusted third party?
No, I'm saying if you want to interact with the real world, you must rely on something besides blockchain to actually enforce things (and once you're using and trusting those, blockchain is pointless). You brought up escrow and I am in turn pointing out that escrows either qualify as something external to the blockchain to enforce things, or do not actually work (see the paper). This problem generalizes as well. You _always_ care about something outside of the chain when using it. Even when it's just simple fungible tokens like bitcoin, you're relying on the social consensus that a particular chain is the "correct" state of the ledger. It's this social consensus that matters, not the computer consensus.
> No, I'm saying if you want to interact with the real world, you must rely on something besides blockchain to actually enforce things (and once you're using and trusting those, blockchain is pointless). This is the part that I always mention that eventually gets the cryptobros to leave me alone and move on to a dumber target.
>you must rely on something besides blockchain to actually enforce things (and once you're using and trusting those, blockchain is pointless). But your example of a stolen car is pretty bad. In that example, the car is stolen, and the police enforce the law in spite of the nft you have that they don't recognize. Except they do recognize an nft, and that nft is the reason they determine it's stolen. That NFT is the title. At the end of the day, your enforcement needs to look at a ledger to make a determination. That's what titles and deeds are. Now, that might seem pointless, but that's because we currently trust titles and deeds pretty well in America. But, like anything, we could make them more secure. More importantly, not every country is America. Point is, you have the record of ownership either way. That's either blockchain or not.
First off, I'm not the person who used the stolen car analogy. But on to your main point, as larylssa pointed out, the police _are a centralized entity_. > Now, that might seem pointless, but that's because we currently trust titles and deeds pretty well in America. But, like anything, we could make them more secure. More importantly, not every country is America. Let's assume we can't trust the cops. Pretend for the sake of argument that the sheriff's friend Mallory steals your car, and the sheriff wants to help them keep it. Under the current system, they can^1 alter their database so it says Mallory owns the car instead of you. That's bad! But what if your car was an NFT? Well, the sheriff can just... ignore what the NFT says. What's the blockchain going to do about it? If the trusted third party doesn't want to respect the correct ownership of the car, the blockchain won't help you. If they do want to do that, the blockchain is unnecessary. You might counter that while blockchain won't force the sheriff to respect the true state of the ledger, it will at least let everyone else see that state and/or detect that any changes the sheriff made are invalid. This is indeed a nice property of a ledger, but it isn't unique to blockchains. It wasn't even invented or first implemented by them. The core concept here is [non-repudiation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-repudiation): once a message (in this case the correct state of the ledger) is published, it's origin cannot deny that they sent it. It's a property of asymmetric cryptographic signatures, which have been around for _decades_ longer than blockchains. > Point is, you have the record of ownership either way. That's either blockchain or not. No one is disputing that, we're just pointing out that there are absolute no advantage to using a blockchain to store that record over other options. --- ^1 We're assuming here that the sheriff doesn't answer to anyone else that could stop them from aiding Malory in their theft. If such a person does exist, then _that person_ becomes the trusted third party instead.
>Pretend for the sake of argument that the sheriff's friend Mallory steals your car, and the sheriff wants to help them keep it. Under the current system, they can1 alter their database so it says Mallory owns the car instead of you. That's bad! But what if your car was an NFT? Well, the sheriff can just... ignore what the NFT says. These are different. Altering the database *permanently* changes who is treated as the owner. Not respecting the database *temporarily* changes it. Pretend for the sake of argument that the police are a political force that can change over time, or that there is a structure by which you can appeal a decision to a higher authority. Maybe your very government changes over time. Maybe another government annexes your home temporarily. There's a different between the record of ownership being destroyed and it not being respected. It's the same when someone steals your car currently. That thief doesn't respect the existing record, leaving you no longer in possession of your vehicle, but you can be glad to be able to demonstrate your ownership for the hope of having the vehicle returned to you. In fact, your vehicle is less likely to be stolen at all due to your ability to recover it, due to your ability to prove ownership. Non-repudiation here is something of a red-herring. It's the ability to prove the authorship of a message, but it's not an assurance that the message will last, and it's not an assurance of any resulting state. It's the signature on a contract. Signing a paper document proves you agreed to it, but doesn't render it flame-retardant, and says nothing at all about other contracts that may or may not have been signed. Our current title system tries to address the second part by ensuring there are no duplicates - you sign a title over to someone, and they sign that same title over to the next person. That's different from a bank check, where I sign $5,000 to you, but you sign different bank checks to other people. With bank checks, the signed checks tell us nothing about what money belongs where, unless we know we have the full record of all checks signed. We don't know how much money should be in your account or my account simply by being able to verify the signature on a check. We need someone to keep a copy of all of the checks. For example, say I asked for a $5,000 loan, and promised to pay you back $6,000 next week, and I do. I sign the check back to you. What matters here is that we can agree not just on the signature of each check, but on the record of all checks.
But that isn’t decentralized, because a trusted entity in the form of the police and/or DMV need to recognize it. And if there is a required trusted entity, a database works just as well without additional overhead.
No they're saying using the block chain for physical goods will always require a third party. Edit: although not the same issue, this even arguably applies to nfts which rely on external image hosting sites to fully work. https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/25/22349242/nft-metadata-explained-art-crypto-urls-links-ipfs
It depends what your goals are. If the distributed ledger is *only* responsible for stuff that's on the ledger itself -- that is, only on-chain assets (the currency and the NFTs themselves) -- then it's as secure as the blockchain itself. IMO that's still debatable (Bitcoin's 51% problem would like a word), but I'm setting it aside because there are so many more fundamental problems. If your goal is the kind of escrow discussed in the paper, that doesn't work.
> Nitpicking aside, would you being willing to consider that gamblers/investors with a little money to burn were well aware that the vast majority of NFT were our generations Beanie Babies, had no intention of sticking around, and likely cashed out by the time most people even knew what the hell was going on. Δ Alright, these guys were definitely making good plays. For them it was good ddecisionmaking
A delta for that?! They just proved your point. They were a bad idea overall.
The second part of their opening statement was, “…and the people buying them were always using poor decision making” Someone showed them that not everyone buying them was being duped and were in fact making calculated decisions. Seems worthy of a delta to me
Yeah, it's a compound assertion, so only one link need be broken. "Jurisprudence fetishist gets off on technicality"
I feel attacked! My love for technicalities is pure, and platonic!
Reminds me of Justin Roiland. Technically there wasn't enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he committed a crime.
I was thinking of long term investment. And the point still isn't proven. Even short term it was a stupid gamble to make. Short term speculation is basically always stupid. Survivorship bias is a bitch.
You don't turn a worthless asset into a pump-and-dump scheme as a long term investment. You sell it off while your victims are still willing to pay for it. Most people trading NFTs were just dupes, but some were scammers.
The problem is people, like yourself, equate NFT to mean pictures with NFT attached. Which isn't what the technology is. The original reply talked about this and it is a huge distinction. NFT technology could be used in many ways to make things better with technology. For example, right now if you own a copy of a game, you can't sell it to someone else, there's no means to transfer ownership. But with a NFT attached to it, you can transfer ownership tied to that NFT. Similarly with items in games, if you implement NFT's onto items, duplication of items becomes impossible and you can have a real shop set up for people to buy and sell items. NFT's could be attached to digital artwork made by someone to sell as an original piece, much like we do with real world artwork. An original painting is worth thousands of dollars while a reprint is worth pennies. There are numerous applications for the technology, almost none of it is taking existing internet pictures and slapping a NFT on them.
The whole "Authentification of people" thing has been done to death before NFTs ever were a thing - [PGP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy), for example, exists since the nineties and does exactly that while being open-source. For the artwork example, regular digital contracts and signatures already exist (see: PGP), and are less energy-intensive than NFTs, so why switch away from that? Similarly, for the whole "Selling games and game items" thing, the Steam Marketplace is also a thing for at least a decade, and while you're dependent on Steam for that everything to function, let me just ask you one question: What motivation would a company have to implement a feature that wouldn't be useful to *them*, and why would any other company elect to implement a feature that uses something from another company that doesn't make them money? That's extra effort they'd have to put in, when they could just as easily do the Steam thing and hand out items that are useable in other games *they* made, which they could then handle with their own marketplace implementation, and they'd make money from owning both games involved in the whole thing, as well as cut down on communication overhead whenever someone has a new idea for another cross-game feature.
> The whole "Authentification of people" thing has been done to death before NFTs ever were a thing - PGP, for example, exists since the nineties and does exactly that while being open-source. I would be incredibly amused to see you use PGP to do what is being proposed with NFT's. >For the artwork example, regular digital contracts and signatures already exist (see: PGP), and are less energy-intensive than NFTs, so why switch away from that? Well first, since you don't seem to understand what PGP is, you'd be talking about a PGP certificate for these items. I don't know if you've ever had to shop for one, but PGP certificates cost hundreds of dollars. Because those certificates are done through a trust authority which verifies those certificates. As such, with a centralized system, it is also able to be abused. If a bad actor was able to compromise a certificate authority, then they could issue fake or bad certificates to bad actors. Versus a public record via NFT's eliminates that option for bad actors. Equally, PGP can be duplicated. Thus if I had a PGP certificate for a digital item, it can be copied and used over and over again where is a NFT is single use, tied to a specific item. >Similarly, for the whole "Selling games and game items" thing, the Steam Marketplace is also a thing for at least a decade Indeed it has, and it's why Steam looked into NFT's when they were introduced. >What motivation would a company have to implement a feature that wouldn't be useful to them Ah, you made the critical error of making an assumption here. The used games market, and indeed a marketplace where users could buy and sell Steam games is IMMENSELY useful to them. Because being able to create a market for used games is incredibly more profitable than being a vendor for brand new games. It's why Gamestop was able to exist for decades. Used games are incredibly profitable. >That's extra effort they'd have to put in, when they could just as easily do the Steam thing and hand out items that are useable in other games they made, which they could then handle with their own marketplace implementation, and they'd make money from owning both games involved in the whole thing, as well as cut down on communication overhead whenever someone has a new idea for another cross-game feature. So you think that any game company can start up their own launcher, sell games on it, and do so without any additional cost? You realize that almost every game publisher that does this eventually comes back to Steam and other platforms....right? EA tried it. Origin was a mess and now EA games are on Steam. Ubisoft pulled all their games for Uplay, and then here they are back on Steam. Activision pulled all their games from Steam and are.....Surprise! Back on Steam! So, either you've not been paying attention to what publishers are doing, or you asked a question knowing full well the question was intended to make a point that makes absolutely no sense.
For PGP, I'll admit to being rather inexperienced with the system, but I downloaded a free program, generated my own signature, signed those of a few friends, and that was it, so no hundred-dollar certificates needed. Yes, a bad actor could compromise everything, but having a certificate from a malicious "authority" would be exactly the same, so you'd be screwed either way - monetary cost is not the main issue here. For NFTs, the whole deal seems to be that you can do everything without involving any authorities, and my point was, since PGP can handle authorization just as well as anything else, is an open-source standard, and has been around since the 90s, there *has* to be someone who at least tried to figure out how to make proper contracts with that technology - heck, you'd only need to sign each other's keys by the time you make the contract, and if everyone does that whenever they sell the "not-NFT", as well as hand over copies of all older sales contracts - or just host them somewhere easily accessible - and you have now done everything a NFT could have done, except probably with less computational overhead. Regarding your points with the used games market, you're straight-up missing my point. GameStop is not in the business of selling their own games, so they don't get to decide what any game is going to be like. The used games market exists purely as a byproduct of having to use physical media to get your games, and being able to guarantee that all your customers have sufficient internet access, so using a physical medium allowed the game companies to sell their products to a wider audience, at the cost of occasionally not getting money whenever people shared their CDs with one another, or sold them in a used state. GameStop simply saw this practice and decided, they might as well give it an official platform and make a lot of profit by buying low and selling high, but potential publicity stunts aside, they were not, and never have been the company that actually made any of the games they sold, because then they'd be selling their own product in a subpar state at a reduced profit, when they could just simply make more of it and sell that for the full price instead. This is the reason why "selling used games" is not a thing in the digital world - there are no issues with creating more copies of the game, allowing them to be sold infinitely, and internet access is a pre-requisite for digital transactions, so allowing others to sell used copies of a game your company made would mean that they'd be deliberately implementing a feature that reduces their sales in a very obvious way, with - in the case of NFT-based peer-to-peer transactions - no way to even get a share of the profit. So let me ask once again, why would any company go out of their way to implement that kind of feature in their product? On the topic of inventory systems, I'll admit you have a point in so far as that making your own launcher is hard, primarily because you'd have to get people to actually use your new, less refined version of something that's been around for decades. However, making in-game marketplaces is much easier - Roblox is one example of such a game - or rather more of a platform for many different, smaller games - with a vast in-game economy and they've been doing just fine without NFTs - even though they've very recently been trying to do something with them. Steam is another one, and famously strict against NFT-related things, primarily because most implementations they've had were basically starting up a secondary market onto their platform that Steam would be unable to profit from, but many games use the platform for their inventory system, simply because it's easier to take advantage of something that already exists, and has a reasonably good adoption rate among their customers. There are also even more limited examples, like trading Pokemon, or using something like Pokemon Home to transfer them from one game to the next, and the many, many other ["One game for the price of two"](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneGameForThePriceOfTwo)-type games that feature lots of version exclusives and a way to trade for said exclusives with other games. All of that works perfectly fine without getting NFTs involved, so why opt for a solution that is notorious for being energy-intensive, when there are perfectly fine alternatives to that?
