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So I do wonder whether the NFT divide (between people who get it and people who don’t) might be a generational split, related to a larger societal shift away fr

So I do wonder whether the NFT divide (between people who get it and people who don’t) might be a generational split, related to a larger societal shift away from ‘owning things’. We’ve definitely passed ‘peak thing ownership’. For those of us old enough to have grown up with the idea of ‘buying a book’, ‘buying a toy’, ‘buying a CD’ or ‘buying a magazine’ we have a particular mental framework for ‘owning’ stuff. But people stopped buying those things a while ago (people stopped buying toys? Not completely, but certainly some of that spend now goes on apps right?). So for people who have grown up in a digital-subscription world, they might just have a fundamentally different mental model of ownership - one which is more compatible with NFTs as a reasonable idea than the paradigm us old ‘thing owners’ have. Like, consider some of the things you likely have bought recently: a ‘twelve month Netflix subscription’, a ‘Steam library game’, an ‘app’… you bought those things with no expectation you could resell them later because you don’t think of those as ‘things’. And because you haven’t yet adjusted your mental model to the reality that this is what you spend your wealth on now - ephemeral digital rights you won’t be able to pass on to your kids when you’re gone. But if you grew up digital native and the only things you’ve ever been able to buy are non transferable digital pointers to rights to use something, maybe the idea of a transferable digital rights pointer seems like a crazy innovative new idea that changes everything?

jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
The difference between most[1] NFTs and Netflix/Steam/Apps is with the latter, you are buying access to something. With most of these NFTs that are just a picture, owning the NFT doesn't confer any special right to you. We can all enjoy the Disaster Girl meme, you don't have to have bought the NFT. The owner of the first ever tweet cannot actually do anything with it, edit it, destroy it, put it in a private collection so only they can look at it. The only thing buying one of these NFTs gives you is I guess "bragging rights" but I think it remains to be seen why anyone should care that you paid money for 0x3B3ee1931Dc30C1957379FAc9aba94D1C48a5405,25046. [1] The only exception is maybe these NFTs that interact with something on the blockchain like an item or place in a videogame, in that case owning the NFT provides some sort of utility.
- jameshart 5y ago
  Yes, that's definitely the case for a lot of NFTs being minted and sold. And if an NFT did represent the right to download and play a particular game from Steam (like, you had to present proof of ownership of an NFT to Steam to be allowed to play the game), such that I could sell that NFT outside of Steam to someone else... well, the value of that NFT is only as good as Steam's willingness to abide by the agreement it embodies, which they can unilaterally withdraw at any time, so there's little value in Steam honoring such a thing. If they wanted to permit game resale, they can do that, inside their own database, without any NFT nonsense. So yeah, it's still a bit of a mystery if or whether this actually adds anything, but I'm just trying to put myself into the mindset of people who are excited by this and trying to figure out what excites them, rather than just assuming they're all dumb because they think buying numbers is going to change the world.
  - the_snooze 5y ago
    It really shows the dishonesty in crypto "innovation:" they claim "security" and "trustlessness," but it all reduces to simple human/institutional/contractual trust relationships as soon as you need to deal with anything with real-world practical value, whether that be access to games on Steam or tracking a package or whatever. With all this fancy software and energy spent on mining, what then is the point of all that effort?
    - WorldMaker 5y ago
