7 ms·

I am hardly surprised. While Bitcoin maybe had theoretical uses as a currency a decade ago, the NFT hype never made any sense whatsoever to begin with.

jaggirs 5y ago
It makes no less sense than a painting. If you accept that an original painting has more value than a perfectly good copy, whilst being undistinguishable for anyone except a few experts, you should realize NFT's have the exact same arrangement, except 'originality' is determined by the blockchain instead of an expert.
- arrow7000 5y ago
  Except that when you own a painting you actually own the physical painting. Not a key to a link to a URL of the file.
- vesinisa 5y ago
  Well yes, exactly. The original painting has value exactly because it is not a copy. And "owning" the first tweet ever sent? What does that even mean?? At the end of the day "ownership" mostly has any meaning within the legal system. NFTs seem to create something akin to a shadow copyright but which makes no sense. Oh well, maybe I am just a simpleton.
  - Fern_Blossom 5y ago
    >And "owning" the first tweet ever sent? What does that even mean?? No, no, no. It's worse than you think. An NFT is more like a plastic cup with Pikachu printed on it. You don't own the rights to Pikachu. You just bought a cup with his face on it. With NFTs, there is no contract to own the actual "thing". Just simply the piece of "merch" (the NFT) with the likeness associated with it. Except, a plastic cup still has value to drink from or hold your toothbrushes.
    - almostkorean 5y ago
      This is true for many NFTs but not all. For example, cryptopunks, autoglyphs, meebits only exist on-chain. Then there are NFTs like artblocks.io where the code to generate your NFT is on-chain and the output is determined by the transaction hash.
  - detaro 5y ago
    At the core, "NFT" is a primitive. It's an entry in a ledger with some properties, it doesn't mean anything. Any meaning is a legal or social construct on top of that, and any perceived value derives from that. And when it comes to the social part, the value really only depends on enough people believing into it. There's a bunch of different things going on, with different people doing different things. E.g. on some art NFT platforms, a legal license is attached that says that if you hold the NFT for an artwork, you get permission to display that just as you would have permission to display lets say a piece of software art you bought from them. The NFT just is a representation of who holds that license right now, instead of a software license represented by a piece of paper being sold, or an entry in a license database somewhere. Digital artists have struggled with how to sell a digital thing that can be copied losslessly for a while. Expensive digital art is often sold as some physical thing, e.g. a print, an installation with some screens showing the artwork, or a movie on DVDs. The limited number of the physical things provides a scarcity that apparently has value to a lot of people, leading to higher sales prices, but is also somewhat frustrating if you want the digital thing to be the art. In contrast, when they try to sell just files, that's basically not happening. People will spend hundreds on a print, but not $5 on the digital file the print was created from. And for some, it now turns out that NFTs also provide that scarcity, in the purely digital domain. Sure, everyone can go and download the file, but if you bought the NFT you have a record that proves that you actually bought the thing from the artist. That appears to have value to some people, and they pay the same kind of money as they would for a print etc. If you don't have an explicit legal thing, it comes down to social convention that this (virtual) thing you are holding has some value to some people. Some collectibles are somewhat of an analogue: Stamps. signed photographs. pokemon cards. Skins in Counter-Strike. All those have no obvious reason why they are worth a lot a money (or not), except that enough people want them and are willing to spend to get them. If a piece of paper with some dudes signature somehow has value to some people, why can't a bag of bits with a digital signature have value to others? And of course there's lots of hype and too much money floating around that makes all this more extreme, leads to people throwing money at it in the hope to make a profit, and makes the amounts paid for the headline-making things just seem entirely stupid. But that's roughly the forces at work, if we agree to the specific value judgements or not (very similar to collectables markets again, those seem equally weird to me in the extremes).
- bosswipe 5y ago
  You're confounding the work of art with a kind of certificate that is nebulously attached to the art.
- wsc981 5y ago
  > It makes no less sense than a painting. Well, the high-end art market is kinda scammy, is it not [0]? I think it's pointless to pay millions of dollars for an original painting when a decent copy can be had for a fraction of the cost. And it would look just as nice. --- [0]: https://qz.com/103091/high-end-art-is-one-of-the-most-manipulated-markets-in-the-world/ https://qz.com/103091/high-end-art-is-one-of-the-most-manipu...
- nly 5y ago
  Paintings have provenance. If you own a Da Vinci you're literally able to touch the canvas that the master himself touched. Your ownership will forever be apart of that works history, and it's yours to enjoy privately and exclusively whenever you want. It's an indulgence. Nobody will ask you in 20 years what it was like to own an NFT, because they can all have the exact same experience by just looking at the blockchain on their device. Humans ultimately value stories and experiences, and anything that gets work out of the way so we can spend more time having them.
  - gomox 5y ago