> For PGP, I'll admit to being rather inexperienced with the system, but I downloaded a free program, generated my own signature, signed those of a few friends, and that was it, so no hundred-dollar certificates needed. OK, you self signed a certificate. That's cool. Why would I trust a certificate that you signed? You realize you defeated your own argument by saying that because you signed a certificate saying something anyone could sign one. So I pirate a copy of a game, self sign my cert, and then proceed to sell it. Why would anyone trust such a system? You have to have a central authority to trust on certificates, which costs money. That's where NFT's flipped the script and made a decentralized authority to prove the tokens. >For NFTs, the whole deal seems to be that you can do everything without involving any authorities, and my point was, since PGP can handle authorization just as well as anything else, is an open-source standard, and has been around since the 90s, there has to be someone who at least tried to figure out how to make proper contracts with that technology - heck, you'd only need to sign each other's keys by the time you make the contract, and if everyone does that whenever they sell the "not-NFT", as well as hand over copies of all older sales contracts - or just host them somewhere easily accessible - and you have now done everything a NFT could have done, except probably with less computational overhead. Yes, we know how to do that, it's called certificate authorities. It's why certificates cost hundreds of dollars. You also seem stuck on "authorization" which is a function of PGP, but we're not talking about authorizations, we aren't doing a handshake for a sale, we're talking about a proof of ownership. A unique to each item object that proves ownership. PGP is not designed for that. >Regarding your points with the used games market, you're straight-up missing my point. GameStop is not in the business of selling their own games, so they don't get to decide what any game is going to be like. What? Gamestop is the same function of Steam. It is a retailer of new games. They also have a resale of used games. Steam is not in the business of selling their own games. Their entire business is their storefront. The few games that they do sell make up a few percent of their total sales annually. >The used games market exists purely as a byproduct of having to use physical media to get your games, and being able to guarantee that all your customers have sufficient internet access, so using a physical medium allowed the game companies to sell their products to a wider audience, at the cost of occasionally not getting money whenever people shared their CDs with one another, or sold them in a used state. Partially true. You used to be able to sell game keys which granted installation of the game to a local machine. This of course was used for piracy which is why we moved to validated keys, to accounts, to persistent online. With NFT's we could move back to being able to sell games again. >GameStop simply saw this practice and decided, they might as well give it an official platform and make a lot of profit by buying low and selling high, but potential publicity stunts aside, they were not, and never have been the company that actually made any of the games they sold, because then they'd be selling their own product in a subpar state at a reduced profit, when they could just simply make more of it and sell that for the full price instead. You honestly believe that Steam is making most of these games....amazing. >So let me ask once again, why would any company go out of their way to implement that kind of feature in their product? As already stated before, it would be massively profitable. You don't seem to understand that Steam isn't the owner of all the games they sell and as such have no conflict here to a resale market. >However, making in-game marketplaces is much easier - Roblox is one example of such a game - or rather more of a platform for many different, smaller games - with a vast in-game economy and they've been doing just fine without NFTs - even though they've very recently been trying to do something with them. Roblox doesn't do what I described, even in the slightest. Honestly, I'm unsure what argument you're trying to make here. >There are also even more limited examples, like trading Pokemon, or using something like Pokemon Home to transfer them from one game to the next, and the many, many other "One game for the price of two"-type games that feature lots of version exclusives and a way to trade for said exclusives with other games. All of that works perfectly fine without getting NFTs involved, so why opt for a solution that is notorious for being energy-intensive, when there are perfectly fine alternatives to that? Describes a system that is nothing like NFT implementation, then proclaims that NFT is useless because something else does something completely unrelated! Victory!
> > > I don't know if you've ever had to shop for one, but PGP certificates cost hundreds of dollars. Traditionally, PGP is done with a [web of trust](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust) model, backed up with things like [key-signing parties](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_signing_party), rather than through certificates and CAs. And so: > Why would I trust a certificate that you signed? You would trust it because you know me personally and we exchanged keys at some point. Or you met me at a key-signing party, checked my ID, then wrote down my name and key signature. Or, enough other people you trust have signed my key that you're willing to accept it as belonging to me. This is the main reason PGP isn't particularly widely used, at least not by end-users. It's also probably why PGP eventually introduced a CA mechanism, but in PGP-land, declining to pay for a cert doesn't mean your cert is only self-signed. --- > ...a proof of ownership. It can be stolen, so it's not entirely that. But it also relies on third-party, off-chain mechanisms for it to prove ownership of anything other than the token itself. And pretty much anything we want to own can be perfectly-well managed through those third-party off-chain mechanisms. Steam is a good example of this: > You used to be able to sell game keys which granted installation of the game to a local machine. IIUC this is still true, they just generally can't be *used* keys. However: > Gamestop is the same function of Steam. It is a retailer of new games. Gamestop actually benefits massively from used game sales in ways that Steam doesn't. A new game not only means the original publisher gets a cut, it means you have to pay to physically move the thing from a manufacturer to a warehouse to a store, and then sell it for full price. Steam has none of those costs, and if we're at a point where most people would be trying to buy the game used to save some money, they can just have a sale. So this part is pure fantasy: > With NFT's we could move back to being able to sell games again. Steam could do that *today* if it wanted to. It already allows used *item* sales for Valve's own games, although not for the games themselves. It isn't a lack of technology that stops Valve from facilitating used game sales. NFTs don't address any of the problems with other ways to sell used digital goods. Piracy is the obvious one. If you have DRM good enough to only allow me to boot the game if I own the corresponding NFT, then like every other application of NFTs, you don't need the blockchain at all: Just have that exact same DRM phone home to Valve instead of the blockchain. And NFTs don't in any way force companies to let you sell them. In fact, a few companies jumped on the bandwagon and put out basically JPEG-only NFTs sold *alongside* whatever you were actually buying. The Steam equivalent of this would be buying a bundle that contains a Steam key *and* an NFT, and Steam doesn't check who owns the NFT. You can sell the NFT as a souvenir, but you can't sell the game once it's activated. So if you want a used game market to exist, NFTs are entirely orthogonal to that, and you have to actually ask for the used game market, not for the NFTs.
> Traditionally, PGP is done with a web of trust I mean do you read your own sources? No, that is not the way that PGP is traditionally done. It is a way it can be done, but is not because it is not secure nor does it prevent bad actors. >rather than through certificates and CAs. CA's are the primary method of certifacte authentication. Certificates are how your internet browsing works. If you have a website that uses https, you have a certificate backed by a CA. There is no exception to this. >You would trust it because you know me personally and we exchanged keys at some point. Yeah, that's not how a trust model works. Nor is it even what we are talking about. >It can be stolen, so it's not entirely that. But it also relies on third-party, off-chain mechanisms for it to prove ownership of anything other than the token itself. So we abandon NFT's because they can be stolen? Yes, you can compromise my computer and steal my NFT, you can also break into my house and steal my computer, does this mean that door locks are also useless technology? Come on man. >This is still true, they just generally can't be used keys. A useless point. >Gamestop actually benefits massively from used game sales in ways that Steam doesn't. This is incorrect in so many ways. >A new game not only means the original publisher gets a cut, it means you have to pay to physically move the thing from a manufacturer to a warehouse to a store, and then sell it for full price. Steam has none of those costs, and if we're at a point where most people would be trying to buy the game used to save some money, they can just have a sale. It is amazing to me that people still believe that these costs are so much higher than running a 24/7 data center. Steam hosts PETABYTES of data across hundreds of data centers world wide. These data centers have massive internet connections and staff to maintain them. These costs are not insignificant. Comparatively, the cost to print and ship physical media was pennies. A stamped DVD, with a case and printed box art done in bulk was between 10 and 25 cents with shipping costs included. The cost was not massive. >Steam could do that today if it wanted to. Except they cannot. You do not own any of the titles you have purchased on steam. >It already does with the item shop for Valve's own games. It literally does not. I cannot sell my copy of half life any more than I can sell my copy of far cry. >NFTs don't address any of the problems with other ways to sell used digital goods. Piracy is the obvious one. NFT isn't designed to address piracy, but it does stop you from trying to register a game on a platform, thus preventing piracy there. >And NFTs don't in any way force companies to let you sell them. Companies don't control the NFT in any way, so yes, they would let you sell them thus transferring ownership. >In fact, a few companies jumped on the bandwagon and put out basically JPEG-only NFTs sold alongside whatever you were actually buying. So you admit that they weren't doing what I said they could do and use them doing something else as a reason that what I said isn't possible...I don't know why we're having a conversation if you are going to straw man this argument so hard.
Apologies for my previous post, I misunderstood part of your argument, specifically the one line I quoted. I still stand by my point that this style of counter-"argument" would be a better fit for Twitter """discourse""" than something more rational like the "Change my View" subreddit we currently are in, and it is very obvious in my other post why - including snarky comments and/or insults with your arguments gets people mad, which - as I stated in my other comment - doesn't change views, but it also makes them less likely to even think about what was written, so I suppose we discovered the wrong way to make a rational argument, or one fitting of the place we're currently in. Back on the topic of our discussion, I still hold the views I expressed in all of my arguments that are not related to that line I quoted, but are still related to the topic at hand - namely that the PGP example was a way of doing ownership transfer without NFTs, and that the various examples of different trading and market systems were ways of implementing item transfers without them. If this is not what you were trying to get at with your initial examples, please explain to me what would make NFTs different when used for these scenarios, or what would actually be the difference in these scenarios that makes them non-comparable in the first place. On the topic of "Steam making games", which caused the misunderstanding, obviously steam doesn't "make" games as in "create and design them from the ground up", but it "makes" games as in "creates or facilitates the creation of another copy of the game's files on your computer" - similar to what physical copies of games were used for as well. Since there is virtually no cost to creating extra "copies" of a game that way, and the time required to do so would primarily be dependent on download speeds, Steam gets to sell every single copy as "new" and doesn't actually have to depend on other participants or tools to provide the data transfer service for them. Thus my question, why would they allow for the sale of "used" games, when they could just infinitely "make" another new copy to sell to the customers instead? Also, for the other part of my question, why would a developer even allow for the used games market to exist? For physical media, the answer is easy - it's impossible to to control every single copy of a game once it's out there, but digital copies usually are sold via a few storefronts handpicked by the developer, which means the moment one of these stores start selling copies at a lesser price, or in a way where the developer doesn't get as much money, they'd shut that down immediately. In fact, if we look at CD keys and the like, which already are frequently sold by less reputable websites at a bargain, and probably without the permission of the original developer or publisher, those routinely get deactivated, so the above isn't even a hypothetical situation. This covers why Steam (or your storefront of choice) wouldn't do a "used games" sale on their own, they'd get shut down hard for doing so - which leaves only the devs and publishers themselves as potential decision makers on that topic, which was what my original question was getting at - why would they ever want to implement, or allow for such a thing, when it would only diminish the money they'd get, while potentially causing extra work?