      I think some of that directly connects to the (intentional) confusion in terms of "smart contracts" and old fashioned "contracts". "Smart contracts" are programs and there's a sense that they are "better" and easier to "trust" than old fashioned "contracts" because computer's enforce them ("fairly and equitably", or so proponents believe [1]) and not people and institutions. But people don't run "smart contract software" in their own brains and at the end of the day if these things are to be meaningful to people they have to interact with people and institutions and good old fashioned "contracts". It's trying to solve sociological and political problems with code, but we don't have a real world substrate for those "programs", what we instead have millennia of institutional history and contract law and at the end of the day those still matter more than what the computer says even you personally don't trust those institutions for whatever reason. ETA: [1] Don't forget that it's a common fallacy among tech idealists that computers are unbiased and objective "because math" rather than machines that will reflect the biases and subjective opinions of those that program them.
bart_spoon 5y ago
Not really, because there is still no utility in owning the rights to an NFT. I've only ever seen two kinds of interest expressed in NFTs. The first is immensely wealthy people who are looking for a trendy way to flaunt their wealth, because they've exhausted all traditional options. This is what leads someone to pay $3M to "own" the first tweet. The second is people who aren't immensely wealthy but are hoping they will become so by buying/minting an NFT and selling it for an huge profit, presumably to someone from the first group (or a sucker from the second). This makes up the majority of NFTs by volume, and is where the pyramid scheme similarities become hard to dismiss. Haven't seen anything resembling a third kind of interest that, under scrutiny, doesn't ultimately fall into one of these two groups.
LudwigNagasena 5y ago
It seems to be exactly the opposite. In digital age you can consume stuff without buying anything and people care less about ownership per se, but "people who don't get it" buy stuff like NFT.
bserge 5y ago
I do, in fact, expect to be able to use my paid for Android app at any time in the future. I'm not counting on updates and new features, I just want the same version I bought to work on the same version of Android it works on right now. Obviously, that's all in my stubborn old school brain, but it doesn't stop me from hoarding .APK files and Android images. I had a lot of great very old software on some CDs that I regularly reburned/copied until I lost them over a decade ago and I'm still pissed about that :D
TeMPOraL 5y ago
Maybe. Or maybe it's that people less used to the concept of ownership can be more easily defrauded by "as a Service" businesses and people peddling crypto alike. > consider some of the things you likely have bought recently: a ‘twelve month Netflix subscription’, a ‘Steam library game’, an ‘app’… you bought those things with no expectation you could resell them later because you don’t think of those as ‘things’ Yes and no. The subscription is very much "a thing". Think of this like a mental jump you've made when you understood functions as first-class values - code that your program can grab and pass around. I may not be able to sell the underlying media library to which I'm granted access, but I can very much sell the access itself. Or borrow it to a friend. Or charge money for it. People are[0], in fact, trading access to subscription services like Netflix. > if you grew up digital native and the only things you’ve ever been able to buy are non transferable digital pointers to rights to use something, maybe the idea of a transferable digital rights pointer seems like a crazy innovative new idea that changes everything? That's... a couple decades of dystopia ahead of us. People growing today are still buying food, toys, medicine. Children develop understanding of ownership before they develop understanding of money. -- [0] - Or were, last time I checked, which was some 2-3 years ago.
- jameshart 5y ago
  “Look what I found in the loft! Grandma’s old Netflix subscription from 2021!”
Grustaf 5y ago
NFTs are all about owning, in fact they are more about owning than almost anything on earth. The ONLY advantage you get from owning an NFT is the knowledge that you own it. Everyone, owner or not, can enjoy looking at the jpeg in the same way. That's not really true for anything else. So, far from representing the move away from ownership, they are a distillation of the ownership concept.

