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eyeroll I won’t deny that there are tons of NFT projects that are nothing more than modern day tulip mania. On the other hand there is an entirely new world of

eyeroll I won’t deny that there are tons of NFT projects that are nothing more than modern day tulip mania. On the other hand there is an entirely new world of opportunity that has never existed before for both common people, artists and corporations in the form of DeFi projects. Basically any distributed form of ownership you can imagine is now possible through NFT and DAOs. There has never been a better time to learn about it either.

teruakohatu 5y ago
> there is an entirely new world of opportunity ... any distributed form of ownership That is what people say, but what I don't understand is what ownership is actually conferred with NFTs. The only "ownership" is the ability to transfer the NFT to another person, which simply gives them the ability to transfer it to another person (which sounds a bit MLMy). For ownership to be worth more than that, you need a legal system and a legal contract ... so back to square one.
- seibelj 5y ago
  If an application (videogame, social network, website, etc.) gives the holder of the NFT special rights, then that is the utility of the NFT. It does not matter about legal ownership of a graphic.
  - polemic 5y ago
    But this is the wrong abstraction. The application becomes the central authority for some arbitrary token. Yes, in theory they could use "an NFT" to represent a key to some in-application capability but at best the owner of the NFT has an exclusive right to that capability at the whim of the application owner. The NFT owner can't really claim to own any real "thing" in and of it's own right. The application owner gains very little – they could just implement a Plan Old Database within their system. The owner of the "NFT" gains very little – except the theoretical value of a token they could trade, and might have value, as long as it's backed with some capability provided by the application. None of this applies to things like "a gif on the internet", for which the NFT means exactly nothing if you have no enforceable rights.
    - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
      I think he means application badges and skins, etc. A special hat sold in a Roblox game that was only created once.
    - cbovis 5y ago
      The point is that the application owner does not become a central authority of authenticity though, the blockchain does. The application owner is just one of many acknowledging authenticity. Many different applications can build on top of this open authenticity verification. This decentralised layer for authenticity verification is much more powerful than a single application builder can achieve with their own database. The concept itself is very powerful for interoperability but some of the valuations of assets currently feel ludicrous.
      - teruakohatu 5y ago
        > central authority of authenticity But authenticity of what exactly? If everyone agrees that, for example, a particular distributed ledger provides authenticity of some class of artwork, that is fine. But soon the real world happens eg. a court in one country orders the art to be seized and handed over to a third party , but they don't have the ability to force the NFT to be transferred because the former-owner is in a different country. Would the art world suddenly pretend that the artwork is not real because the current owner does not have the NFT? We are back to square one.
    - nyhc99 5y ago
      You don't think there's value to the application owner? They get a secondary market for the accounts in their application that they don't have to manage and they get royalties automatically paid to them for every resale. The scarcity of accounts drives up the value of those accounts, which also financially benefits the application holder because now they can sell the extra accounts they held on to for more money, and they get bigger royalties on every resale. And on the consumer side, someone is more willing to buy in to check it out because if they get tired of it or they don't like it or they beat the game and want to move on they know they can sell their account easily. And on top of all that, assets from one application can be integrated into another application. If I build a game and I allow people to use the "sword of NFT" they have from another game in my game then I've created a big incentive for people who like that other game to also play mine.