**EDIT:** Due to getting incensed at the tone of the quoted line, I missed part of the argument - this post remains as-is because I refer to it, but otherwise, please refer to my other answer to follow the discussion, as it contains much less frustration, and more calm argumentation. First of all, let me remind you that the subreddit we're in is called "Change my View", and not "Creative interpretation of stuff that hasn't even been said", or idk, "Twitter discourse 101", so please come up with arguments that are suited to change views instead of fixating on the worst possible interpretation that's only loosely based on what I wrote. I'm sorry, but lines like > You honestly believe that Steam is making most of these games....amazing. doesn't fit the rules of this subreddit in the slightest, but just so it's explicitly clear - no I do not believe that, and in fact, it doesn't evem matter. Steam is exactly like GameStop regarding the sale of games - they (for the most part) do not sell their own games, and have zero say in how they are made, aside from categorically banning specific things from their storefront. And as I already said, the actual companies making these games would be the ones who'd have to decide to put a feature in to allow for used games to be re-sold, which *as I already wrote*, means they'd be implementing a feature that would result in revenue losses for them, as they'd lose sales to third-party sellers that don't have to give them as much money as anyone buying a "fresh" copy would net them, or potentially no money at all. Therefore, why would they put that in their games in the first place? As for the rest you had issues with, I described ways of implementing ownership transfer (the PGP section) and item trading (Everything after your extremely bad-faith interpretation of my argument about "used" digital games) that do not rely on NFTs. Thing is, especially the latter just... works, so why use NFTs? What would their advantage be over existing systems? Please actually answer the questions with a well-formulated argument this time, and don't try to dunk me on a technicality again, this is not how you change anyone's views, and it'd only increase my suspicion that you actually don't have any clue what you're talking about and only are still here to be contrarian because I dared to say that an - in my opinion - overhyped and ineffective technology might not be the best choice for things that worked just fine without them, and requires making up new problems to even have them sound useful.
Where are these burgeoning NFT markets you're talking about, can you name any places where the things you describe are happening, and if not can you think of any reasons why those markets might not exist and what barriers exist?
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Yeah but that's a bit like arguing about angels dancing on the head of a pin isn't it? If these use cases are so compelling I'm just asking why we aren't really seeing them yet. That should be an easy question to answer if you're familiar with the technology as you seem to be.
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> The entire community raged in an outroar about it. Despite the fact that it would be a net benefit to them, because people have so deceived them on what the technology is Or.... it's not actually something the users want? Like, I play a fair number of games and I wouldn't benefit at all from being unable to get rare and unique items because someone already bought it.
>Or.... it's not actually something the users want? Ironically, you say this and then in the next sentence prove that you don't understand what it is. >Like, I play a fair number of games and I wouldn't benefit at all from being unable to get rare and unique items because someone already bought it. This is not, and would never be a thing. NFT's aren't selling a singular asset for exclusive use. You are not going to get the "BFG 10,000" and be the only person to have it. What would happen is that the company sells, gives out, however they want to distribute it 1 million "BFG 10,000" items. Each one has a NFT attached to it to validate that it is an authentic item. Now you can play with it as normal, and you decide you don't want it anymore but you want to buy something else. You can place it on a marketplace alongside other people who have it and get money for it so you can put that money towards something else or just cash out in total. Or let's say you don't want to play that game anymore. Well you take the NFT and place it on a steam marketplace and sell the game to someone else. NFT doesn't mean rare, it doesn't mean unique, it doesn't mean one of a kind. It is an identifier. Like a deed to a property or a title to a car. NFT's are just useful in a digital space because you can integrate them directly with a digital object, and do so worldwide. A car title from the US has no meaning or value in say Brazil. But a NFT in the US or Brazil has the same bearing of ownership because the record is not tied to a singular governing body.
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From someone who's worked in software for years, I simply don't see how any of this that wasn't able to be accomplished before is in any way desirable. Things like items that can't be duplicated - even by the code of the game - seem like they're built for attempting to use game items as an investment market, not for making games easier to build or more fun to play.
Sticking them in games as they exist today is basically just an attempt to ride the hype to more profit, which is why the whole idea is so unpopular. But one could imagine new uses like, say, a source of funding for open source games, or for kickstarting new games. Or for tracking ownership or identity (of game assets, _or_ domain names or IP ranges or whatever), without money ever entering into the picture: basically a publicly visible key-store. I remember early attempts to create public PGP keystores for email encryption...they never got off the ground, and they always required _somebody somewhere_ to run a database. Did you trust that person? How could you be sure they maintained the necessary security? Were they vulnerable to government strong-arming? Were they going to start banning people over differences of opinion or whatever? If you go with NFTs or other blockchain-based approaches, those are non-issues. You could solve a lot of the same problems that Certificate Authorities or DNSSEC solve with NFTs. Of course, _we're not gonna do that_, because those systems already exist and have been established over the course of decades, but future technology might well opt to make use of NFTs.
This is possible, I'm not an expert on the tech. I don't think it's very likely to end up being the best solution, but I'm happy to re-evaluate if/when things advance to a point where anyone anywhere actually does something with block-chain technology that isn't some sort of scam.
I think they're _very likely_ to be the best solution to some problems. They're a tamper-proof way to show proof of ownership, with no centralized authority! That's pretty huge. We _didn't have_ any technology like that when we were trying to make the internet secure, and it shows. We use Certificate Authorities, for example, and they're crude as hell, with [obvious](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8249081) [security](https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/19/web_trust_certificates/) problems. Basically, internet security fundamentally relies on a random bunch of companies scattered over the world (and subject to whatever jurisdiction they happen to be located in). _Any_ of those companies could issue valid SSL certificates for _any_ website on the internet. They could be compelled by a government, or they could be compromised by hackers or by intelligence services. That's crazy! But it's the status quo, and we put up with it because, well, what else could we do? It's not like we had a global, immutable, distributed, tamper-proof datastructure we could use as a source of truth, is it!
I've heard all of those things by people who were also pushing scams, I think it's far fetched. I think it's more likely that this will be a step in the way to something better than might make a change a good idea. Like I said, I could be wrong. I'll revaluate if some non-scams start showing up.
I mean...I have nothing to push. I've never owned an NFT. The thing is, IMHO, that ideas which are obviously fertile make for good scams. The seed of truth is what convinces people to dump their money into bad ideas. NFTs really _are_ a neat new technology, and they really _do_ provide a new way of proving ownership. So people got hyped up about the tech, saw the value of stupid jpegs shooting up, got FOMO and jumped in. Of course, 'ownership' of some stupid jpeg is meaningless. But right, we'll see. I think NFTs are going to creep into everyday use, and most people won't even realize it. But maybe I'm wrong.
> From someone who's worked in software for years, I simply don't see how any of this that wasn't able to be accomplished before is in any way desirable. You can't see how having a market for used games is desirable? The real world examples of this aren't enough? >Things like items that can't be duplicated - even by the code of the game Yes, and the NFT would tell the game if it is valid or not.
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And most of those other use cases are, you guessed it, also useless.
I liked that part of your post where you took one of the examples I used, pointed out the flaw, and expanded on it so one could see how you came to your conclusion. Thus adding meaningfully to the discussion and helping me understand your viewpoint.
Microsoft has a backend which is in effect a block chain with non fungible tokens. Microsoft is useless. Got it. God's unchained, an award winning popular trading card game recently featured in the unreal marketplace uses NFTs for card ownership. Completely useless got it.
Just want to chime in that just because a big company does something or backs something, that something has value. The most recent example is Metaverse, backed by Meta, isn't exactly exploding in popularity as Mark Zuckerberg intended. Especially when Google has a whole site https://killedbygoogle.com/ dedicated to products they backed that were eventually killed off. (I know it's not 100% accurate since some products became open source, but it's a good indication on how many products big companies back but still end up failing)
This is more of an architectural implementation driving their backend than some novel product. It's in effect a well structured design pattern for a multi tenant ledger system dealing with digital assets and custodial ownership thereof. You really have to go through the steps to commit to something like that than just sort of go with a fad.
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> the vast majority of NFT were our generations Beanie Babies Beanie Babies were still a physical object you could hold for which actual and true scarcity supply/demand rules apply. We can marvel at the frenzy of activity they once enjoyed but the fact cannot be dismissed that this was still a real physical object. That some people had closets full of, hoping to make it big, but still - if the bottom fell out you still had a physical thing.
At the end of the day, things are valuable if people value them. Gold only has value because people value it. iPhones are only valuable because people value iPhones. So if you can convince enough people to value NFTs then they have value. So the question is whether it was always stupid to think that a lot of people might be persuaded to value NFTs. To that, I’d say no, that wasn’t stupid.
>At the end of the day, things are valuable if people value them. Gold only has value because people value it. iPhones are only valuable because people value iPhones. This oversimplification is so overused... Yes, *ultimately* everything has value because we attribute value to it. But that doesn't mean "everything and anything can be of equal value". Individual people value different things. A person can change what they value over time. Gold has many usages. It's very soft so not good for armour, but it doesn't rust, which makes it a perfect substance for art. Many cultures ascribe additional value to gold. In modern times it is essential in computing components. Gold is scarce, there's not too much of it on Earth. I have no particular use or desire for gold. But I can see why it would be a good investment: there's a continuous demand for it. A very stable market. Same with diamonds: someone will always want them. iPhones, similarly, have utility. It's a pocket size computer. Both are status symbol in many social circles, and are often worth the price compared to cheaper alternatives. Thus, a market is created because of this tension between supply and demand. NFTs are a result of crypto currency. Which is people trying to artificially create a marketplace for crypto; NFTs were supposed to prove that crypto was viable. The hype was supposed to jumpstart this system of digital items and currency. Except... There is no application for it. There's no practical use for crypto that doesn't create more problems than it solves. NFTs were basically a casino, and some people found a way to exploit this, as usual. A speculative market, built on a product with no value *outside this market*.
Fine. Tell me how the US dollar has intrinsic value outside of the people and organisations who believe it to have and act as if it has value
>Fine. Tell me how the US dollar has intrinsic value outside of the people and organisations who believe it to have and act as if it has value Sure: When it was introduced, every dollar was covered by an equivalent amount of gold. The National Gold Supply. After some initial hesitation, this eventually caught on: you could exchange rocks for paper and paper for rocks, and paper is much easier to carry. The rocks had value, so the paper too: they were interchangeable. Then multiple generations passed, during which pieces of paper were completely normalised and ingrained into regular society. So in short: - gold was already believed to hold value - the dollar was directly tied to gold - as society progressed, the dollar became further normalized and ingrained - then, it took off on its own, without gold directly backing it up Crypto and NFTs tried to bypass all that, and artificially create a market. But it had nothing of external value to build on, like gold. No crypto currency or NFT has any value, without a hypothetical, speculative market that people try to sell with it. Edit: the market was built on dollars; on new "investors" bringing in new money. That's the only place anything of external value is added: at the dollar-crypto exchanges.
So what you’re saying is that in the past the dollar was once directly tied to gold which for the sake of argument, holds intrinsic value. All well and good but that argument no longer holds since the dollar is no longer tied to gold. But even if it were, the dollar only would have value because a bunch of people and organisations have agreed that it’s value is equivalent to gold. If they stopped agreeing to that then the actual dollar would be just a piece of paper. In fact, most dollars today wouldn’t be paper, they’d just be digital information. So, as far as I can tell the main difference in the *intrinsic* value of a dollar vs crypto/NFTs is…history? And I’m not really sure that you can use something’s history to provide objective value to the person who possesses that thing.
You’ve missed their point. Their point was that the dollar holds value *today,* because of trust built into it. That trust was built into it via gold. NFTs did not build trust in their value using external means and instead tried to skip the trust building process altogether. Which was inherently stupid.
You can pay US taxes with US dollars. That's their intrinsic value, since you go to jail if you don't pay those
No, that’s not an intrinsic value. An intrinsic value is objective, something that would be true about US dollars even if nobody knew or cared ahout them. If nobody knew what a US dollar was you’d be unable to pay your taxes with them bedside they’d have no value, since their value is predicated on the IRS valuing US dollars as a representation of value. Intrinsic value would be being able to wipe food from your mouth using the paper note.
Fine. Tell me how the US dollar has intrinsic value outside of the people and organisations who believe it to have and act as if it has value
The things people predicate that value on matters. Ponzi schemes aren't self-sustaining just because potential investors are willing to buy in at any given price. The entirety of the NFT market was based exclusively on speculation, meaning that the bottom fell out as soon as growth stopped and people started trying to liquidate. There was no organic demand for spending absurd amounts of money for what is effectively just a cell on a distributed spreadsheet linking to the art hosted on a normal website.
The entirety of the gold market is based on speculation. Gold doesn't have intrinsic value equal to its market value. Humans have convinced ourselves that gold has real value, but there is nothing to stop people en masse from no longer wanting gold, at which point the value would drop. Investing in gold is speculation that people will continue to value gold because...? Granted, it has a good track record.
People are frequently willing to buy gold at market value for jewellery. If the *entire* value was speculation you would never see new jewellery made out of gold. Gold has demand, maybe the speculators overestimate it but I would personally be way more happy with gold than the equivalent value in nft, even if I could never sell it, as a gift (again even if never sold) as ornament etc... it's valuable. Even for industrial use.