    The NFT is a token for the story behind it, just like the artwork. It is issued by the artist. It has even better provenance tracing than the artwork, which could be a fake.
    - bhandziuk 5y ago
      What's to stop an artist from selling you a print as an original through an NFT?
      - Sargos 5y ago
        You can see that the artist made NFTs on chain. That's actually how you can verify uniqueness as anyone can see this NFT is authentic and not a random copycat.
        bhandziuk 5y ago
        What is an artist sells a a print verified by an NFT. The person who buys that print wants to sell it again. They make a copy of the print and sell the copy with the NFT. They keep the original print. The NFT doesn't seem like it did anything there other than be used as deception for the second buyer. Is there a way to actually link the NFT to the thing the NFT is supposedly tied to?
        Sargos 5y ago
- tomp 5y ago
  NFTs are like taking a Picasso, making a copy, shredding the original, and signing a paper that says the copy is actually the “real one”. 100% the same thing
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    Or the owner of Picasso asking you if you want virtual token of his Picasso. You give him some money, and you get to say you own token of Picasso. While the person still owns and can sell the original. He could even get cut out of the further sales of Picasso even after he sold it... And I suppose technically nothing stops new owner of the physical object making new token of this time "his Picasso"...
    - cma 5y ago
      It could even turn out later that he sold another 1000 tokens of it earlier that were hidden until a timed smart contract revealed them.
  - prepend 5y ago
    I’m not aware of any NFTs that work this way. No not 100%. If there were destructive scans of a Picasso where the only thing digital was the NFT, then yes. It would also be kind of neat in a terror kind of way to actually shred the Picasso and issue an NFT. The problem is that I still have copies that look just like the Picasso. Infinite. If NFTs start being linked with rights, then that might work. Like the copyright ownership is conveyed to the owner of the NFT. It’s kind of like buying a numbered print of a painting and trusting the artist to not make more.
- angio 5y ago
  NFTs are more like fine prints, which derive their value from the sticker that says "copy X of Y" than from the print itself.
alexgmcm 5y ago
Crypto (and NFTs in particular) remind me of the tale of The Emperor's New Clothes. I accept that maybe Ethereum could be valuable (I don't really understand smart contracts well enough to say..) and if they move to proof-of-stake that will make it more sustainable. Likewise, the sheer anonymity of something like Monero might be valuable for the black market. But everything else just seems like people seeking a "greater fool" to sell to.
- prepend 5y ago
  If etherium gets down to femtocents per transaction then that would be cool. A usable distributed ledger would be nice for many purposes. But at dollars per transaction, there’s no real use cases. Imagine if my sql db was free but charged me $10 for any write transaction. That would suck. When the price gets to an operational level, people will use it. I think the price it will eventually get to is Napster/BitTorrent-level.
  - vmception 5y ago
    Charged me $10 *and doesn’t charge me for storage I dump a ton of crap on blockchains and just set the transaction fee low until someone takes it Also check out gas tokens as a concept, you can prebuy gas when gas prices are low and subsidize your future time sensitive transactions when gas prices are high
    - prepend 5y ago
      I’ve dumped stuff at low transaction fees and had it stay there forever. Try setting 1 cent as your transaction fee and see if anyone picks that up. This works great if you already prebought way back when, but is not suitable for any current use case I can think of. And certainly not usable by many. There’s not many situations where $10 for a few bytes is needed, even with the cool feature of free storage forever. For comparison, 1GB is 2 cents per year on AWS deep glacier. And I trust AWS to be around in a hundred years more than ethereum. Not to mention that storing 1GB costs a fortune in transaction fees.
- FranchuFranchu 5y ago
mypastself 5y ago
I’ve yet to find a scenario in which a smart contract truly improves upon a traditional, centralized database solution, NFTs included. As long as the system relies on externally originated information for proper functioning, we’re back to the issues of trust the technology was intended to resolve. That is why digital currency actually still seems like the only appropriate application of the blockchain, although it may never see widespread adoption.
- SuchAnonMuchWow 5y ago
  An actual casino without the need for a central authority can be implemented on smart contracts, and is the only real application of smart contracts that I see that is better than a centralized solution.
  - mypastself 5y ago
    As far as I understand it, producing entropy, which is needed for fair distribution of odds in games of chance, is not achievable directly on the blockchain. Instead, the job of producing non-deterministic inputs is offloaded to an off-chain source, an oracle, which still requires some degree of trust in an external entity. My information might be out of date, though, and some implementations might have resolved this issue without destroying the integrity of the entire system. And I will concede that gambling seems to be the most popular use of the tech so far.
    - SuchAnonMuchWow 5y ago