- polemic 5y ago
  Yep, several years ago it was trendy to shill the idea of "cadastre [land records] on the blockchain" to solve some imagined issue with the central authority of land registries, never mind that of any particular asset class, land title was the very last thing any sane individual would cede to a "zero trust database". If you're going to sell or buy land, that title better be backed by all the legal and otherwise mechanisms of force available to the state! NFTs are just a further abstraction on that same failed idea – a cyptofinancial derivative to make something appear real that isn't real.
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  > For ownership to be worth more than that, you need a legal system and a legal contract ... so back to square one. That's the part about NFTs that I keep getting hung up on, yes. I get the abstract notion of creating artificial scarcity for digital goods, and how that could have market value. But we've seen absurd things like "use this service to create an NFT for any individual tweet," with no verification that the NFT is being created by anyone who has any legally-recognized right to the tweet's content. If an artist tweets out an image of a new art piece of theirs and I mint an NFT from the tweet, what exactly do I have "ownership" of? I sure don't have any rights to the artwork. I don't even have any rights to the tweet text, which is implicitly copyrighted by its author. And it's that sort of foofery, more than anything else, which makes me more inclined to be skeptical. Obviously there are NFTs created by legitimate copyright holders who can legally transfer ownership or other rights to you, but the legal recognition of the ownership doesn't seem to have anything to do with the inclusion of the NFT in the transaction -- the NFT itself can't verify that it was minted by someone who had the necessary legal rights to assign ownership of the thing the token represents.
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    A lot of people on here are aggressively expressing skepticism of NFTs while only giving simple easily refutable reasons. It seems like they're trying hard not to understand. That's what happens when people have cognitive dissonance. Perhaps they've spent their whole life building a slightly incorrect mental model of how society works and NFTs don't fit that model. It's easier to deny the value of NFTs than to change their mental model. The denial has to be aggressive because it's so emotionally dangerous to let yourself lose your grip on your existing beliefs. That kind of hysteresis or stickiness of beliefs is a good thing because it allows us to build elaborate consistent useful models of the world without upending it at every random new idea. But it also means old set-in-their-ways people aren't good at adopting cutting edge ideas.
    - teruakohatu 5y ago
      > giving simple easily refutable reasons I didn't vote you down, but I do think it would have been a better use of time to explain why NFTs are the future, rather than ad-hominem attacks on people who disagree with you. Please tell me why NFT are valuable and useful, with very concrete examples of utility. If you use the word "ownership" please explain in context what this means.
ayngg 5y ago
The author literally says the following in the article: >Note: It is important to note here that we think that NFTs as a technology hold incredible promise to help more evenly distribute financial outcomes to community users, not just community organizers. We are in the early days of exploring what digital ownership actually means and it is far too bearish to universally decry the technology. Our concern is with the following types of NFT applications.
chaostheory 5y ago
You’re missing a big part of the picture. NFTs do provide real utility for anyone dealing with illegal goods or services. They are only selling NFTs publicly while the real goods or services are something else. It’s not a new hack but this is a much more efficient vehicle.