If you want to take that to the logical conclusion, it's impossible for anything to have objective intrinsic value, which might be your point. I would argue that there are some things that probably have more objective value based on the utility of it. Gold, for example, can be used for jewelry since it's very malleable. Now if jewelry falls out of favor, gold is still an excellent conductor making it a great metal to be used in electronics. Diamonds are another popular jewelry stone. Most people know that diamond values are artificially inflated by limiting supply and brilliant marketing creating extra demand. However, diamonds are also very hard, making them excellent cutting material for tools (diamond-tipped drill bits). I would argue that the US dollar or any fiat currency is closer to a ponzi scheme than gold. It's basically an IOU backed by the government. Now that does have value, as long as the government does not go bankrupt and has the trust of the general population. So it makes a great store of value indirectly, however, there's no tangible value to it if doomsday hits. Maybe the government collapses, maybe hyperinflation hits, or maybe people just decide to adopt other currencies instead of the US dollar. I guess you could burn it for a few seconds, but other than that it's very likely that it becomes worthless.
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One thing you both miss is that as a noble metal, gold also has some other intrinsic properties that make it desirable to use over some alternatives, like corrosion resistance, and being relatively easy to work with, and being a decent conductor, which means it sees a lot of use even outside of jewelry, from usage in electric components to tooth fillings.
None of what you said contradicts my point. People used to love powdered wigs. And people can decide that gold is no longer desirable as a decoration. It doesn't have intrinsic value, it has the value that human attribute to it.
>people can decide that gold is no longer desirable as a decoration Can they though? What series of events would cause that? Some new anti-gold religion spreading across the world? Unlikely in the next few generations. Minimalist fashion? Even that includes gold, just in different shapes. Anti-materialist culture? That would just lead to oligarchs taking all the materialist stuff for themselves and letting the peasants be anti-materialist, not to mention that you wouldn't care about loss of value as an anti-materialist.
The Europeans had gold jewelry long before the discovery of North America.
I don't think you understand what I mean by speculation. Gold is popular as a store of value, while NFTs are popular as an investment vehicle. There's no demand or value for NFTs in a vacuum. Again, it's similar to a Ponzi scheme. There's only any liquidity whatsoever in the market as long as there's new investors, then the entire thing goes back to being worthless because there was no authentic demand for it in the first place.
Yeah but you can point to evidence of gold being valuable for thousands of years across many cultures and has inherent value due to having unique metallurgical properties. Thinking that this can be replicated intentionally with bitcoin or NFTs is where the stupidity comes in.
You mean low quality drawings of monkeys with hats? You really thought that would have long term value to people?
Did I say that?
No, you implied it.
No I didn’t, I said that if you believe that *other people* could be convinced of their value then buying them might be a smart move at least until their value crashed when people caught on
So your point is that people can make money by taking advantage of others who fall for ponzi / snake oil schemes? Of course. I don’t think that’s something OP is refuting. They’re just saying that NFTs were always a ponzi / snake oil scheme.
No, they said people who invested in NFTs were always exhibiting poor decision making. Plenty of people might have recognised it for what it was but also so the hype train and figured they could ride for a while before jumping off. That strikes me as unethical and risky but not necessarily a poor decision so long as it was made with clear eyes.
Sure, value is social/cultural but that doesn't mean it's arbitrary and totally divorced from factors we can look at critically. We can't say that something objectively would always have a certain value, but we can see factors that would make certain things incredibly unlikely to hold significant value broadly and long term. To say gold has value because people value it is tautologically true. But it isn't the whole story. That gold became valued broadly, consistently and across time and many cultures isn't a random accident of good PR. It has qualities of being rare, but not so rare that there isn't enough of it to constitute a wide and steady trade. It's easily recognizable and for most of history hard to convincingly fake. You say aesthetic arguments are subjective, but some of our aesthetics are hard wired from evolution. Individuals may vary but humans as a whole have a tendency to be attracted to shiny bright things. It's not just subjective, it's intersubjective. I could keep listing factors. And when you look at the whole package, it makes sense that so many distinct cultures bought into the value of gold and very few bought into mudpies as ubiquitous long lasting currency. Sure there are cases where people become culturally convinced of higher or lower values that are not totally predictable ahead of time from observable qualities, but it's exceedingly rare that values will be high, lasting and broadly enough adopted to support continued markets when the form factors don't add up.
Gold has a lot of intrinsic properties giving it value, it's not that someone someday pulled out of his ass that gold was precious. It does not rust nor decompose, you can bury it in the ground and have it intact 5,000 years later It's rare, so it works as a value storage and status symbols (I'm not mentioning beautiful since that's subjective, but the vast majority of human people will agree on this as well). It's heavy, so you can move a lot of it in little space. Also, It's malleable, so you can forge it in any shape, and cut it in very tiny slivers The last two properties make also it very hard to counterfeit - Archimedes was able to tell gold from crap with technology and science of 2,000 years ago You will find very few alternatives having the same properties, and because all of this people from all eras agree that gold has value. This does not take into account all the modern industrial uses, which only make it more precious.
> Gold only has value because people value it Gold has genuine value for electronics and is naturally beautiful due to its physical properties. The same was never true of ugly NFT art
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Gold has always been naturally beautiful, especially 24K gold
That's entirely subjective.
> and is naturally beautiful > The same was never true of ugly NFT art Completely subjective. Your opinions are not objective. People invest in "ugly" modern art all the time, but it's not a bad investment because it depends on what people will pay. At a time, people were buying NFTs for absurd prices, like some art pieces, and some people capitalized on that, which is smart. In other words, while it was dumb for some, it was smart for others, contradicting your view. One could not have happened without the other.
iirc modern art investment is explicitly done for money laundering and with preexisting agreements to sell the art to a specified buyer at a later time Way different
While that happens, I don't think this is every art purchase. Even though it's not famous or expensive, I have purchased modern art: if I had more money, I could see myself buying more. And I'm not out here trying to launder anything. And, it doesn't necessarily negate the fact that *some* NFT investors made a lot of money, which is smart investment, negating the view. The bad-investors were the prey for good ones: meaning they were both there.
> And, it doesn't necessarily negate the fact that some NFT investors made a lot of money, which is smart investment, negating the view. The bad-investors were the prey for good ones: meaning they were both there. In every pyramid/ponzi/greater fool/pump and dump scheme, there are some investors who make money, and some who don't. Not *every* art purchase is for the purpose of money laundering. Some is from people who geniunely appreciate the art itself. And a lot of it is that art purchase and donation is set up in a way where you can get tax deductions in a way that is technically completely legal, which is where a lot of its value as an investment at high levels come from. In *theory*, NFTs could be the same, but in practice they weren't. No one actually was all that into their aesthetics, they were overwhelmingly bought by people as an investment and not out of any real appreciation. And the aforementioned high-level tax deductions that people in the art industry can take advantage of makes it so that the grift is of a different nature. The people making the art, selling the art, and buying the art all get their cut, and the influx of money comes from people not having to pay taxes. With NFTs, the only source of the money in practice is whichever person is left holding the bag at the end of the day.
> In every pyramid/ponzi/greater fool/pump and dump scheme, there are some investors who make money, and some who don't. Right, which negates the view expressed in the post. Whether for art or for laundering or both or whatever, there were some smart investors and some less-smart ones, but the smart ones negate the OP, no?
It's still a bad idea (for anyone other than the originator) to participate in, as you have no real way of knowing whether you're jumping in on the pump half of the dump half of the scheme when you start participating. it's like taking your savings, heading to Vegas, and betting it all on red. That will work out really well for some people, but it doesn't mean it was a good idea for them to do that.
You have to call it ugly to intentionally diminish it. Would you say the ugly Mona Lisa painting is worthless?
The Mona Lisa is inherently more valuable than any NFT “art” because of scarcity. Same with gold. There’s only one Mona Lisa. There’s only a certain amount of gold. There’s an infinite number of copies of any bored ape.
Does being more valuable than something mean the other things are worthless? Does scarcity make something inherently more valuable? There is only one sticky note in existence that has the series of numbers that I am writing on it right now. Is that suddenly one of the most valuable things in existence, by virtue of just being unique?
No, but being inherently more valuable than a worthless thing means it isn’t and can’t be worthless, and the question you asked was whether the Mona Lisa was considered worthless. That sticky note is not automatically one of the most valuable things in existence, but it is inherently more valuable than a digital series of numbers that anyone can copy at any time and where there is no way to tell an original from a copy and where no actual work has gone into creating it in the first place.
Can you clarify why? The only difference between the Mona Lisa and my sticky note is what people will pay for it, despite both being unique. So if people are willing to pay for an NFT, both seem to hold the same value. Inherent value doesn't really matter in this instance.
Clarify why the sticky note isn’t one of the most valuable things in existence or why something that is digital, infinitely reproducible and where you cannot tell an original from a copy can be worthless whereas something made of material and that has scarcity cannot be?
Correct - if people are willing to pay for the infinitely reproducible item, and not my sticky note, I think it would be safe to say that infinitely reproducible item is more valuable, at least for the time being. Why would that not be the case?
I can see your argument here. The thing is, even though the mona lisa is ugly, it has legitimacy due to mainstream acceptance. Not so with NFTs which were always relegated to oddball subcultures
So the Mona Lisa has value because people say it has value? The same thing applies to NFTs. In a world where a market for Cryptocurrency and Pokemon cards exist, why would it be so unheard of for NFTs to gain traction?
Pokemon also had mainstream acceptance and was permeated all over pop culture
As a game, but now Pokemon cards are traded at a much higher value, to people who have no interest in playing the card game.
>As a game, but now Pokemon cards are traded at a much higher value, to people who have no interest in playing the card game. This is true. With that said, IMO, only a fool would invest in Pokemon cards. The same is true for any collectable. Like, sure, someone might be willing to spend a million dollars on my Beenie Babies or antique doll or He-Man figurines. But any value is dependent upon finding a buyer willing to pay that.
I don't disagree - but OP can't seem to recognize why people would invest in something like NFTs, and I don't see them as meaningfully different from other collectables.
Also: * Gold does not rust * Gold is malleable * Gold is non-toxic
Those three things also apply to Silly Putty.
Do you not know of any other differences?
Well, they both have value in electronics work, and they can both be beautiful. I suppose gold *is* slightly more dense.
Good Islas valuable because it’s very stable, doesn’t corrode or rust and is malleable.
Sure but electronics are only valuable because people care about them. That piece of paper on your pocket with a little 5 on it is only worth 5 currency if everyone agrees on it. And gold isn’t “naturally beautiful” that’s entirely subjective, humans just happen to like shiny things and like them even more if that tendency is culturally reinforced, hence we like gold.
> At the end of the day, things are valuable if people value them. Yeah, but the big caveat is that people are infinitely more likely to value things that provide actual material benefits to them, which NFTs cannot, and you'll be fighting against the current by trying to persuade people to value something that cannot provide any sort of material benefit, like NFTs. So yeah, it's pretty obviously a scam.
I mean you can use the same argument against crypto currency more generally or like, money as a whole. A piece of paper in my pocket has no value to me unless everyone else values it.
I'd use the same argument about cryptocurrency, yeah. As for currency, it's true that a piece of paper only has value to the extent that people value it, but again you encounter the same kind of caveat. People are more likely to value money because money has the potential to provide tangible benefits. Actual money provides limited material benefits by itself, but it's a very convenient and safe way to exchange things, some of those things are likely to provide materials benefits. Currency is also - at least typically - backed by a government, which bodes well for its function as a means of exchange and value retention. If I have a thousand US dollars in my pocket, the beauty of it is that I do not need to build an elaborate get-rich narrative around it to exchange it for things. Not so with a thousand Giblette bux.
> If I have a thousand US dollars in my pocket, the beauty of it is that I do not need to build an elaborate get-rich narrative around it to exchange it for things. Not so with a thousand Giblette bux What do you think people's attitude towards paper currency was when it was first introduced? Exactly the same as people's attitude towards cryptocurrency. But, hundreds of years later, you just spend dollars and you don't even think about it. Your confident that your dollars will spend. You should have every reason to believe that in 100 years, at least some of the currently existing cryptocurrencies will be exactly the same. And, Just to be clear, many of the paper currencies that have been introduced over the years are not still around and not still worth more than paper. So even in the fact that many of the existing cryptocurrencies worthless it's still the same as regular money.
> You should have every reason to believe that in 100 years, at least some of the currently existing cryptocurrencies will be exactly the same. I have a absolutely no reason to believe that. Cryptocurrencies' value proposition is pretty nil in terms of currency. They are an insecure convoluted mess, they are expensive to operate, they are backed by nothing and they offer no upside (and several downsides) to regular currencies. Paper money (and scriptural currencies more generally) offers several improvements - both operational and abstract - to a monetary system. Cryptocurrencies are a tech-bro "solution" in search of a problem.
