I don’t really care about fad stuff so I never bought any but also I never really understood how they worked practically. Like if I bought a famous tweet or jpg or what ever, how would I use the token to verify owner ship of the thing or sell it?
Dan Olson made one of his fun documentaries about this exact subject. If you have the time, watch it.
If you want my cheap boil-down of the idea:
NFTs are representations of ownership of a digital asset stored on a blockchain. However, as with any digital thing, the represented object can usually just be duplicated, making ownership essentially lacking in the aspect of ‘control’ one usually associates with other forms of ownership, and as with many fad purchases, the value of such things was massively distorted. There was and probably still is no legal structure for that ‘ownership,’ so it’s a bit like ‘owning’ your Lemmy account. As long as you have the password and no one else does, you can control it, if anyone gets the credentials, they can take control and there is little to no legal recourse. So, if you can’t stop other people using duplicates and you can have it taken as easily as any other account, it’s hard to really call it ownership. It’s just a mark in a ledger that says your account is associated with some entry, which is also what registering a title/deed does but with the legal force of the government reinforcing it.
Slightly off-topic, but the only kind of interesting use for an NFT I ever encountered was my Master’s degree. The diploma was issued as a pdf that is also an NFT. There is a university website you can upload it to and it says “yup this is a real diploma” which in theory means the digital is as good as the physical.
So 99.9% of the time they were a scam but it was ALL worth it to have grad admissions committees tell me “neat but you will need to send us the paper copy anyway”
NFTs actually have some niche purposes. They could even be used for cool stuff. But the internet’s perception is of a smoking monkey jpeg and it’s so silly.
I think they’ll eventually find some purpose and just exist without much conversation.
What were NFTs? Uhhhhh…stupid, and a scam. That’s the best way I can describe them.
NFTs, like blockchain in general, are public write-only databases. The only difference is that NFTs also contains references to things such as media (pictures).
They’re still around, but like all other fads that are poorly camouflaged
pondicherryponzi schemes (ducking autocorrect), they’re practically worthless.An NFT doesn’t dictate ownership, neither de jure nor de facto.
While I find the concept of public write-only databases interesting feom a technological standpoint, an actual use case has yet to be discovered.
A commercialised use case known to you, perhaps, but they have some very useful actual use cases.
E.g. a commercialised use case is supply chain verification
And a really cool use case that hasn’t been commercialised is transferrable/sellable digital licences, e.g. for video games. NFTs even have a royalty system that would ensure the rights holder gets paid a small % with each second hand sale too
why the hell would anyone want a second hand game to cost even more?
The ability to sell digitally purchased games would be nice
The resale % back to the artist went away.
Doesn’t have to though. All of this is based on smart contracts, to which means the logic is what you make of it. It could, for example, also send some kickback to a platform when activating the game there, so e.g. you buy the game from the game dev directly and you’re given an NFT for it, with it you can download the game from the game dev page, but also you can pay a small fee and get a steam key for it, that fee could be sent to both Valve to justify their involvement, then you might be able to generate similar Playstation key for it, or any other platform. This would be an interesting system where users can buy the game once and activate it for different platforms.
