Non fungible token in a nutshell

If you buy this, you are scammed.

Bωockchain @lemmy.ml

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Yeah, NFTs are little more than a receipt, if you ask me.
- I think the biggest place it has genuine benefit would be for something like deeds to homes, titles for cars and stuff like that. A permanent, auditable and public system for tracking the transfer and ownership of things.
  Unfortunately it comes with its own caveats, such as “what if I lose the wallet containing the deed to my home, and I want to sell it?”
  I never really understood the whole thing about picture based NFTs though.
  
  We already have that without adding a completely useless layer of complexity. You've been able to look up property records online for decades. NFTs would add zero value to that system, and as you've correctly pointed out, have serious dowsides including lost, hacked, or stolen tokens.
- Yet millions of people use receipts constantly.
  
  Yes, but do you ever pay for the receipt, though?
  
  You pay for something and get a receipt. You get ownership of an original image, such as a painting, transferred by a verified owner or creator. It’s mostly used for art now because the reputation hasn’t matured enough for an authority to link it to a physical item. But being able to own a 1 in 5 Nike release with a receipt that never decays and that you can transfer to others and verify the authenticity of on your phone just seems like the next step in ownership. Same with video games, for example, it’d allow a true second hand digital games market if game ownership was verified by owning a copy on a blockchain.
  
  "It's mostly used for art now"
  Do you call a procedurally generated monkey art? In stores, you get receipts for things that are actually usable. The hell are you going to use a JPEG for?
  "Verify authenticity"
  If that JPEG is shared, other people will have access, and your "ownership" will be nothing, since people can just repost it on other NFT shit sites and start the loop all over again.
  "with a receipt that never decays"
  And what if the NFT site suffers link rot or actually goes down? Your digital "never decaying" receipt would be useless and/or inaccessible.
  
  The hell you gonna use a painting for then? Like it or not, there’s physical art and digital art. Both are easy to copy, so it’s good to have an easy way to indicate ownership of an original.
  Why does anyone pay for art when they can just copy paste it? Why do people pay for an original when a copy is just as good? Do you just not understand the concept of digital ownership? It doesn’t even have to be something like art, you could own one of a million copies of a movie and the token gives you cryptographic proof that you’re allowed to watch and sell this movie to others.
  The receipt still never decays, link rot is pretty useless when the token just says “This art/media/object belongs to this person” as long as the art/media/object still exists the token is proof of who actually owns it and (hopefully in the future) who owns the rights to it.
  If the NFT site goes down you still have your NFT registered on a publicly accessible verification chain. Anyone with or without original NFT site can see you own something.
  I get that it’s new and I get that it’s scary when such big technological changes are made and people are testing them out in the real world but they’re here to stay. They’ve proven to be quite useful to people who got into them because of the ridiculous digital art NFT price speculation trend.
  Turns out, the receipts are basically as bullet proof as a torrent, seeded by a couple of million people. That’s why decentralisation is so nice, you’re on Lemmy, I assume you understand.
  
  But you're not the owner, though, you don't get a copyright, the image is hosted externally, anything besides the receipt is just a contract which needs to be enforced via regular legal means and can be broken.
  
  Copyright is something legal, so as long as the law is out of date, there’s no support for digital copyright transfers. But ownership and authenticity is certainly transferable.
  Anything better than the “you’ll own nothing and enjoy it” state of the internet today. It’d be amazing to own my movies and be able to transfer them to anyone I want.
  
  Think of an NFT as a membership card to a club. You can sell your card to someone else, but there's nothing stopping the club from changing their system and no longer accepting old cards, not letting someone in despite having a card, or going out of business.
  And you've never been able to own movies or video games, unless you made them yourself. NFT's don't change that either, you may own a receipt for access to something, but the club analogy still counts.
  
  And that whole comparison is only valid because there’s no laws about online ownership outside of copyright.
  You don’t own anything at all, but NFTs are one of the only ways that we’ll ever be able to emulate ownership online. Seeing as our entire lives are moving there, I’m hopeful. You can be tired of them all you want, but nonetheless NFTs are the building blocks of decentralised ownership.
  Also my copy of Pokémon Red and my Gameboy disagree with your statement about never owning a movie or game. I own most of my Switch games too, I can mod the cartridge however I want and I can resell it. Because I own it.
  The whole point, by the way, is to have everything decentralised. You can’t take away my movies when there’s multiple, independent “sources” that I can claim the file from with my NFT. You don’t even need to give your private details away, you simply prove you own the private key that owns the NFT and you can watch your movie. Do you not see the bigger picture or are you too tired to look further?

35 comments