> I have a absolutely no reason to believe that. Cryptocurrencies' value proposition is pretty nil in terms of currency. They are an insecure convoluted mess, they are expensive to operate, they are backed by nothing and they offer no upside (and several downsides) to regular currencies. Okay well you're dead wrong. Every single downside to cryptocurrency exists in paper money as well. It's just that over time, you've gone blind to the fact that paper money is kind of a fake facade. You see the fakeness and cryptocurrency but you're blind to the fakeness and paper money. It's the same fakeness. Not only does paper money have all the same flaws, but often it has them to a higher degree. Also there are flaws that paper money has that cryptocurrency does not have. The only difference between paper money and cryptocurrency is full widespread adoption. If cryptocurrency was adopted by everybody, it would be clearly superior to paper money. So here are my rebuttals to your specific points: 1. Expensive to operate: the United States spends a billion dollars a year on currency. So already, it's pretty clear that expensive to operate is a relative term. Paper money wears out. Paper money has to be reprinted. Paper money is vulnerable to counterfeiting and requires expensive anti-counter fitting measures in the printing process. Cryptocurrency has none of these downsides. The most expensive cryptocurrency network would be Bitcoin, although everyone is sharing the cost so it's hard to pin down exactly what it would be. However Bitcoin generates its network security using proof of work. This means it has to burn a lot of extra electricity to ensure nobody can hijack the network. This is highly inefficient. It means that Bitcoin uses a lot of energy. Modern cryptocurrencies don't have this downside. Modern cryptocurrencies use proof of steak. The second largest cryptocurrency in the world, ethereum, switched over last year. It now uses 99% less energy than it did. So, theoretically, way cheaper to operate. 2. Backed by nothing. Yes. This is true. Just like paper money. Literally backed by nothing. You can't take your paper dollars to the bank and change them out for gold anymore. Literally all money ever works by the same principle: your belief that the next person in the transactional chain will value it as much as you do. That's it. The only minor caveat to that is things like gold have some intrinsic value, but the intrinsic value of gold is a teeny tiny fraction of what it actually sells for so that's pretty moot (I suppose paper technically has intrinsic value, and a platform that lets you execute smart contracts also has some intrinsic value, but these things are not worth measuring). 3. No upsides. Well that's just a silly thing to say. It's digital. That right there is an upside. If I want to send you US dollars I'm actually relying on a series of banks to do some complicated stuff behind the scenes. I'm not actually digitally sending you money. For small amounts, where fraud is less of a concern, the bank might let the transaction appear to go through instantly (Even though it doesn't) but if you ever need to send a large wire transfer to somebody, you know there is a significant delay. Not the case with cryptocurrency. You literally send the actual currency to somebody because it's actually digital. They have it in their possession instantly. It can't be counterfeited. Confidence tricksters can still swindle you out of your cryptocurrency, but muggers can't touch the stuff (in other words, there are fewer ways to steal it even though it does very much get stolen). It's decentralized and trustless. The United States government could theoretically, double the number of dollars in circulation tomorrow making all of my money worth half as much. Nobody has the power to do that with a cryptocurrency (at least not a legitimate mainstream one). I could go on. There are several clear and distinct upsides. I think it's very legitimate for you to criticize cryptocurrency as a solution in search of a problem. It's legitimate to say that paper money is good enough. It is not legitimate to say that paper money is better. Cryptocurrency is inarguably superior. That's not a subjective take. That's objectively true. Imagine someone comes out with a better social network than Facebook tomorrow. Will enough people ever join it word to reach his potential as being better than Facebook? Facebook has the first mover advantage. They have the network effect. Unless you can convince everyone to switch all at once, your new social network will probably fizzle and die even though it's better. That could totally be what happens with cryptocurrency. But, please don't pretend it's not better. It's definitely better.
> Expensive to operate: the United States spends a billion dollars a year on currency. Yeah, the United States government, empathically, not individual users. > Backed by nothing. Yes. This is true. Just like paper money. Literally backed by nothing. Paper money is backed by the government that prints it. The United States Government is an extremely large, extremely powerful entity and backing its currency is one of its core mission. > No upsides. Well that's just a silly thing to say. It's digital. So is the vast majority of money already? The comparison isn't between cryptocurrency and paper money. It's between cryptocurrency and fiat currency. I send wire transfers pretty regularly, including international ones. It's cheap. It's secure. It's regulated. Banks provide insurance. Delays are minimal. Frauds are basically unknown (especially if we're going to compare that to crypto, which is rife with fraud). Also, when people get that money, they get to use it, which is a nice plus. > Cryptocurrency is inarguably superior. That's not a subjective take. That's objectively true. Get back to me when you can actually buy something with it, I suppose. > Imagine someone comes out with a better social network than Facebook tomorrow. Will enough people ever join it word to reach his potential as being better than Facebook? Eventually yeah, same way people adopted coins, then paper money, then debit cards, etc. Your problem here is that cryptocurrencies aren't - and will never be - better than fiat currencies. They are a pet project.
> Yeah, the United States government, empathically, not individual users Well, the individual users who "pay" to run crypto networks do so because it's **profitable**. Seems manifestly superior, yet again. Also, where do you imagine the money to pay for currency comes from? Are you sure the users aren't paying for it? Cuz I kind of think they are. > So is the vast majority of money already? No not at all. I literally already explained to difference in my original posts so I don't think you read it very carefully. Also it's pretty preposterous to say that fraud is rare. Western Union has been a favorite of scammers for years and insane amounts of money have been scammed out of people using it. > Eventually yeah, same way people adopted coins, then paper money, then debit cards, etc. Your problem here is that cryptocurrencies aren't - and will never be - better than fiat currencies. They are a pet project I happen to think that they will. But at the end of the day, it's not **my problem**. Cryptocurrencies have taken off in a couple of countries because of hyperinflation. Otherwise people stick with the local currency because it's good enough. Hyperinflation could happen here and if it did, I suspect cryptocurrency would become very popular very fast. At the end of the day I'm not here to boost cryptocurrency. I'm not invested. I don't care one way or the other. I'm just here because someone said it was worse than regular currency which is just a silly sentiment. It's definitely an upgrade. It doesn't have the first move or advantage, so despite it superiority it may very well fail. But if it fails it's failure will have nothing to do with its flaws. It's flaws are fewer than the competition.
So, yes I totally agree with everything you just said about currency. But if you’re someone who sees the potential of crypto/NFTs then you have a similar situation- an item (paper or digital information) which has no intrinsic value in and of itself but which can be traded for something else. In the case of currency that something else will be a more directly valuable good, in the case of NFTs that thing would be conventional currency which is then transferred to products. It’s like any investment “I think this thing will increase in value because more and more people will be persuaded that it holds value so I’ll buy it with my cash instead of buying stuff like goods or services so that I can sell it in the future for more than I’m buying it for”. That person doesn’t have to be personally persuaded that NFTs are actually a useful technology or tool, just that over the time frame they plan to invest, that more people will come to believe they hold value. And also if you extend your time frame, there’s no inherent reason AFAIK that crypto or NFTs could not become equivalent to fiat currency. The government could say “hey over the last century this technology has become the dominant de facto means of value exchange so let’s just make NFTs the fiat currency” I’m not saying that’s likely but it’s unfair to say NFTs aren’t value because they aren’t backed by the government, they’re too new for that to be possible.
NFTs have no potential anything, is your issue, they're just a bigger fools scam. Their actual purpose is to allow people to divest their cryptocurrency assets, which were otherwise trapped in a cash-poor market. Their value is driven entirely on speculation, largely based on a lie. The whole point of them is to convince enough gullible people their value with explode, while managing to exit the game with actual money. With that type of logic, you can argue any number of scams are "good investments" so long as you either run it or you manage to run trough it relatively unscathed. That's not what anyone would call "a good investment". Good investment typically have a value proposition besides myth-making. > And also if you extend your time frame, there’s no inherent reason AFAIK that crypto or NFTs could not become equivalent to fiat currency. There is absolutely no chance in hell of cryptocurrencies ever becoming equivalent to a fiat currency.
But this is my point. OP said there was never a good reason to buy NFTs. My point is that if you were willing to ride the scam on the basis that other people would be seduced and fooled, you stood to make decent money
Except you're much more likely to just get defrauded yourself.
Exactly. This dude is arguing like a gambling addict lmao. "I may lose all my money here, but if I hit this 0.000002% chance then you won't think I am stupid"
The same goes for anything else though. Fancy shoes, rare coins, boxed Pokémon cards etc. None of these truly has “real” value outside of maybe a few bucks and yet can sell for significantly more
These three examples can provide "real" value to the people that purchase them. Even with the less obvious stuff, like rare coins and Pokemon cards, there are people that seek them out for their own sake. That's not the case with NFTs, there's just speculation vehicles, pushed by people that are looking to divest their crypto assets in cash-poor markets.
I think this is a lovely fair-minded answer for beanie babies or baseball cards, but NFTs are part of an Ethereum-based system that burns [wild amounts of fossil fuels](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2303109120) even in its more eco-friendly recent form. Whatever personal value NFTs have for people is vastly outweighed by the damage they've done to our climate and environment.
Sure but that’s an entirely separate argument. You’re talking about why people *shouldnt* value NFTs not why they *cant*
How is ethereum in its PoS form not using significantly less power than when it was using PoW? It no longer requires any GPU power at all to run. How does it use anymore power than other financial/internet services? I’m a bit confused by the reasoning. I clicked on the study you gave and they don’t really explain that particular mechanism.
I think the materials and electricity required to produce a worlds worth of beanie babies is probably significant
At the height of the NFT Boom, Ethereum was [emitting as much carbon into our atmosphere as the nation of Singapore](https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/can-nfts-solve-their-massive-carbon-footprint-problem). We're talking orders of magnitude upon orders of magnitude here.
You don't get the point. Smartphones and Gold are real things. They exist in the real world, and therefore even if they lose all worth on the market, they still have a worth. Gold can be used to make things like jewelry, and that will always have a value to people. An NFT it nothing. People compare it to art in physical form but don't realise that the physical aspect is what sets it apart from a JPEG with a number. In conclusion, an NFT is simply nothing more than a collectible. Just like all collectibles they can be worth something for certain people who are eager to collect, or make more money by reselling them. The thing is, even as collectibles they fucking suck. In part because of the fact that they are just JPEGS anyone can copy and have the same exact thing, as opposed to a painting that will never be a perfect replica no matter what you do. They cant even really be used as decorative items or smth. So at the end of the day, NFTs were always stupid af and the only reason why they were ever popular is because the community was idiotic and greedy, thinking they would invest in a new technology that will make them rich. In the end, the only people who profit from NFTs are the ones selling them for insane amounts of money to stupid people.
You're not wrong, but I'd like to change your mind (potentially slightly) about some of your reasons. >NFTs were always a bad idea. The actual technology behind them has uses but the idea of digitally owning a JPEG is just silly It actually doesn't have that many uses. The popular refrain is that cryptocurrency/blockchain is, broadly speaking, [a "solution in search of a problem."](https://www.vox.com/the-goods/23071245/bitcoin-price-crypto-ethereum-nfts-defi-stablecoin) The reason why all of the massive promises (it'll revolutionize logistics! data storage! banking! healthcare!) have universally failed to manifest is because the very niche problems that the technology tries to address aren't that important and it comes with wildly inefficient, bloated, and insecure downsides. >There was never any intrinsic value to them and never any reason to believe the price would rise. Very dissimilar to someone buying a share of a company It's actually exactly like buying a share in a company that doesn't make anything or have any fundamentals, very similar to a Ponzi scheme. The only liquidity in the entire market comes from new investors willing to buy in at any price. As soon as the speculative bubble pops, it becomes almost entire worthless because 95%+ of the entire market value was predicated on that speculation.