      You can just make the participants of a bet provide each a random number, and xor their results. If even one of them picked a real random number, the result will be random. This is the basis of most distributed random number selection algorithm, which existed since a lot before blockchains. In a smart contract, it could look like something like that: 1- each person which want to participate in the bet pick a random number, then send: their bet (0 or 1), the hash of the random number, and of course money to bet. 2- after some specified time, the first phase finish and no new person can bet. now everyone has to send their actual random number to the smart contract 3- after some specified time again, every random number gathered which had the correct hash are xored. If the popcount of the result is even, 0 win. otherwise 1 win. Everyone who send their random number and guessed correctly get a share of the total amount. edit: note that I'm not overly familiar with smart contracts, so if this cannot work I would love to be explained why.
teorema 5y ago
I admittedly don't really understand this in depth but it has seemed to me that there's a need for some general purpose decentralized signature or authentication mechanism. I can see NFTs functioning in that kind of way although I'm not sure the current implementations are the best ones nor has the hype bubble necessarily been focused on best use cases. I wouldn't be surprised if NFTs evolved into something far more mundane, a historical footnote on the way to something else.
cturner 5y ago
"the NFT hype never made any sense whatsoever to begin with" I felt the same, but now regard NFTs as the first meaningful application of blockchain. First, let's talk about land registries. In developed countries, the state administers a land registry. There is a strict, human-administered API against this registry. It allows users to inspect the full history of land; cause property splits/mergers; execute land exchange; and there is capacity for extensions like water-rights and native title. There is formal governance around some of these operations - conveyancing; council approval. NFTs have the potential to do something similar, initially for artwork. Imagine if every time an artist created a painting, they issued a NFT against it, and got this authorised by an authority. That authority does not yet exist, but Christie's and Sotheby's could set up in this space with low effort. Each time a transfer of the artwork occurs, both the NFT and the physical artwork change ownership to the new owner. This would have a snowball effect, and quickly become the new standard for provenance. Insurance companies would insist that works were marked on the exchange. A stolen artwork would be nearly worthless. It would be pointless to duplicate artwork, because the sold duplicate would effectively destroy the original. Extension: firearms. Firearms are valuable goods, and would soon be forced onto this registry. Perhaps the state would encourage this transition by asking that firearms ranges mark the transition of guns to and from the range premises by marking this on the chain. Extension: wine. There is a live problem in China, with rubbish wine being fraudulently marked as premium Australian varieties. Each bottle could be chipped in the cap with an on-chain identifier. In the wine shop, you could use your phone to scan the identifier, and witness custody of that wine back to the producer. Evolution: complex goods. The next evolution would be to trace the grapes that went into the wine back to the vineyard that they came from. Reputation becomes very important in this system. This would encourage a new type of auditing profession, who serve a similar role as conveyances, but for chain operations. Once you have that, you could mark carbon credits of goods on the chain, you could have eggs tagged as being free-range or organic, etc.
- prepend 5y ago
  I think your examples are good cases for any registry. NFTs aren’t particularly good for this as they are expensive in their current form. Any transaction should be very low cost to process and there would be no value to the NFT itself, but to the thing tracked by the NFT. So I think the right play would be to not speculate and wait for a government to use blockchain/NFT for registries. The land registry is a good idea, but is already done without blockchain/NFt so I’m not sure the value of layering this on. For these things to work, it’s better to have a common operator under a monopoly (government) and fees be nominal. This is how deeds work in the US today, but there’s some clerk filing sheets in a courthouse and processing transactions. This can be improved by databases, etc but NFT doesn’t provide much benefit over a parcel number. As we automate this process, we would not have a market for selling NFTs, we would just need a robot instead of a clerk.
jokoon 5y ago
NFT reminds me that bitcoin doesn't have any legal regulation or protection whatsoever, meaning bitcoins are not legally protected or insured by any government. It's weird how tech inventions came from publicly funded research, yet it's being adored by libertarians and anti-government people.
woah 5y ago
NFTs bring the willfull ignorance of the anti-crypto crowd into stark relief. I had a roommate 10 years ago who was a video artist. She would do gallery showings and sell videos for hundreds of thousands of dollars. She had been doing it since the 90's. Her videos could be downloaded from her website, so what was she selling? Certificates of authenticity, that certified that the holder owned the art. All criticisms of NFTs could just as easily be applied to the way that all digital artists have always sold their art. Where were you, ten years ago? Why weren't you yelling at my roommate for being a scammer?
- exporectomy 5y ago
  Not to mention stamp collectors, antique collectors, art buyers, retro video game collectors, etc. Most of this stuff only has value for being an original thing with limited supply. You can get all the practical value from cheap copies. Also gold, diamonds, etc.

