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I think there's a big overlap -- if you're a crypto skeptic, you are almost certainly going to be an NFT skeptic as well. But the reverse is not necessarily tr

I think there's a big overlap -- if you're a crypto skeptic, you are almost certainly going to be an NFT skeptic as well. But the reverse is not necessarily true. NFTs are just fundamentally a lot worse than cryptocurrencies. They have every problem that cryptocurrencies have, except they're also not scarce, require centralized verification mechanisms, have bad incentive structures around hoarding, are prone to link rot, etc, etc, etc... NFTs are much harder to justify than cryptocurrencies are. They're all of the drawbacks with virtually none of the upsides. I don't know anyone who likes NFTs but dislikes cryptocurrency.

baby 5y ago
It doesn’t make sense to say that an NFT is not scarce. Every NFT is unique by design.
- danShumway 5y ago
  Most NFTs are just links to a publicly hosted asset. They're not meaningfully unique in any of the ways that matter. Sure, technically you're making a new NFT when the same creator mints an NFT that points to the same work as before. But also technically you're making a new dollar with a new serial label when the government prints money, and we don't call paper money "non-fungible". It's not a kind of uniqueness that matters to anyone.
  - baby 5y ago
    > Most NFTs are just links to a publicly hosted asset That's metadata, to display or use it in dapps, this is not how you uniquely identify an NFT. The metadata is optional.
    - danShumway 5y ago
      > The metadata is optional For the vast majority of people hyping NFTs, the metadata is the only part they care about. The metadata is the part that links the NFT to an actual piece of artwork -- the issuer and the work that it's linked to are the only reasons why some tokens are worth more to collectors than others. Without the context of the person who issued it and the work that the token is being paired with, you're just trading numbers around and assigning completely arbitrary values to them. Which to be fair is a common criticism of NFTs. It's just weird to hear an advocate lean into that argument themselves, normally advocates are trying to convince me that NFTs mean something.
      - miracle2k 5y ago
        Yes, a lot of NFTs will represent some kind of visual media, and you want to know what that visual media is that they represent. But whether the link is a URL in the contract, a hash, or simply collective memory/agreement amongst collectors doesn't matter. Note that the argument that NFTs are useless if you need to rely on social consensus to link token and asset is not valid - the use case is in having a common ledger to track ownership of the token.
        danShumway 5y ago
        > But whether the link is a URL in the contract, a hash, or simply collective memory/agreement amongst collectors doesn't matter. You voice your objection to this point below, and I'll get to that, but I just want to be clear: the NFTs are adding nothing to the existing social systems we use to determine value. We could have a collective memory/agreement without NFTs. We're going to get to having a shared ledger below, but I just want to be clear about where we're starting -- NFTs do not add any value to the link between a token and an asset, we use the same social contracts that could always have been enforced before. > the use case is in having a common ledger to track ownership of the token. Now, a common ledger is a nice thing, but it also doesn't require NFTs, you could set up the exact same system with a little bit of federation. Of course, federation would require some degree of trust and moderation, but here's the problem: NFTs require all that too. The only way that the NFT community has figured out to deal with copycat NFTs is to introduce secondary off-chain validation of which NFTs are "real" and which ones aren't. You end up recreating the exact same ecosystem of services that validate which NFTs are safe to buy, and the end result is that the secondary market isn't safe to use unless you run it through one of those services. Those off-chain validators will log fraud NFTs and refuse to validate them. As the ecosystem grows, they'll eventually shift to only validating NFTs that come from sources they trust. It's the same systems of moderation that already exist. It's really hard to claim that NFTs add any value in the form of a trustless distributed ledger when one of the biggest recent events inside the space is Twitter verification. How much more centralized than that can you possibly get? I bring this point up in a previous comment, but for all the criticism I have of Bitcoin (and I have a lot), Bitcoin at least doesn't suffer from this problem quite as much as NFTs do. The entire ecosystem for Bitcoin doesn't fall apart as soon as somebody stops trading on Coinbase. The NFT ecosystem has no idea how to keep the secondary market safe from copycat NFTs for normal buyers without cloning the same centralized systems for "genuine product" guarantees that we already have today. And since NFTs aren't changing anything about our social consensus of value, and since NFTs aren't changing anything about how we verify goods on the secondary market, what on earth are they doing that's of any value? It's just an over-complicated system trying to reinvent federation. If the secondary market for NFTs was safe to use without hooking into a 3rd-party validator, or if the distributed ledger was safe to trust in its entirety without filtering out a socially determined list of bad actors, then you might have a point. But it isn't safe, NFTs have done nothing to make it safe.
fortuna86 5y ago
> I think there's a big overlap -- if you're a crypto skeptic, you are almost certainly going to be an NFT skeptic as well. They are both vehicles for gambling with no real world application or value. Well unless you count ransomware as value.