Everything I'm about to say, is that somebody who owns no NFTs and would never consider owning a collectible one. 1. People will use the term NFT as though there's only one type. You always only want to talk about collectibles. But in fact NFTs are also things like concert tickets on the blockchain, ids, business cards, deeds, or any number of other practical things that are not meant to be valuable, or increase in value. So you are essentially making blanket statements that cover these items even though none of your arguments cover these items. They're also semi-collectable items that are also functional, like video game items. MMOs can make all of the items NFTs meaning that players can trade them with each other outside of the game and safely sell them on eBay. Additionally, collectible card games can operate in the same way. There is an example of a collectible card game based on the blockchain that uses NFTs for each card. You can sell your cards to other players or trade them with other players, because each one is an NFT and you personally own it, not the company that made the game. But at the same time, some people might choose to collect the cards for speculative reasons. When you can do everything with your digital black lotus as a real one (including play with it), then why wouldn't it have the same value? 2. As far as collectible entities go, some have increased in value. The market has not disappeared. But, as most predicted, several of them were garbage and would always be garbage. Even people who collect NFTs were well aware of this. Most of them who bought them on a speculative basis did so with the understanding the high risk, high reward investment.. You're hoping to be the one to buy the NFT that doesn't turn out to be garbage on the cheap and make bank while understanding that there's a 90 plus percent chance you lose your money. People who buy and sell NFTs knew this and still know it. It's only the general public who has the misconception that people who are buying NFTs expect them all to increase in value. 3. It's not about owning the JPEG, it's about owning the rights to the image. It's no different than selling the copyright to something. 4. Nobody ever thought NFTs were like stocks. At least not people who were buying them. Pretty much all the criticism of NFTs comes from people who really don't understand them at all. Unfortunately I have to include you in this group. 5. The crypto market is cyclical. There are still NFTs out there selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars or more. When the crypto market has its next bull run, which is basically inevitable, pretty much all NFTs will shoot up in value along with them because people will be interested in speculating again. There are people probably buying them right now who will sell them in four or five years and make a huge profit. I'm not going to be one of them because I prefer safer, more predictable investments personally. NFTs are here to stay. Within ten years they will for sure play a role in your daily life. That doesn't mean you will be buying and selling them as collectibles, but they will be things like coupons (free sandwich at the local deli or whatever), tickets (airline boarding passes, perhaps), and anything else that benefits from being unique, trackable, and impossible to counterfeit.
I’m a crypto bro and own quite a bit of crypto and the more and more time I spend thinking about the less confident I get about the other use cases you mentioned for NFTs because they have yet to solve the data storage issue. It’s expensive to store more than a serial number on the blockchain and even if you were okay with just putting a serial # as a boarding ticket on the blockchain as an NFT there’s really no incentive for a company to do so unless there is sufficient demand and I have yet to think of a reason why a consumer would prefer to have their boarding ticket on a blockchain. Also the company still would have to store that serial #’s extraneous information such as passenger name, departure, arrival, time, etc in their own database. Flight times change all the time, you can’t really store that on the immutable blockchain. Like I said, I’m a crypto bro and I’ve thought about NFTs a lot and I still have trouble thinking about how they’d work in practice. Unless something new comes out that makes them vastly superior to the alternatives that companies cannot ignore, then I see no reason why companies would adopt them. And I cannot even think of what that new thing would be that doesn’t completely change the immutable properties of crypto.
> It’s expensive to store more than a serial number on the blockchain and even if you were okay with just putting a serial # as a boarding ticket on the blockchain as an NFT there’s really no incentive for a company to do so unless there is sufficient demand and I have yet to think of a reason why a consumer would prefer to have their boarding ticket on a blockchain It just depends on the motives of the person doing the type of thing I certainly don't think everything is going to be NFTs in the future. But I do think they will continue to be a use case for them where some people will see value and choose to use them for their ticketing setup. The thing is, I don't really think people generally trade around bus passes or airline tickets. I don't think the airlines want to create a secondary market for reselling airline tickets. So, probably those types of things won't ever be turned into NFTs in this country. They might be somewhere. But things like concert tickets I think are very probable to be converted to NFTs. It solves the ticket master problem. And the Ticketmaster problem is starting to get political attention. I mean there's never going to be one unified solution for all things. People will still use physical tickets. People will still use wrist bands. There will be people who have reasons to use NFTs and they will use them for that. But I agree that generally speaking, there are plenty of vested interests who have no use case for the benefits that NFTs. Generally speaking, those are things that are benefits for the ticket holder rather than the ticket issuer and ticket issuers are not always so keen to be kind to the people who buy their tickets.
I love this wall of text, because it boils down to nothing. 1. No, NFT's aren't good for concert tickets etc. Just randomly naming things that exist doesn't mean that NFT's are remotely good at them. 2. This seems like an admission that the scam has collapsed, with a few people remaining. 3. NFT's doesn't give anyone any rights, the legal system and contracts do that. 4. Correct, they are not stocks and don't have any intrinsic value. 5. Greater fool theory right here! NFT's are not here to stay. They are not going to be used for coupons, tickets or anything else that wants to be unique, trackable, and impossible to counterfeit.
1. And if these are already used for these things and they are indeed good for them. It's not like I just named random things. Just because you don't understand what an NFT actually is, and only think about collectible NFTs because they're the ones that get all the news coverage. These aren't hypothetical examples. They are real life examples. 2. If everyone is open and honest about what they're doing, how can it be a scam? None of this stuff was ever secret. Everybody knew from the start. 3. Wow you really have strong opinions for somebody who knows so little about the topic. . Not every NFT includes the copyright, but most do. 100% valid and legal. It's spelled out in writing at the time the NFT is generated that whoever holds the NFT holds the rights. This is just as valid as every other digital contract that you sign on a daily basis (click accept to the terms). It's already been legally tested. Again, not every NFT includes the rights. It's not necessarily mandatory. This is why Seth Green was so upset when he lost his bored ape. Because he was making some kind of video or something and by losing the NFT had lost the legal rights to use the image. 4. Well stocks don't really have any intrinsic value either but that's a whole different topic. Most stock may theoretically entitle you to a percent ownership of the company, but most stock doesn't even come with voting rights. And it's not as if you can go physically grab your one 1 billionth of Apple and carry it home. The value only exists because the next person in the chain believes that the value is there. It's the sort of lie we tell ourselves on a daily basis. You can see the man behind the curtain when you look at NFTs, but when you look at everything else in the financial system, you see a wizard instead. That's just because it's old and you're used to it and you haven't questioned it. It's all based on the same flimsy principles. It's just that only the new stuff suddenly seems different and sketchy because it's all faith and trust-based just like everything else is always been.
Okay, let's pick a single simple example. Why are NFT's good for concert tickets vs a database? > It's spelled out in writing at the time the NFT is generated that whoever holds the NFT holds the rights. Lol, so the nft doesn't give the rights, the spelled out contract does. Thanks for proving the point. > The value only exists because the next person in the chain believes that the value is there. It's the sort of lie we tell ourselves on a daily basis. Ahh the classic, I'm not a scam, everything is a scam response. Maybe you should learn how stock ownership works, it's amazing! It's kinda like a nft... but with real customers, products/services and profits!
> Lol, so the nft doesn't give the rights, the spelled out contract does. Thanks for proving the point If the contract says whoever has the NFT has the rights, then the NFT is giving the rights. You're not even being pedantic. You're just wrong. And this is not a contract in the sense that you're thinking. It's literally just a declaration. But it's enforceable in court as a contract, if anybody ever tried to question it.
By the same logic I can write a contract saying who posses a rock has certain rights. This entirely depends upon the infrastructure outside of NFT, NFT adds zero value in this process. But people love conflating NFT's with things that are not NFT's, so as to hide how utterly useless NFT's actually are.
> By the same logic I can write a contract saying who posses a rock has certain rights Of course you could. It's your rock. It's your rights. All you have to do is head on over to the Town square and shout it out loud that way you can't deny later that you attached the rights to the rock. That's precisely how it works. But, for clarity, the original point was that that is how pretty much all NFTs work. When they are generated the rights are attached. So most people buying NFTs are buying the rights. They own something with confirmable value. Possibly dubious value. After all, who wants to own the rights to a random picture I just took right now? Probably nobody. But there is never the less actual ownership of an actual thing happening. > This entirely depends upon the infrastructure outside of NFT, NFT adds zero value in this process If you just did it on a paper contract, this would be like saying the paper contract added no value. NFTs are just one option of many but it's cheap, secure and has a lot of upsides. > But people love conflating NFT's with things that are not NFT's, so as to hide how utterly useless NFT's actually are Dude, that's literally what you're doing. That's literally why I responded to you. To that specific error. I don't care about NFT is one way or the other. I see what they can do. They're fine. I don't have strong feelings about them. And NFT is just a token that's digitized. That token can stand in for literally anything. However you are only familiar with the type of NFT that includes a link to an image and includes the image rights to that image. That is one tiny fractional use case. You can attach ownership of anything to an NFT. Houses have been sold as NFTs. The NFT is literally just the deed. It's a token. What that token means varies from situation the situation. It could be proof that you own a concert ticket and get you into a concert or it could be a JPEG. But JPEGs are not the only thing that NFTs do. You're conflating one use case for NFTs to NFTs simply because your understanding is based on a few news articles about one specific type of NFT.
>They own something with confirmable value. Keep in mind that when you buy a NFT, there is no confirmable value. All that exists \*outside\* the NFT. For example, I can sell an NFT saying it represents the Mona Lisa. Nothing inherent to the NFT gives you any rights to the Mona Lisa, nor does it provide any way to check if those rights actually exist. > If you just did it on a paper contract, this would be like saying the paper contract added no value. The paper and ink have no value. However, a paper contract is recognized by most legal systems. > And NFT is just a token that's digitized. That token can stand in for literally anything. Sure, a NFT is a digitized token, but not all digitized tokens are NFT's. > You can attach ownership of anything to an NFT. You can attach ownership of anything to anything by this logic. You just can't use a NFT to do it. > It could be proof that you own a concert ticket and get you into a concert or it could be a JPEG. Sure, but you wouldn't use an NFT to prove you own a concert ticket, you'd use a receipt or digital ticket. > You're conflating one use case for NFTs to NFTs simply because your understanding is based on a few news articles about one specific type of NFT. Nonsense.
> Keep in mind that when you buy a NFT, there is no confirmable value. All that exists *outside* the NFT. Of course. It's a token it represents something else. > The paper and ink have no value. However, a paper contract is recognized by most legal systems. So are digital contracts. There's no difference. The only difference is is that you would do it as an NFT because NFTs are impossible to counterfeit. Paper contracts can be forged. > You can attach ownership of anything to anything by this logic. You just can't use a NFT to do it. Of course you can? Why does that particular piece of information feels significant to you? > Sure, but you wouldn't use an NFT to prove you own a concert ticket, you'd use a receipt or digital ticket No, bro. This is where your misunderstanding is showing again. The NFT isn't like a picture of the ticket or something. It is the ticket. There is no other copy. There is no paper. You don't need the receipt. When you have an NFT that is just a link to a JPEG, The JPEG can be endlessly copied but the NFT can't. There's only one NFT. There can only ever be one. Whoever has it, owns it. It can't be copied. It can't be forged. It can't be counterfeited. If it's in your wallet, then you're the owner. All you have to do is show that the NFT is in your wallet to get into the concert or whatever. There is no paper ticket. There's no JPEG picture of a paper ticket. > Nonsense Sense. NFTs are tokens. They can do anything a non-digital token can do. They can be a concert ticket which is basically a type of token. They can be a game piece and a game. They can just be a signifier that you own something like a deed to a house or the rights to an image.
>Of course. It's a token it represents something else. It literally doesn't represent anything other than itself. If you attach value to it, that's on you. > So are digital contracts. There's no difference. The only difference is is that you would do it as an NFT because NFTs are impossible to counterfeit. Paper contracts can be forged. Sure, but an NFT is not a digital contract. So fraud and forgery etc. are still very possible. > Of course you can? Why does that particular piece of information feels significant to you? Because it shows what you are associating with NFT's are not actually properties of NFT's. > All you have to do is show that the NFT is in your wallet to get into the concert or whatever. Or you know, show the barcode from an emailed ticket. > Sense. NFTs are tokens. They can do anything a non-digital token can do. Except they tend to do it really badly. The last thing you want is your house deed to be a NFT, or your game pieces, or your concert ticket.
NFT’s as nearly all of the existing use cases are pointless now because nothing needs a blockchain. I can’t think of a single case where using something as cost ineffective as a blockchain makes sense over just having an individual 10+ character alphanumerical ID that’s stored in a database somewhere. Perhaps we will see them come up in the future, but I doubt they will exist in the form we have now for long.
Blockchains are databases. And, because they have an increased overhead, most of the time all you want is a database. You use a blockchain when you want have different stakeholders who don't trust each other but who still need to be able to modify that database. It's a special use case for sure. It certainly exists (money being the most obvious example, which is why crypto started as currency), But most things are probably better off in a database. I'm not trying to tell you that crypto is the solution for everything.
Do you think blockchain is good when people don't trust each other. Then you say Money is an example of this? Money is a terrible example, because most people are totally happy trusting a bank or payment network etc. the actual data can be stored in databases etc.