jaggirs 5y ago

It makes no less sense than a painting. If you accept that an original painting has more value than a perfectly good copy, whilst being undistinguishable for anyone except a few experts, you should realize NFT's have the exact same arrangement, except 'originality' is determined by the blockchain instead of an expert.

arrow7000 5y ago
Except that when you own a painting you actually own the physical painting. Not a key to a link to a URL of the file.
vesinisa 5y ago
Well yes, exactly. The original painting has value exactly because it is not a copy. And "owning" the first tweet ever sent? What does that even mean?? At the end of the day "ownership" mostly has any meaning within the legal system. NFTs seem to create something akin to a shadow copyright but which makes no sense. Oh well, maybe I am just a simpleton.
- Fern_Blossom 5y ago
  >And "owning" the first tweet ever sent? What does that even mean?? No, no, no. It's worse than you think. An NFT is more like a plastic cup with Pikachu printed on it. You don't own the rights to Pikachu. You just bought a cup with his face on it. With NFTs, there is no contract to own the actual "thing". Just simply the piece of "merch" (the NFT) with the likeness associated with it. Except, a plastic cup still has value to drink from or hold your toothbrushes.
  - almostkorean 5y ago
    This is true for many NFTs but not all. For example, cryptopunks, autoglyphs, meebits only exist on-chain. Then there are NFTs like artblocks.io where the code to generate your NFT is on-chain and the output is determined by the transaction hash.
- detaro 5y ago
  At the core, "NFT" is a primitive. It's an entry in a ledger with some properties, it doesn't mean anything. Any meaning is a legal or social construct on top of that, and any perceived value derives from that. And when it comes to the social part, the value really only depends on enough people believing into it. There's a bunch of different things going on, with different people doing different things. E.g. on some art NFT platforms, a legal license is attached that says that if you hold the NFT for an artwork, you get permission to display that just as you would have permission to display lets say a piece of software art you bought from them. The NFT just is a representation of who holds that license right now, instead of a software license represented by a piece of paper being sold, or an entry in a license database somewhere. Digital artists have struggled with how to sell a digital thing that can be copied losslessly for a while. Expensive digital art is often sold as some physical thing, e.g. a print, an installation with some screens showing the artwork, or a movie on DVDs. The limited number of the physical things provides a scarcity that apparently has value to a lot of people, leading to higher sales prices, but is also somewhat frustrating if you want the digital thing to be the art. In contrast, when they try to sell just files, that's basically not happening. People will spend hundreds on a print, but not $5 on the digital file the print was created from. And for some, it now turns out that NFTs also provide that scarcity, in the purely digital domain. Sure, everyone can go and download the file, but if you bought the NFT you have a record that proves that you actually bought the thing from the artist. That appears to have value to some people, and they pay the same kind of money as they would for a print etc. If you don't have an explicit legal thing, it comes down to social convention that this (virtual) thing you are holding has some value to some people. Some collectibles are somewhat of an analogue: Stamps. signed photographs. pokemon cards. Skins in Counter-Strike. All those have no obvious reason why they are worth a lot a money (or not), except that enough people want them and are willing to spend to get them. If a piece of paper with some dudes signature somehow has value to some people, why can't a bag of bits with a digital signature have value to others? And of course there's lots of hype and too much money floating around that makes all this more extreme, leads to people throwing money at it in the hope to make a profit, and makes the amounts paid for the headline-making things just seem entirely stupid. But that's roughly the forces at work, if we agree to the specific value judgements or not (very similar to collectables markets again, those seem equally weird to me in the extremes).