teruakohatu 5y ago

> there is an entirely new world of opportunity ... any distributed form of ownership That is what people say, but what I don't understand is what ownership is actually conferred with NFTs. The only "ownership" is the ability to transfer the NFT to another person, which simply gives them the ability to transfer it to another person (which sounds a bit MLMy). For ownership to be worth more than that, you need a legal system and a legal contract ... so back to square one.

seibelj 5y ago
If an application (videogame, social network, website, etc.) gives the holder of the NFT special rights, then that is the utility of the NFT. It does not matter about legal ownership of a graphic.
- polemic 5y ago
  But this is the wrong abstraction. The application becomes the central authority for some arbitrary token. Yes, in theory they could use "an NFT" to represent a key to some in-application capability but at best the owner of the NFT has an exclusive right to that capability at the whim of the application owner. The NFT owner can't really claim to own any real "thing" in and of it's own right. The application owner gains very little – they could just implement a Plan Old Database within their system. The owner of the "NFT" gains very little – except the theoretical value of a token they could trade, and might have value, as long as it's backed with some capability provided by the application. None of this applies to things like "a gif on the internet", for which the NFT means exactly nothing if you have no enforceable rights.
  - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
    I think he means application badges and skins, etc. A special hat sold in a Roblox game that was only created once.
  - cbovis 5y ago
    The point is that the application owner does not become a central authority of authenticity though, the blockchain does. The application owner is just one of many acknowledging authenticity. Many different applications can build on top of this open authenticity verification. This decentralised layer for authenticity verification is much more powerful than a single application builder can achieve with their own database. The concept itself is very powerful for interoperability but some of the valuations of assets currently feel ludicrous.
    - teruakohatu 5y ago
      > central authority of authenticity But authenticity of what exactly? If everyone agrees that, for example, a particular distributed ledger provides authenticity of some class of artwork, that is fine. But soon the real world happens eg. a court in one country orders the art to be seized and handed over to a third party , but they don't have the ability to force the NFT to be transferred because the former-owner is in a different country. Would the art world suddenly pretend that the artwork is not real because the current owner does not have the NFT? We are back to square one.
  - nyhc99 5y ago
    You don't think there's value to the application owner? They get a secondary market for the accounts in their application that they don't have to manage and they get royalties automatically paid to them for every resale. The scarcity of accounts drives up the value of those accounts, which also financially benefits the application holder because now they can sell the extra accounts they held on to for more money, and they get bigger royalties on every resale. And on the consumer side, someone is more willing to buy in to check it out because if they get tired of it or they don't like it or they beat the game and want to move on they know they can sell their account easily. And on top of all that, assets from one application can be integrated into another application. If I build a game and I allow people to use the "sword of NFT" they have from another game in my game then I've created a big incentive for people who like that other game to also play mine.
polemic 5y ago
Yep, several years ago it was trendy to shill the idea of "cadastre [land records] on the blockchain" to solve some imagined issue with the central authority of land registries, never mind that of any particular asset class, land title was the very last thing any sane individual would cede to a "zero trust database". If you're going to sell or buy land, that title better be backed by all the legal and otherwise mechanisms of force available to the state! NFTs are just a further abstraction on that same failed idea – a cyptofinancial derivative to make something appear real that isn't real.
chipotle_coyote 5y ago
> For ownership to be worth more than that, you need a legal system and a legal contract ... so back to square one. That's the part about NFTs that I keep getting hung up on, yes. I get the abstract notion of creating artificial scarcity for digital goods, and how that could have market value. But we've seen absurd things like "use this service to create an NFT for any individual tweet," with no verification that the NFT is being created by anyone who has any legally-recognized right to the tweet's content. If an artist tweets out an image of a new art piece of theirs and I mint an NFT from the tweet, what exactly do I have "ownership" of? I sure don't have any rights to the artwork. I don't even have any rights to the tweet text, which is implicitly copyrighted by its author. And it's that sort of foofery, more than anything else, which makes me more inclined to be skeptical. Obviously there are NFTs created by legitimate copyright holders who can legally transfer ownership or other rights to you, but the legal recognition of the ownership doesn't seem to have anything to do with the inclusion of the NFT in the transaction -- the NFT itself can't verify that it was minted by someone who had the necessary legal rights to assign ownership of the thing the token represents.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  A lot of people on here are aggressively expressing skepticism of NFTs while only giving simple easily refutable reasons. It seems like they're trying hard not to understand. That's what happens when people have cognitive dissonance. Perhaps they've spent their whole life building a slightly incorrect mental model of how society works and NFTs don't fit that model. It's easier to deny the value of NFTs than to change their mental model. The denial has to be aggressive because it's so emotionally dangerous to let yourself lose your grip on your existing beliefs. That kind of hysteresis or stickiness of beliefs is a good thing because it allows us to build elaborate consistent useful models of the world without upending it at every random new idea. But it also means old set-in-their-ways people aren't good at adopting cutting edge ideas.
  - teruakohatu 5y ago
    > giving simple easily refutable reasons I didn't vote you down, but I do think it would have been a better use of time to explain why NFTs are the future, rather than ad-hominem attacks on people who disagree with you. Please tell me why NFT are valuable and useful, with very concrete examples of utility. If you use the word "ownership" please explain in context what this means.

ayngg 5y ago

The author literally says the following in the article: >Note: It is important to note here that we think that NFTs as a technology hold incredible promise to help more evenly distribute financial outcomes to community users, not just community organizers. We are in the early days of exploring what digital ownership actually means and it is far too bearish to universally decry the technology. Our concern is with the following types of NFT applications.

chaostheory 5y ago

You’re missing a big part of the picture. NFTs do provide real utility for anyone dealing with illegal goods or services. They are only selling NFTs publicly while the real goods or services are something else. It’s not a new hack but this is a much more efficient vehicle.