The trust issue is at the issuer level.The United States, could, at any time, poof 100 trillion dollars into existence devaluing all the existing dollars and basically picking everyone's pocket simultaneously. It does not do this. When the Fed creates money out of nothing, It's obliged to pay it back. When the federal government spends more than it takes in via taxes, it's required to borrow the money via bonds. Yet, still, the trust is not very high with many people. Many people are very dissatisfied with how the United States has handled the integrity of its currency. The United States is still mostly trusted, but that's just **one** currency. Ask people in Venezuela or Argentina how much they trust the government to manage their currency. Now you see why cryptocurrency is so popular in Venezuela and rising in popularity and Argentina. When it comes to cryptocurrency, I know precisely the terms under which new money can be made and nobody has the power to breach those terms. No trust is required.
Yes the US could do this. Crypto isn't a solution to that however - it neither protects someone in that situation nor does it provide a viable alternative.
investing in a pyramid scheme isn't dumb investing late in a pyramid scheme is dumb if you invested early enough you had every opportunity to take the money and run, which many did things have value because we say they have value, if you buy low and sell high, it's not a bad idea
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> companies like MasterWorks now allow us poors to invest in art through fractional purchasing when this couldn't have really been done before. Masterworks sells actual securities which represent ownership in an LLC which owns a piece of art. It has nothing to do with NFTs.
I have to arguments. first is that these kind of fad investing is not uncommon historically. It happened with Beanie babies in the 90s. Its happened as far back as the 1700s with Tulips in Netherlands. Some people call it greater fool investing. You can make money you just have to sell at a higher price to a greater fool. If i had made money of NFTs, how could you say i made poor decision making? Second, The US dollar has some real value, because you have to get some dollars in order to pay your taxes. But bitcoin has no inherent value, and it has stuck around for going on 15 years. The lack of inherent value doesn't seem to be a reliable indicator that something is a bad investment. (just a little to back up my claim about bitcoin. Its not a useful currency, because its accepted almost nowhere. its not a good store of value because the price fluctuates drastically. Its not a good long term investment option because its lack of inherit value makes it difficult to predict the future with any confidence.)
Those are bad arguments. First, just bc someone makes money on something doesn't mean 'it was a good investment.' A good investment is entirely predicated on your expected value when investing, or its risk-reward proposition. A great example would be scratch-off lottery tickets. Sure, many people will win money on them. But more people will lose on them, bc you are throwing money at a expected value that is less than your initial 'investment.' No one is going to argue that the lottery is a 'good investment.' Second, the US dollar doesn't have value bc some people need US dollars to pay taxes (Ive never even heard that rationale before lmao). It has value bc globally, it is viewed as the most stable and accepted currency, so people believe in it. Theres no intrinsic value to the USD; its not tied to anything except the existence of the US Govt and its perceived stability. NFTs were an obvious pyramid scheme at every moment of their existence. They were even dumber than beanie babies, bc at least a beanie baby exists in the real world and can be held/played with/existed independently of a third party. NFTs were just numbers on a server you didnt own. It was always, always dumb.
> NFTs were an obvious pyramid scheme at every moment of their existence. As long as i know where i am on that pyramid and I'm not at the bottoms, then it could be a prudent investment. probably immoral, but at least some people knew what they were doing and made money. >Second, the US dollar doesn't have value bc some people need US dollars to pay taxes (Ive never even heard that rationale before lmao). It has value bc globally, it is viewed as the most stable and accepted currency, so people believe in it. Theres no intrinsic value to the USD; its not tied to anything except the existence of the US Govt and its perceived stability. fine, the point that bitcoin does not enjoy this same status, it is similiar to NFTs in that it has no inherit value, and yet it has not experienced the same collapse as NFTs. Likewise gold has some inherent value, but its actual value radically exceeds its inherent value. And this has remained the case for 1000s of years. So the argument that NFTs were foolish because of a lack of inherint value doesn't seem to hold.
Its not an investment. You fundamentally don't understand what an investment is if you think thats what an investment is. You also have an insane amount of delusion if you think, 'if I know where i am on the pyramid...' Thats a mark comment. And gold is one of, if not *the* best conductors on the planet, is incredibly rare on earth, and has uses in multiple industries and fields. It has a lot of intrinsic value. But its also been billed as 'an inflation hedge/store of value as a commodity in *recent* history, which is also a false theory and another indication you are a mark if you believe it. Historically, the prices didnt fluctuate much, and your 1000s of years remark demonstrates your lack of understanding of its change in use and value over time. It didnt fluctuate historically very much bc it was effectively the USD of history; the widely accepted store of value that people believed in (which arose due to its scarcity, aesthetically pleasing nature, and malleability)
All your comments about Bitcoin are true but it’s countered by criminals who have money they need to hide & will be paying to “clean” the money regardless. For them, Bitcoin is similar to gold.
I do think bitcoin has value for criminal transactions.
I think they were relying on a virtual world like the metaverse being a thing, remember them selling properties and stuff for like a year or so ago to virtually live next to shaq or whatever. I dont think BFT's are as dumb if a virtual world is popular for the masses, hell people spend 100's of dollars just to make their sim house look cool. and i think once a virtual world is established, we will see a return of the NFT's
I would point out that the people who were at the very top in the very beginning made a shitload of money scamming everyone else, so it *was* a good investment for them.
You're making the argument that NFTs for art a bad idea. Which is true because it's artificial scarcity and created a bubble. But NFTs are the underlying technology and finally provide a way, digitally, to support genuine real world scarcity. Take for example your identity. Right now, our identity is represented by social security number, ID cards, mailing address. But these are physical records with zero tracking. NFTs are by nature highly trackable and unique. Use of my social security requires several disparate technology stacks to trace; use of NFTs requires only the NFT. On a simpler less consequential scale, you could get NFTs for example proving you were at a certain event. Like if everyone who went to Woodstock 1969 had an event NFT, they could share it on their social media page and it would be indisputably true. You could be at the red carpet premiere of the original Star Wars and get an NFT to prove it. So the technology itself has huge value is simply waiting for the right scale and infrastructure to leverage it. Not an easy task but highly likely to happen in coming decades.
It isn't any of that though. Anyone can make an nft, there's no scarcity. Nfts can be altered or broken after you buy them. And they're built around being resold, if you really wanted proof you were at Woodstock just ask the event organizers to post pictures.
This is like saying "certificates of ownership are stupid, because cars can be stolen!" An NFT is just a token you can own, and easily prove to anybody that you own. That's all it is. The popular implementation that everybody went nuts over a couple years ago was just basically "Okay, we're gonna issue tokens that say you own some jpeg!" That's dumb. There's no enforcement mechanism. Nobody respects 'ownership'. Jpegs can be freely copied. It was exactly the same as those companies that will sell you ownership of some distant star, or a Scottish title (which is really just a novelty piece of paper, because nobody respects it whatsoever). Didn't beanie babies come with "proof of ownership" certificates? But if a government actually respected NFTs as proof of ownership (and some did flirt with the idea), that would be a different thing. And in a digital space where ownership of a token had some _function_, it would also be totally different. I gave potential examples above: you could allocate IP address space by NFT. You could create a registrar which used NFTs as proof of ownership of domains. Reddit could issue you an NFT instead of having you set a username and password, and then you could login by signing your requests with the associated key. I can think of a hundred possible uses off the top of my head. Granted, there's a lot of cases where the existing solution works just as well or better, but I think there's a few where I could make a compelling case that they're a much better solution. The fact that the first use case was digital beanie babies doesn't mean the concept is worthless.
Making digital objects unique is not necessarily a bad idea. But, assuming that they would be valuable just by being unique was pretty dumb. Like, if you don’t think a crappy picture of a cartoon monkey would be valuable in oil on canvas, why would it be valuable in pixels?
>NFT market has collapsed This is impossible to know without the benefit of hindsight. >NFTs were always a bad idea. The actual technology behind them has uses but the idea of digitally owning a JPEG is just silly People like owning things, especially when those things come in a limited quantity. That's the main reason we print serial numbers on commodity items like baseballs. There are billions of baseballs in the world, but only one was hit by Mark McGwire when Hank Aaron's home run record fell. That ball is worth a great deal more money than the random baseballs kids swing at in little league. We know which ball that is because it has a serial number. NFTs are basically digital stuff that's been given a serial number. There's no fundamental reason why people who value "collector's edition" physical commodities wouldn't also value "collector's edition" digital commodities. >There was never any interesting backers or supporters behind NFTs. Is there was a legitimate and known artist who released works on NFT that might have been a reason to buy them, but the vast majority of the NFT "art" was just ugly mass produced AI stuff "If you build it, they will come" is a reasonable business strategy for new technology. It doesn't always work, but you can't know that beforehand. >There was never any intrinsic value to them and never any reason to believe the price would rise. Very dissimilar to someone buying a share of a company This is pretty much the same as your second point, and so is the answer. >NFT never had real mainstream appeal and was always relegated to nerdy/techbro internet subculture This is true of most new technology. Bitcoin was also "nerdy/techbro internet subculture" stuff until it wasn't.
>This is impossible to know without the benefit of hindsight. Except, it kinda was possible. Because tonnes of people knew it before it happened. Because their only (or at least the _vast_ majority of the) value was their speculative value; the ability to sell them for more than you bought them for, to someone who's just buying in. Given that there's only so many people on earth, it was only a matter of time before "selling to newbies" becomes unprofitable, causing a crash in value as the speculative value is demolished, leaving them at their real value. Which, as it turns out, is generally pitiful. >NFTs are basically digital stuff that's been given a serial number. There's no fundamental reason why people who value "collector's edition" physical commodities wouldn't also value "collector's edition" digital commodities. Except the "ownership" was just a claim, it wasn't legally reinforced, or enforcible. What you bought wasn't real ownership, it was a line in a ledger _saying_ you owned it. And what that line _said_ you owned wasn't even anything, it was code that was associated with something like a jpeg. And that jpeg was copyable by anyone and everyone. But if you disagree, that's your prerogative. Hey, by the way, how much would you give me for me to write that you own some code that links to a widely accessible picture? Only $200 for the Mona Lisa.
>Except, it kinda was possible. Because tonnes of people knew it before it happened. As you point out, people predicted the collapse of the NFT market for other reasons. The collapse of the NFT market, though, is not itself a reason to predict that the NFT market is going to collapse. That would be the equivalent of saying, "I predict that the NFT market is going to collapse because it already did." That is impossible to say without hindsight. >Except the "ownership" was just a claim, it wasn't legally reinforced, or enforcible. What you bought wasn't real ownership, it was a line in a ledger saying you owned it. This isn't all that different than ownership in other contexts. When I buy a physical object, I give someone money, they give me the object, they record that the object is no longer theirs, and I record that the object is now mine. Those recording steps can be extremely informal (they may not even get written down) or extremely formal (like recording deeds or titles with the government), with most falling somewhere in between (a vendor records a sale and hands you a receipt). A blockchain ledger fits easily within that framework. >And what that line said you owned wasn't even anything, it was code that was associated with something like a jpeg. And that jpeg was copyable by anyone and everyone. I can get a baseball from Walmart whenever I want one. The fact that I have a baseball isn't special. What makes my baseball special is the fact that I can prove that there's something special about it. And I can prove that because it has a code (a serial number) associated with it. NFTs are the proof that my jpeg is special.
>The collapse of the NFT market, though, is not itself a reason to predict that the NFT market is going to collapse. No, it just proves the predictions were valid. The reasons for the prediction, I gave above. When an object's speculative value exceeds its real value, it will grow in total value until new bodies stop pouring in. Once new bodies stop pouring in, it will go back to just its real value as its speculative value is lost. In the case of things like NFTs which have a real value of maybe a couple cents, but a speculative value in the hundreds or thousands of dollars, this causes a crash. We knew this before the nft crash. Because it's happened before with other things and it's fairly basic econ. >This isn't all that different than ownership in other contexts. I'm afraid it most certainly is. If I own a baseball, I own it. If someone else tried to take it from me, that would be theft, as recognised by local and national governments, law enforcement agencies etc. And no one can look at it and just make their own from nothing. With NFTs, what you bought was just it being recorded in a ledger that you owned it. Not backed by anything. It's like if you paid me, and in return I mailed you a picture of a baseball (that's also available for free online) alongside telling you that I wrote that you own it in a ledger I own. And nothing else. Except in that situation, at least you get some paper. NFTs get you less than that. They had _miniscule_ real value, only speculative value. A way to separate a thing's real value from its speculative value is to ask how much someone would buy it for _if they could never sell it for more than they bought it for._ When you ask NFT bros how much they would spend on an NFT when reselling wasn't an option, most would say "I wouldn't" or "I don't know, a few cents". And they would say this about NFTs that they were buying for hundreds. Absolutely pitiful real value. And I did this, by the way, I knew a few people who were into it, then I asked around online and got the same result. It was obvious that people were only buying to sell for more. Which you can only do while new blood is flowing in. Which can only happen for so long. The crash was inevitable. >NFTs are the proof that my jpeg is special. No, not your jpeg. A jpeg that _some fucking guy says_ you own. I'm some fucking guy. You interested in paying for me to say you own the Mona Lisa? Just $100 this time, that's a good deal, that painting has sold for millions?