bosswipe 5y ago
You're confounding the work of art with a kind of certificate that is nebulously attached to the art.
wsc981 5y ago
> It makes no less sense than a painting. Well, the high-end art market is kinda scammy, is it not [0]? I think it's pointless to pay millions of dollars for an original painting when a decent copy can be had for a fraction of the cost. And it would look just as nice. --- [0]: https://qz.com/103091/high-end-art-is-one-of-the-most-manipulated-markets-in-the-world/ https://qz.com/103091/high-end-art-is-one-of-the-most-manipu...
nly 5y ago
Paintings have provenance. If you own a Da Vinci you're literally able to touch the canvas that the master himself touched. Your ownership will forever be apart of that works history, and it's yours to enjoy privately and exclusively whenever you want. It's an indulgence. Nobody will ask you in 20 years what it was like to own an NFT, because they can all have the exact same experience by just looking at the blockchain on their device. Humans ultimately value stories and experiences, and anything that gets work out of the way so we can spend more time having them.
- gomox 5y ago
  The NFT is a token for the story behind it, just like the artwork. It is issued by the artist. It has even better provenance tracing than the artwork, which could be a fake.
  - bhandziuk 5y ago
    What's to stop an artist from selling you a print as an original through an NFT?
    - Sargos 5y ago
      You can see that the artist made NFTs on chain. That's actually how you can verify uniqueness as anyone can see this NFT is authentic and not a random copycat.
      - bhandziuk 5y ago
        What is an artist sells a a print verified by an NFT. The person who buys that print wants to sell it again. They make a copy of the print and sell the copy with the NFT. They keep the original print. The NFT doesn't seem like it did anything there other than be used as deception for the second buyer. Is there a way to actually link the NFT to the thing the NFT is supposedly tied to?
        Sargos 5y ago
tomp 5y ago
NFTs are like taking a Picasso, making a copy, shredding the original, and signing a paper that says the copy is actually the “real one”. 100% the same thing
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Or the owner of Picasso asking you if you want virtual token of his Picasso. You give him some money, and you get to say you own token of Picasso. While the person still owns and can sell the original. He could even get cut out of the further sales of Picasso even after he sold it... And I suppose technically nothing stops new owner of the physical object making new token of this time "his Picasso"...
  - cma 5y ago
    It could even turn out later that he sold another 1000 tokens of it earlier that were hidden until a timed smart contract revealed them.
- prepend 5y ago
  I’m not aware of any NFTs that work this way. No not 100%. If there were destructive scans of a Picasso where the only thing digital was the NFT, then yes. It would also be kind of neat in a terror kind of way to actually shred the Picasso and issue an NFT. The problem is that I still have copies that look just like the Picasso. Infinite. If NFTs start being linked with rights, then that might work. Like the copyright ownership is conveyed to the owner of the NFT. It’s kind of like buying a numbered print of a painting and trusting the artist to not make more.
angio 5y ago
NFTs are more like fine prints, which derive their value from the sticker that says "copy X of Y" than from the print itself.

