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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 pictu

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.
    - jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
      Yeah I agree, and that's why I'm generally skeptical of any smart contract ideas that have to interface with real life (supply chains, land registry, and so on). I think they make more sense when they are concerned with things entirely contained within the blockchain, like swapping tokens or mapping names to addresses. Frustratingly enough, it's the former type ("let's put cows on the blockchain") that seem to get the most mainstream attention.
      - WorldMaker 5y ago
        I've passed beyond skeptical of smart contracts that try to apply to real life to a concern that much more real contract law needs to apply to smart contracts. Ethereum is already full of fun stories where "smart" contracts did extremely dumb things because they took a programmer's word extremely literally rather than a programmer's intent. In a world where programmers are assumed to be ordinary, fallible humans that's a ton of pressure to put on a programmer to never make a single mistake. While there's a lot of active research into trying to bring technical solutions to that human problem such as strict "formal proofs" and such of the programs being made into smart contracts, I'm increasingly of the opinion that would benefit them the most would be political and sociological solutions such as classics like "courts of appeals", "trials by jury of peers" to determine intent over literal substance, and so forth. Those aren't "fun, technical" solutions, and would require placing trust again in institutions and people, so I absolutely have zero optimism that any smart contracts system would embrace them. I just think that they need such political structures to exist otherwise you left with merely a lowest common denominator tyranny of software bugs (no matter how formally the best contracts mathematically prove their claims/efforts).
kobasa 5y ago
Pretty much every profile pic NFT now (hottest form of NFTs right now) comes with some huge list of utility and roadmap behind it (look into BAYC for a good example), if that's the sort of thing you're looking for. Also, "bragging rights" or flexing, it turns out, is a pretty huge part of not only the physical realm but also digital as well if you look at the existing digital skins market.
- rocho 5y ago
  Roadmaps! Like those spicy ICOs in 2017! I wonder if 90% of them failed, or is it 95%?
- jameshart 5y ago
  I think 'utility' might be a stretch for the BAYC roadmap. That model of NFT is very much on the MLM end of the scale.
- jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
  Skins are an interesting comparison. I feel like that falls under the utility category I mentioned, like when you buy a skin you are really buying the right to use something at a particular place and time (a cool looking gun during a match), and nobody else has the right to use it. In contrast, whenever I see the Disaster Girl meme posted somewhere on the Internet I don't see any indication of who "owns" it.
  - jameshart 5y ago
    It has an owner. Its copyright belongs to the photographer who took it - Dave Roth, father of Zoë Roth, the girl in the picture. If you ever see it reproduced in a newspaper article you’ll see him credited. The NFT Zoë Roth sold doesn’t convey any rights over that image or its use. It’s got the faint frisson of exclusivity to it - kind of like if you had a print of that photograph signed by Zoë Roth. It’s a little bit special that it’s an NFT minted by her in specific reference to the meme; and it has some additional cachet as a historical artifact of being maybe one of the first meme NFTs, so there’s that. So sure, I can sort of see there being some value in the bragging rights of being able to say “look, I have the private key to the ethereum wallet that has the right to transfer ownership of this binary string to someone else, and look - this cryptographically secure chain of numbers shows that that very same binary string is the one Zoë Roth cryptographically signed with her own private key way back in 2021…” Just, that’s going to be a lot to explain, for the bragging rights, I think. Compared to pointing to a picture in a frame and saying “yeah, that’s signed by the person in the picture”.

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.
  - jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
    Yeah I agree, and that's why I'm generally skeptical of any smart contract ideas that have to interface with real life (supply chains, land registry, and so on). I think they make more sense when they are concerned with things entirely contained within the blockchain, like swapping tokens or mapping names to addresses. Frustratingly enough, it's the former type ("let's put cows on the blockchain") that seem to get the most mainstream attention.
    - WorldMaker 5y ago
      I've passed beyond skeptical of smart contracts that try to apply to real life to a concern that much more real contract law needs to apply to smart contracts. Ethereum is already full of fun stories where "smart" contracts did extremely dumb things because they took a programmer's word extremely literally rather than a programmer's intent. In a world where programmers are assumed to be ordinary, fallible humans that's a ton of pressure to put on a programmer to never make a single mistake. While there's a lot of active research into trying to bring technical solutions to that human problem such as strict "formal proofs" and such of the programs being made into smart contracts, I'm increasingly of the opinion that would benefit them the most would be political and sociological solutions such as classics like "courts of appeals", "trials by jury of peers" to determine intent over literal substance, and so forth. Those aren't "fun, technical" solutions, and would require placing trust again in institutions and people, so I absolutely have zero optimism that any smart contracts system would embrace them. I just think that they need such political structures to exist otherwise you left with merely a lowest common denominator tyranny of software bugs (no matter how formally the best contracts mathematically prove their claims/efforts).

kobasa 5y ago

Pretty much every profile pic NFT now (hottest form of NFTs right now) comes with some huge list of utility and roadmap behind it (look into BAYC for a good example), if that's the sort of thing you're looking for. Also, "bragging rights" or flexing, it turns out, is a pretty huge part of not only the physical realm but also digital as well if you look at the existing digital skins market.

rocho 5y ago
Roadmaps! Like those spicy ICOs in 2017! I wonder if 90% of them failed, or is it 95%?
jameshart 5y ago
I think 'utility' might be a stretch for the BAYC roadmap. That model of NFT is very much on the MLM end of the scale.
jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
Skins are an interesting comparison. I feel like that falls under the utility category I mentioned, like when you buy a skin you are really buying the right to use something at a particular place and time (a cool looking gun during a match), and nobody else has the right to use it. In contrast, whenever I see the Disaster Girl meme posted somewhere on the Internet I don't see any indication of who "owns" it.
- jameshart 5y ago
  It has an owner. Its copyright belongs to the photographer who took it - Dave Roth, father of Zoë Roth, the girl in the picture. If you ever see it reproduced in a newspaper article you’ll see him credited. The NFT Zoë Roth sold doesn’t convey any rights over that image or its use. It’s got the faint frisson of exclusivity to it - kind of like if you had a print of that photograph signed by Zoë Roth. It’s a little bit special that it’s an NFT minted by her in specific reference to the meme; and it has some additional cachet as a historical artifact of being maybe one of the first meme NFTs, so there’s that. So sure, I can sort of see there being some value in the bragging rights of being able to say “look, I have the private key to the ethereum wallet that has the right to transfer ownership of this binary string to someone else, and look - this cryptographically secure chain of numbers shows that that very same binary string is the one Zoë Roth cryptographically signed with her own private key way back in 2021…” Just, that’s going to be a lot to explain, for the bragging rights, I think. Compared to pointing to a picture in a frame and saying “yeah, that’s signed by the person in the picture”.