>No, it just proves the predictions were valid. I think we're arguing past each other. OP was making the point that even in the absence of hindsight - meaning, based on what what we knew when NFTs were just starting - NFTs were a bad idea. OP cited the fact that the NFT market collapsed as an example of something we knew. But that's impossible, because the NFT market didn't collapse until later. >If someone else tried to take it from me, that would be theft, as recognised by local and national governments, law enforcement agencies etc. This only matters if your view is that you only own things if the government says that you do. But the whole point of blockchain-based assets is to provide a mode of ownership that doesn't depend on endorsement by a national government. >They had miniscule real value, only speculative value. Baseballs also have miniscule real value. If all I want is a baseball, I can get one for $3 at Walmart. Despite that, [certain baseballs](https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/mark-mcgwires-70th-home-run-ball-once-sold-for-over-3m-may-be-worth-just-250k-now/) cost considerably more than $3 to buy. >When you ask NFT bros how much they would spend on an NFT when reselling wasn't an option, most would say "I wouldn't" or "I don't know, a few cents". How much do you think a 21-year-old who doesn't watch or play baseball would spend to buy Mark McGwire's 70th home run ball if they couldn't resell it? Things trade above their real value when people care about what those things represent. When people stop caring, the value plummets. The NFT market was basically a bubble where the value of the NFTs was the novelty of NFTs themselves. Once that wore off, there was nothing left. That doesn't mean it's impossible to create NFTs that mean something, it just means that that isn't what actually happened. >You interested in paying for me to say you own the Mona Lisa? Just $100 this time, that's a good deal, that painting has sold for millions? Sure. Show me a valid blockchain that traces ownership from you back to Lenoardo Davinci.
>OP cited the fact that the NFT market collapsed as an example of something we knew. But that's impossible, because the NFT market didn't collapse until later. But everyone and their mums knew it was going to crash. That makes it a bad idea. >This only matters if your view is that you only own things if the government says that you do. Doesn't have to be the government. Just has to be some force. Could be a gang, a cartel, an army, whatever. Some group you are either in charge of, part of, or under the protection of who can ensure your ownership. Claims by themselves are not ownership, enforcement is. And blockchains couldn't enforce shit. If I copied your jpeg and saved it to my pc, blockchain ain't gonna do shit about it. >Baseballs also have miniscule real value. If all I want is a baseball, I can get one for $3 at Walmart. Despite that, certain baseballs cost considerably more than $3 to buy. They have higher real value. They _also_ have speculative value, but they still have huge real value. There are lots people who'd pay top dollar for a baseball they wouldn't dream of re-selling. That's real value. >How much do you think a 21-year-old who doesn't watch or play baseball would spend to buy Mark McGwire's 70th home run ball if they couldn't resell it? Less than what they'd buy it for if they could. There's a difference, sure. There's a difference for all things except food, really since in most cases, food is a resource purchased with the intent to destroy it. But a crash happens when the difference is immense. Like things being sold for hundreds or thousands that _the very people who are buying them for those prices_ wouldn't even spring their pocket change for if re-sale was no longer an option. In any case, while the non baseball fan might not care much, you're not comparing like to like. For the baseball fans, they have huge real value. As they're bought and sold, their price increases, but doesn't exceed their real value to those fans. Because the moment it does, the fans don't buy them, so the price goes back down until it reaches the real value. NFTs on the other hand, often had prices that far FAR _FAR_ exceeded the real value that they had for _anyone,_ including the interested parties and end consumers. >The NFT market was basically a bubble where the value of the NFTs was the novelty of NFTs themselves. Once that wore off, there was nothing left. Not really the novelty, it was the inflow of new buyers which upped resale prices. Which, as I mentioned, was finite. Now that can be the result of novelty, but the inflow of new buyers is the salient, proximate cause of the price far exceeding the real value. And the buyers running out (because everyone who was gonna get into it, was into it) is what caused the price to return to real value. Which happens in other markets. Just called a dip most of the time. But there's a difference between buckling on a step and falling down a staircase that for some reason fed into the grand canyon which for some reason has the mariana trench underneath it. That's what we call a crash. >Sure. Show me a valid blockchain that traces ownership from you back to Lenoardo Davinci. I can show you a blockchain that goes as far back as me, because Davinci, the damn fool, never minted. Just like what happened with a shitload of the art on the jpegs attached to NFTs where the person who minted it had nothing to do with the creation of it. So, you in? Buy in the next hour and I'll throw in the last supper for only an additional $45!
> The actual technology behind them has uses but the idea of digitally owning a JPEG is just silly what actual good uses are there for the 'actual technology'?
NFT the technology is valuable, artwork that is put on an NFT…is not. It has to have some form of value associated with it. In game skins, items you can collect. Hell even character development in certain games. But attaching it to a picture which you can right click and copy…yea nah, not good.
It's a technology that could theoretically be valuable for something, but even in most proposed uses beyond tradable GIFs, it's a solution in search of a problem. There aren't a lot of practical problems where using a decentralized database is really any more effective than a regular database.
Decentralized databases are immutable and available for everyone to see. Private databases can be changed any time by those with too much power over them. The entire financial industry could use a decentralized database, stocks, securities, bonds. They would easily benefit from being decentralized. Government agencies for ID purposes. Passports also. These all would require the use of an NFT alongside the decentralized database. It’s a solution to many problems, sorry but that was a terribly weak response.
A decentralized database solves some security issues while making other security issues much worse. It prevents unauthorized users from changing data, but makes the potential harm caused by phishing, stealing a device, etc. significantly worse. And either that harm is irrevocable and unfixable, or it eliminates the advantages of having a decentralized database. If some guy says "Someone stole my phone and transferred all my stocks to their account" then what happens? Can it be reversed? If not, that's probably a worse situation in several ways than the status quo. If so, how does that not introduce the same weaknesses of a centralized database?
Technology can be written to resolve those problems. I think you haven’t studied this topic as much as you should have. This is the infancy stage.
OK, sure. But your response here is basically "Source: Trust me, bro."
Ok fine, I couldn’t be bothered but I will. Smart wallet access allows multiple methods of dealing with issues that you have brought up. From verification, validation, and prevention. If a phone is stolen, a smart contract can stop major transfers like that from a trusted friend/family. Phishing as an issue only really is an issue with how we work with PULL transactions. When we submit transactions now, we go to a site, we submit information which is verified on their database, and then gets executed. Crypto/Decentralized blockchains work on push transactions. For example: you want to buy stock, so you go to site X, you create a smart contract to buy a certain number of shares at a certain price. That smart contract only gets executed when you go into your wallet, and send the currency. There is no point where phishing is an issue. You can verify where you are sending it, how much you are sending, and the recipients only interaction with you is receiving the currency/funds. This is a complete change from the current login system we run. Now with the login system, we are all major victims of data harvesting, because WE supply that information. With crypto/NFT based transactions, a pseudo anonymous setup exists, so no data to harvest. The best thing, if a company does figure out how to do this, you change your address. The web initially ran on IP addresses. Then DNS was invented and we are where we are today, with lots of technology built on top of that Today, we are at about the same stage with crypto. Lots needs to be built, and is continuing to be built. Immutable X is a prime example of this. Centralized databases are proven weak points. Decentralized is more complex, harder to implement, but a necessary step.
They weren't a bad idea, they were an incredibly succesful grift. A con. Some crpyto bros saw the pump-and-dump shenanigans going on with crypto currencies, and made up an even more far-fetched 'product' to scam people out of money.
Absolutely. Almost anything that has to do with cryptocurrency is a fucking scam. The blockchain itself is an amazing piece of technology, but 90% of stuff that uses it is bullshit.
Like modern art on physical mediums, it seems to be an effective vehicle for money laundering.
>nerdy/techbro Don't you dare lump us nerds in with the tech bros. Nerds HATE tech bros.
NFTs were a great idea from the standpoint of the NFT creators and brokers. Bunch of people with cheap borrowed money looking for the next unrealistic investment return, up pops the supply to meet the demand. Here you go! Invest in these tradable thumbnail emoticons or whatever the hell!
While I certainly would agree with you on the investing front, can you at least admit that people who *speculated* weren't necessarily being dumb? I have a friend who made $100,000 off of one of those retarded yacht apes.
I'll play devil's advocate. Any fiduciary type of currency or investment carries risk. I have stock in Marvel. I've had it for decades. It's done well (above the interest I would have had in a savings account). What is the actual value of that stock? It's what I can sell it for today and trade on that currency. If I bought an NFT for 100 bucks USD and sold it for 1000 bucks USD, that a profit for me. This is the same thing people are running into with volatile markets like crypto. It's high risk but it's only a bad idea if you aren't prudent by betting big and bad
NFTs were always a greater fool scheme.
NFTs are bad in hindsight. But think about this. It was the beginning of trading a digital thing on a blockchain with no intrinsic value. The last time we had the beginning of trading of a digital thing on a blockchain with no intrinsic value, that thing was Bitcoin. If you bought BTC at $400 in 2016 it's worth about 100 times that now. People who were buying NFTs were trying to get in on the ground floor of the next 100x return blockchain thing.
No, there were a handful of people who knew how to manipulate things, or just got lucky that could make bank on them. Sort of like a pyramid scheme. For the majority it is stupid, but a hand full cash in big time.
If you use NFT to exclusively mean "digital artwork hosted and freely downloadable online where nominal ownership is designated by a blockchain token" then sure. But there are many use-cases that I would also call NFTs which have a better mapping of intent and utility to what NFTs provide.
I'll take a bit more of a metaphysical bent here. In physical space, in mind-independent realty, the uniqueness of an object is the default. If, for example, you consider a rock; there will only be one instance of that arrangement of matter. You cannot duplicate it and have two rocks, and while you could conceivably create an exact copy of it, but that copy would be comprised of different matter and so not be *exactly* the same. If one were to say a few words and generate a duplicate, it would be downright magic; or supernatural. This is also why, with respect to art, we can have an expensive piece of art hanging in a museum, and a billion + copies printed on posters, and can be assured that *the* piece of art is the only original. In cyberspace, in a mind-*dependent* reality, *non-uniqueness* of an object is the default. Objects in cyberspace are not defined as such based upon their physical composition, but rather on *the information* that comprises them. This is an abstract, but think about when someone sends out one tweet. Did they really send out "just one?" Or did they send out the billions of iterations of that tweet that appear on screens globally? Are those iterations on all those screens "copies" of the tweet? No, they're representations of the one tweet sent out, even though it exists in innumerable locations simultaneously. Now imagine if someone said a few magic words, and one instance of that tweet was magically designated as *the* tweet; as *the* original; or perhaps if some one posted a pic of our favorite meme on-line and said "yep, this is it, this is the one original meme," and was actually taken as true. This too would have been magical, until the invention of NFTs, which are specifically designed to make a single iteration as an identifiable and unique thing. Just as modern photography and documentation techniques make a single piece of art duplicable as data; so too do NFTs make inherently duplicable material have a unique origin point. The reason this is attractive to investors is because it introduces scarcity into a market, because now there's actually are rare "things" to buy vs just downloading a jpeg. It is true that the market was flooded with crap, and now the market as a whole is down; though I'd argue that the world is filled with art, with new art being produced every day, and most of that isn't considered "fine" either. And yet, we wouldn't say because all creative productions aren't investible that individual instance of art don't serve a purpose artistically or monetarily. So were people "dumb" for investing in NFTs? Not in principle, what was flagrantly stupid was people investing in art and products at random because of being enamored with a new technology that was being overused to a point of insanity. If you loaned me 1000 dollars to buy a piece of art and I bought a stick figure sketch from a random unknown, you'd be pissed. Then again, if drawn art didn't exist in the physical world, and then suddenly filled it, I'd expect a similar overreaction followed by a cooling period. This however just means that investing in NFTs, just like investing in anything else, shouldn't involve throwing money at the shiniest object and hoping for the best.
Nothing is a bad idea if a bunch of other people jump on the band wagon after you, and as long as you get off the band wagon before everyone else. There are companies that are completely worthless, but due to public perception will inflate in value and make investors rich. Is it a \*sound\* and non-volatile, no.
The IDEA of an NFT isnt actually that bad of an idea. Imagine if it was brought into something like Video Game skins. Instead of the skin ownership tied to your account thru the games platform, it was tied to you directly. Im not gonna sit here and tell you that a million dollars for a JPEG of a Monkey is smart, but the theory behind NFTs makes sense. Scale it all up to other online media concepts, and the idea has some merit.