jallen_dot_dev 5y ago

The difference between most[1] NFTs and Netflix/Steam/Apps is with the latter, you are buying access to something. With most of these NFTs that are just a picture, owning the NFT doesn't confer any special right to you. We can all enjoy the Disaster Girl meme, you don't have to have bought the NFT. The owner of the first ever tweet cannot actually do anything with it, edit it, destroy it, put it in a private collection so only they can look at it. The only thing buying one of these NFTs gives you is I guess "bragging rights" but I think it remains to be seen why anyone should care that you paid money for 0x3B3ee1931Dc30C1957379FAc9aba94D1C48a5405,25046. [1] The only exception is maybe these NFTs that interact with something on the blockchain like an item or place in a videogame, in that case owning the NFT provides some sort of utility.

jameshart 5y ago
Yes, that's definitely the case for a lot of NFTs being minted and sold. And if an NFT did represent the right to download and play a particular game from Steam (like, you had to present proof of ownership of an NFT to Steam to be allowed to play the game), such that I could sell that NFT outside of Steam to someone else... well, the value of that NFT is only as good as Steam's willingness to abide by the agreement it embodies, which they can unilaterally withdraw at any time, so there's little value in Steam honoring such a thing. If they wanted to permit game resale, they can do that, inside their own database, without any NFT nonsense. So yeah, it's still a bit of a mystery if or whether this actually adds anything, but I'm just trying to put myself into the mindset of people who are excited by this and trying to figure out what excites them, rather than just assuming they're all dumb because they think buying numbers is going to change the world.
- the_snooze 5y ago
  It really shows the dishonesty in crypto "innovation:" they claim "security" and "trustlessness," but it all reduces to simple human/institutional/contractual trust relationships as soon as you need to deal with anything with real-world practical value, whether that be access to games on Steam or tracking a package or whatever. With all this fancy software and energy spent on mining, what then is the point of all that effort?
  - WorldMaker 5y ago
    I think some of that directly connects to the (intentional) confusion in terms of "smart contracts" and old fashioned "contracts". "Smart contracts" are programs and there's a sense that they are "better" and easier to "trust" than old fashioned "contracts" because computer's enforce them ("fairly and equitably", or so proponents believe [1]) and not people and institutions. But people don't run "smart contract software" in their own brains and at the end of the day if these things are to be meaningful to people they have to interact with people and institutions and good old fashioned "contracts". It's trying to solve sociological and political problems with code, but we don't have a real world substrate for those "programs", what we instead have millennia of institutional history and contract law and at the end of the day those still matter more than what the computer says even you personally don't trust those institutions for whatever reason. ETA: [1] Don't forget that it's a common fallacy among tech idealists that computers are unbiased and objective "because math" rather than machines that will reflect the biases and subjective opinions of those that program them.

bart_spoon 5y ago

Not really, because there is still no utility in owning the rights to an NFT. I've only ever seen two kinds of interest expressed in NFTs. The first is immensely wealthy people who are looking for a trendy way to flaunt their wealth, because they've exhausted all traditional options. This is what leads someone to pay $3M to "own" the first tweet. The second is people who aren't immensely wealthy but are hoping they will become so by buying/minting an NFT and selling it for an huge profit, presumably to someone from the first group (or a sucker from the second). This makes up the majority of NFTs by volume, and is where the pyramid scheme similarities become hard to dismiss. Haven't seen anything resembling a third kind of interest that, under scrutiny, doesn't ultimately fall into one of these two groups.

LudwigNagasena 5y ago

It seems to be exactly the opposite. In digital age you can consume stuff without buying anything and people care less about ownership per se, but "people who don't get it" buy stuff like NFT.

bserge 5y ago

I do, in fact, expect to be able to use my paid for Android app at any time in the future. I'm not counting on updates and new features, I just want the same version I bought to work on the same version of Android it works on right now. Obviously, that's all in my stubborn old school brain, but it doesn't stop me from hoarding .APK files and Android images. I had a lot of great very old software on some CDs that I regularly reburned/copied until I lost them over a decade ago and I'm still pissed about that :D

TeMPOraL 5y ago

Maybe. Or maybe it's that people less used to the concept of ownership can be more easily defrauded by "as a Service" businesses and people peddling crypto alike. > consider some of the things you likely have bought recently: a ‘twelve month Netflix subscription’, a ‘Steam library game’, an ‘app’… you bought those things with no expectation you could resell them later because you don’t think of those as ‘things’ Yes and no. The subscription is very much "a thing". Think of this like a mental jump you've made when you understood functions as first-class values - code that your program can grab and pass around. I may not be able to sell the underlying media library to which I'm granted access, but I can very much sell the access itself. Or borrow it to a friend. Or charge money for it. People are[0], in fact, trading access to subscription services like Netflix. > if you grew up digital native and the only things you’ve ever been able to buy are non transferable digital pointers to rights to use something, maybe the idea of a transferable digital rights pointer seems like a crazy innovative new idea that changes everything? That's... a couple decades of dystopia ahead of us. People growing today are still buying food, toys, medicine. Children develop understanding of ownership before they develop understanding of money. -- [0] - Or were, last time I checked, which was some 2-3 years ago.

jameshart 5y ago
“Look what I found in the loft! Grandma’s old Netflix subscription from 2021!”

Grustaf 5y ago

NFTs are all about owning, in fact they are more about owning than almost anything on earth. The ONLY advantage you get from owning an NFT is the knowledge that you own it. Everyone, owner or not, can enjoy looking at the jpeg in the same way. That's not really true for anything else. So, far from representing the move away from ownership, they are a distillation of the ownership concept.