alexgmcm 5y ago

Crypto (and NFTs in particular) remind me of the tale of The Emperor's New Clothes. I accept that maybe Ethereum could be valuable (I don't really understand smart contracts well enough to say..) and if they move to proof-of-stake that will make it more sustainable. Likewise, the sheer anonymity of something like Monero might be valuable for the black market. But everything else just seems like people seeking a "greater fool" to sell to.

prepend 5y ago
If etherium gets down to femtocents per transaction then that would be cool. A usable distributed ledger would be nice for many purposes. But at dollars per transaction, there’s no real use cases. Imagine if my sql db was free but charged me $10 for any write transaction. That would suck. When the price gets to an operational level, people will use it. I think the price it will eventually get to is Napster/BitTorrent-level.
- vmception 5y ago
  Charged me $10 *and doesn’t charge me for storage I dump a ton of crap on blockchains and just set the transaction fee low until someone takes it Also check out gas tokens as a concept, you can prebuy gas when gas prices are low and subsidize your future time sensitive transactions when gas prices are high
  - prepend 5y ago
    I’ve dumped stuff at low transaction fees and had it stay there forever. Try setting 1 cent as your transaction fee and see if anyone picks that up. This works great if you already prebought way back when, but is not suitable for any current use case I can think of. And certainly not usable by many. There’s not many situations where $10 for a few bytes is needed, even with the cool feature of free storage forever. For comparison, 1GB is 2 cents per year on AWS deep glacier. And I trust AWS to be around in a hundred years more than ethereum. Not to mention that storing 1GB costs a fortune in transaction fees.
FranchuFranchu 5y ago

mypastself 5y ago

I’ve yet to find a scenario in which a smart contract truly improves upon a traditional, centralized database solution, NFTs included. As long as the system relies on externally originated information for proper functioning, we’re back to the issues of trust the technology was intended to resolve. That is why digital currency actually still seems like the only appropriate application of the blockchain, although it may never see widespread adoption.

SuchAnonMuchWow 5y ago
An actual casino without the need for a central authority can be implemented on smart contracts, and is the only real application of smart contracts that I see that is better than a centralized solution.
- mypastself 5y ago
  As far as I understand it, producing entropy, which is needed for fair distribution of odds in games of chance, is not achievable directly on the blockchain. Instead, the job of producing non-deterministic inputs is offloaded to an off-chain source, an oracle, which still requires some degree of trust in an external entity. My information might be out of date, though, and some implementations might have resolved this issue without destroying the integrity of the entire system. And I will concede that gambling seems to be the most popular use of the tech so far.
  - SuchAnonMuchWow 5y ago
    You can just make the participants of a bet provide each a random number, and xor their results. If even one of them picked a real random number, the result will be random. This is the basis of most distributed random number selection algorithm, which existed since a lot before blockchains. In a smart contract, it could look like something like that: 1- each person which want to participate in the bet pick a random number, then send: their bet (0 or 1), the hash of the random number, and of course money to bet. 2- after some specified time, the first phase finish and no new person can bet. now everyone has to send their actual random number to the smart contract 3- after some specified time again, every random number gathered which had the correct hash are xored. If the popcount of the result is even, 0 win. otherwise 1 win. Everyone who send their random number and guessed correctly get a share of the total amount. edit: note that I'm not overly familiar with smart contracts, so if this cannot work I would love to be explained why.

