The extremely messed up incentives make it impossible to even have an honest conversation about it’s merits or issues. If there are any legitimate uses for blockchain (and that’s an if) they’re lost in the noise of 10,000 get rich quick schemes, outright frauds, and bad actors.
100% this. It's the world's greatest machine for generating motivated reasoning. People buy in during the pump and get incredibly motivated to join the immune system for their chosen coin.
I spent a long time giving NFTs the benefit of the doubt because I didn’t really get it and I couldn’t get anyone to explain it to me who wasn’t also VERY invested in their outcome and unable to concede the possibility of any downsides.
What are your thoughts on NFT's after giving it the benefit of the doubt? I, too, wanted to give the NFT space a chance because admittedly I wanted to cash in while the gettin was good. But after digging into things before I dipped my toes, the whole thing smelled foul, even if people I know and respect are making good money in that space. It's just off to me, the motivations, moreso than the tech & function & problems it purports to address/ solve. A big ole hype machine that doesn't seem like it has real depth, integrity or soul, to use a bit more flowery language.
Well, if your question is just can you make a buck off them, I'd guess you probably could. But I don't like gambling and I'm more interested in whether there's anything of lasting value here. Tl;dr I don't own any NFTs and have no plans to buy any.
The NFTs that just point to a painting or a youtube video, I don't think so. They don't do anything and I don't think owning them will be valuable.
The NFTs of, like, NBA clips I can sort of understand as digital trading cards. Being purely digital I think they're inferior to the baseball cards I collected as a kid, but I can kinda see it. But 1) they don't need a blockchain; a public database would probably work better for everyone and 2) I don't think sports trading cards are generally a good investment.
There's something maybe interesting in the "creator economy" angle where like a new podcaster auctions off NFTs of the episodes to early fans, who then become invested in its success. If the show takes off, newly minted NFTs will go for more and more money benefitting the creator and the secondary market will appreciate for early supporters. To be clear, I don't think this is actually a good idea for a lot of reasons... but it's interesting.
All the games and pets and racehorses seem like junk.
I think the idea of digital collectibles is a novelty. Just like real world collectibles. People talk about it like it's a world changing thing, and it's a lot of bullshit. There's not a whole lot about it that truly requires decentralization.
Like, sure, NFTs hypothetically make it so that ownership of Top Shots can persist regardless of whether the company that operates it survives. But would the actual Flow blockchain survive the demise of Dapper Labs? I kind of doubt it. And where would the Top Shots I supposedly own continue to be hosted? It's effectively just a centralized marketplace.
I've tried to think about what would truly be unique and interesting about decentralized NFTs, and to me, they make sense if they hold credibility independent of any producer. So, something like a tradable auth role that is respected in many spaces. Kind of like an identity, except that I think the concept of a role makes a bit more sense as something that people can trade. Consider it to be like an event ticket that is respected in an entire ecosystem of different companies.
To me, that's where it starts to enable something that's unlike what's existed before, but it's still hard for me to imagine a real use case. And that's core of the problem of the crypto world: the technology solves problems that don't map on to existing B2B or B2C services. It's literally a solution in search of a problem.
> Like, sure, NFTs hypothetically make it so that ownership of Top Shots can persist regardless of whether the company that operates it survives.
They don't confer copyright or licensing or anything at all other than a URL. This means it would be illegal to build a site that displays such content, and it would get instantly DMCA'd into oblivion.
My issuing an NFT of the Mona Lisa is basically me grabbing a museum map from the Louvre, circling the Mona Lisa on it, signing my name, then selling that map to you for big money. The map doesn't given you a license to display the Mona Lisa. It's just a set of instructions re: how to find it alongside my signature. If they move the painting to a new location, it gets stolen, destroyed, or the Louvre is shut down - well, tough. And anyone can do it, with any map of the Louvre.
> Consider it to be like an event ticket that is respected in an entire ecosystem of different companies.
Event tickets have one issuer and one point of redemption. Generally, Ticketmaster is on both sides (they own the issuance via Ticketmaster and they own the redemption side - the venues - via Live Nation). It's not in their interest as a business to relinquish even the tinies bit of control.
Right, an NFT of off-chain property represents ownership of...the NFT. Its value is reliant on a community ascribing value to it. There are real world analogs to this type of ownership, but it's not as revolutionary as breathless NFT fans are making it out to be.
Agreed on the unlikelihood of NFTs supplanting event tickets. I'm just speculating on the type of novel product/ecosystem the technology enables. But building a compelling experience around this concept is a whole other challenge. It remains to be seen whether someone eventually does. Even if that happens, it doesn't mean we're talking about an entire new market of significance.
I'm just using tickets as an anchor to something that already exists. My point is that if the credential of owning the NFT were recognized throughout an ecosystem of unrelated organizations, that might merit building it on a permissionless blockchain. Few people are bothering to explore such ideas. I think you're right about it being hard to monetize, but people once thought Facebook was hard to monetize.
I guess I'd just say absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, when it comes to the utility, but a level of outside-the-box thinking is required that no one's motivated to do when you can simply mint NFTs of URLs and sell them for absurd sums of money.
It's true that copyright is not transferred but courts may well recognize the buyers right to display those images on a website as implicitly given. If you are minting an NFT today, putting the file on IPFS, accepting the fact that it will be freely available across the internet, and selling to someone "digital ownership", you will I think fins it hard to convince a judge that you did not intend to grant such a license.
Also, consider that in NFTs, the only one selling an NFT to the Mona Lisa is Leonardo.
No one is talking about assigning copyright. The question is about a license to display the content on a website. I am fairly certain you have heard of non-verbal contracts before. For example, here is what the UK government has to say about an implied copyright license:
Anyone can also sell a signature of Clooney. And yet no one does, nor would anyone buy it. This is not something that plays into a serious analysis of the NFT space, and so I am not sure why you would want to find it interesting to talk about.
They even recognize the entire point of NFT is artificial scarcity. How could something fly which has the word "artificial" in the name??? On the other hand, artists/creators could sell copyright along the digital artifact. Then it could be for real - as soon as you can hold a future-proof proof of that copyright, and not a mere URI to some random server storage.
You won't find an uninterested party anywhere near crypto, but this is a discussion between an NFT issuing artist and an anti-crypto gentleman about NFTs. They're friends so they get into a back and forth, and the artist I think does a good job of explaining what they like about them. [1]