baby 5y ago

It doesn’t make sense to say that an NFT is not scarce. Every NFT is unique by design.

danShumway 5y ago
Most NFTs are just links to a publicly hosted asset. They're not meaningfully unique in any of the ways that matter. Sure, technically you're making a new NFT when the same creator mints an NFT that points to the same work as before. But also technically you're making a new dollar with a new serial label when the government prints money, and we don't call paper money "non-fungible". It's not a kind of uniqueness that matters to anyone.
- baby 5y ago
  > Most NFTs are just links to a publicly hosted asset That's metadata, to display or use it in dapps, this is not how you uniquely identify an NFT. The metadata is optional.
  - danShumway 5y ago
    > The metadata is optional For the vast majority of people hyping NFTs, the metadata is the only part they care about. The metadata is the part that links the NFT to an actual piece of artwork -- the issuer and the work that it's linked to are the only reasons why some tokens are worth more to collectors than others. Without the context of the person who issued it and the work that the token is being paired with, you're just trading numbers around and assigning completely arbitrary values to them. Which to be fair is a common criticism of NFTs. It's just weird to hear an advocate lean into that argument themselves, normally advocates are trying to convince me that NFTs mean something.
    - miracle2k 5y ago
      Yes, a lot of NFTs will represent some kind of visual media, and you want to know what that visual media is that they represent. But whether the link is a URL in the contract, a hash, or simply collective memory/agreement amongst collectors doesn't matter. Note that the argument that NFTs are useless if you need to rely on social consensus to link token and asset is not valid - the use case is in having a common ledger to track ownership of the token.
      - danShumway 5y ago
        > But whether the link is a URL in the contract, a hash, or simply collective memory/agreement amongst collectors doesn't matter. You voice your objection to this point below, and I'll get to that, but I just want to be clear: the NFTs are adding nothing to the existing social systems we use to determine value. We could have a collective memory/agreement without NFTs. We're going to get to having a shared ledger below, but I just want to be clear about where we're starting -- NFTs do not add any value to the link between a token and an asset, we use the same social contracts that could always have been enforced before. > the use case is in having a common ledger to track ownership of the token. Now, a common ledger is a nice thing, but it also doesn't require NFTs, you could set up the exact same system with a little bit of federation. Of course, federation would require some degree of trust and moderation, but here's the problem: NFTs require all that too. The only way that the NFT community has figured out to deal with copycat NFTs is to introduce secondary off-chain validation of which NFTs are "real" and which ones aren't. You end up recreating the exact same ecosystem of services that validate which NFTs are safe to buy, and the end result is that the secondary market isn't safe to use unless you run it through one of those services. Those off-chain validators will log fraud NFTs and refuse to validate them. As the ecosystem grows, they'll eventually shift to only validating NFTs that come from sources they trust. It's the same systems of moderation that already exist. It's really hard to claim that NFTs add any value in the form of a trustless distributed ledger when one of the biggest recent events inside the space is Twitter verification. How much more centralized than that can you possibly get? I bring this point up in a previous comment, but for all the criticism I have of Bitcoin (and I have a lot), Bitcoin at least doesn't suffer from this problem quite as much as NFTs do. The entire ecosystem for Bitcoin doesn't fall apart as soon as somebody stops trading on Coinbase. The NFT ecosystem has no idea how to keep the secondary market safe from copycat NFTs for normal buyers without cloning the same centralized systems for "genuine product" guarantees that we already have today. And since NFTs aren't changing anything about our social consensus of value, and since NFTs aren't changing anything about how we verify goods on the secondary market, what on earth are they doing that's of any value? It's just an over-complicated system trying to reinvent federation. If the secondary market for NFTs was safe to use without hooking into a 3rd-party validator, or if the distributed ledger was safe to trust in its entirety without filtering out a socially determined list of bad actors, then you might have a point. But it isn't safe, NFTs have done nothing to make it safe.

fortuna86 5y ago

> I think there's a big overlap -- if you're a crypto skeptic, you are almost certainly going to be an NFT skeptic as well. They are both vehicles for gambling with no real world application or value. Well unless you count ransomware as value.