teorema 5y ago

I admittedly don't really understand this in depth but it has seemed to me that there's a need for some general purpose decentralized signature or authentication mechanism. I can see NFTs functioning in that kind of way although I'm not sure the current implementations are the best ones nor has the hype bubble necessarily been focused on best use cases. I wouldn't be surprised if NFTs evolved into something far more mundane, a historical footnote on the way to something else.

cturner 5y ago

"the NFT hype never made any sense whatsoever to begin with" I felt the same, but now regard NFTs as the first meaningful application of blockchain. First, let's talk about land registries. In developed countries, the state administers a land registry. There is a strict, human-administered API against this registry. It allows users to inspect the full history of land; cause property splits/mergers; execute land exchange; and there is capacity for extensions like water-rights and native title. There is formal governance around some of these operations - conveyancing; council approval. NFTs have the potential to do something similar, initially for artwork. Imagine if every time an artist created a painting, they issued a NFT against it, and got this authorised by an authority. That authority does not yet exist, but Christie's and Sotheby's could set up in this space with low effort. Each time a transfer of the artwork occurs, both the NFT and the physical artwork change ownership to the new owner. This would have a snowball effect, and quickly become the new standard for provenance. Insurance companies would insist that works were marked on the exchange. A stolen artwork would be nearly worthless. It would be pointless to duplicate artwork, because the sold duplicate would effectively destroy the original. Extension: firearms. Firearms are valuable goods, and would soon be forced onto this registry. Perhaps the state would encourage this transition by asking that firearms ranges mark the transition of guns to and from the range premises by marking this on the chain. Extension: wine. There is a live problem in China, with rubbish wine being fraudulently marked as premium Australian varieties. Each bottle could be chipped in the cap with an on-chain identifier. In the wine shop, you could use your phone to scan the identifier, and witness custody of that wine back to the producer. Evolution: complex goods. The next evolution would be to trace the grapes that went into the wine back to the vineyard that they came from. Reputation becomes very important in this system. This would encourage a new type of auditing profession, who serve a similar role as conveyances, but for chain operations. Once you have that, you could mark carbon credits of goods on the chain, you could have eggs tagged as being free-range or organic, etc.

prepend 5y ago
I think your examples are good cases for any registry. NFTs aren’t particularly good for this as they are expensive in their current form. Any transaction should be very low cost to process and there would be no value to the NFT itself, but to the thing tracked by the NFT. So I think the right play would be to not speculate and wait for a government to use blockchain/NFT for registries. The land registry is a good idea, but is already done without blockchain/NFt so I’m not sure the value of layering this on. For these things to work, it’s better to have a common operator under a monopoly (government) and fees be nominal. This is how deeds work in the US today, but there’s some clerk filing sheets in a courthouse and processing transactions. This can be improved by databases, etc but NFT doesn’t provide much benefit over a parcel number. As we automate this process, we would not have a market for selling NFTs, we would just need a robot instead of a clerk.

jokoon 5y ago

NFT reminds me that bitcoin doesn't have any legal regulation or protection whatsoever, meaning bitcoins are not legally protected or insured by any government. It's weird how tech inventions came from publicly funded research, yet it's being adored by libertarians and anti-government people.

woah 5y ago

NFTs bring the willfull ignorance of the anti-crypto crowd into stark relief. I had a roommate 10 years ago who was a video artist. She would do gallery showings and sell videos for hundreds of thousands of dollars. She had been doing it since the 90's. Her videos could be downloaded from her website, so what was she selling? Certificates of authenticity, that certified that the holder owned the art. All criticisms of NFTs could just as easily be applied to the way that all digital artists have always sold their art. Where were you, ten years ago? Why weren't you yelling at my roommate for being a scammer?

exporectomy 5y ago
Not to mention stamp collectors, antique collectors, art buyers, retro video game collectors, etc. Most of this stuff only has value for being an original thing with limited supply. You can get all the practical value from cheap copies. Also gold, diamonds, etc.