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The only non-speculation and non-dumb use case for NFTs I know of is identities for distributed or federated apps. An NFT registry is just a list of people who

The only non-speculation and non-dumb use case for NFTs I know of is identities for distributed or federated apps. An NFT registry is just a list of people who own numbers, and they get made fun of because a) owning a number isn't very useful, and b) anyone who wants to own the same number can just make a new list. But identities are exceptions: a) a username for a specific app is one of the few cases where it is useful to own a number, and b) because a specific app will only look at a specific list, i.e. it's reasonable and expected that I might own the 'ineptech' username on HN and someone else might own it on some other platform. So, if you were going to make some sort of distributed social app, e.g. a twitter clone, it would make sense to use an NFT-like registry to track ownership of the handles. I believe this is basically how urbit identity ownership works, although it was implemented before the NFT craze.

floatboth 5y ago
Namecoin was released in 2011 — way before the NFT craze. This is indeed the most attractive reason for a globally distributed database of "valuable things", but proof-of-whatever powered "trustless" systems (cryptocurrencies) are still terrible. There was a really good experimental system with articulated trust: https://github.com/andres-erbsen/dename https://github.com/andres-erbsen/dename
pornel 5y ago
I guess that is close to making sense, but as usual there are simpler alternatives. For example, the DNS. It already is a distributed global registry of reserved names that can be traded. The difference is more in political outlook than technical capability. There could be simpler solutions even without a big bad central authority. Nodes participating in the federated network could build consensus among themselves (after all, each node has to voluntarily honor the database, whether that database is on the blockchain or not). The identity ownership can be controlled via knowledge of the private key. Just like you can currently sell your Twitter or Insta username by selling the password.

floatboth 5y ago

Namecoin was released in 2011 — way before the NFT craze. This is indeed the most attractive reason for a globally distributed database of "valuable things", but proof-of-whatever powered "trustless" systems (cryptocurrencies) are still terrible. There was a really good experimental system with articulated trust: https://github.com/andres-erbsen/dename https://github.com/andres-erbsen/dename

pornel 5y ago

I guess that is close to making sense, but as usual there are simpler alternatives. For example, the DNS. It already is a distributed global registry of reserved names that can be traded. The difference is more in political outlook than technical capability. There could be simpler solutions even without a big bad central authority. Nodes participating in the federated network could build consensus among themselves (after all, each node has to voluntarily honor the database, whether that database is on the blockchain or not). The identity ownership can be controlled via knowledge of the private key. Just like you can currently sell your Twitter or Insta username by selling the password.