this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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They think the value would go up. Why? Who would want to buy it from them?
Whatever people generally accept as a tradeable asset can be used as a currency. Be it a painting, a very old coin or a banana taped to a wall. Currency doesn't have to be directly useful, it just needs to be unique and give some kind of confidence in value. Paper bills are well established with high confidence in their value, even though they are really just pieces of cotten paper with a specific print. However, NFTs are linked to crappy artwork which seems to generally lower the general confidence in sustained value.
The general idea of NFTs is fine, but the execution is a shitshow of dimensions beyond my belief.
The general idea of NFTs is completely stupid IMO.
If you don't know anything about NFTs, they sound really stupid.
If you know a lot about NFTs, they sound really stupid.
Care to elaborate? I can see that the result of extremely pricey meme drawings is completely stupid. But the general idea of linking property to a non-centralized system which anyone could verify against, but basically no one could cheat, sounds like a decent concept to me.
That would only be like, who tagged this digital copy first.
What would that use be in the real world? I mean it's not because you tagged my super invention paper before me that it has any legal ground.
It's like using a cannon to kill a fly too IMO, just secure a server if you need to know when things happened for example.
I'm interested in what scenario you think it could be useful (except fraud ofc).
NFTs are typically linked to digital assets, but it could also reference physical assets. Artists and collectors could link their physical artwork to NFTs to formalize ownership. And it wouldn't have to stop at art. Ownership of cars could be linked to NFTs. Manifacturers could link NFTs to chassis-references such that ownership would exist in the block chain instead of (or in addition to) national registers. Similarly NFTs could reference houses, computers, chipped pets etc.
I'm sure that there are a lot of issues with this, but the general idea seems fine at the very initial thought. Obvious flaws like increased hacking incentive or money laundering would probably turn it into a bad idea. But that's my point. The general concept is fine, but the execution makes it a horrible mess.
But why?
And who's in charge of errors in this immutable ledger?
I only feel it being shoehorned into some possible usefulness, conveniently forgetting everything that won't work.
What is it trying to solve?
Also linking physical objects, that's even worse, use it a bit and it's digitalisation will change lol. Also you want to sell your auto radio, but it's linked to your Car-NFT, it's Kafkaïenne lol!
All of those questions can only be answered with a big shrug. I don't know. I guess there exist cases of ownership disputes where NFTs would provide an easy answer, but it's fringe. Errors in transactions would probably be tough to handle, so I don't know what would be done there. I specified the chassis-reference on the car to say something that is unlikely to change for the car, but of course you end up with the "Ship of Theseus"-paradox.
And that brings it back to: it's a nice solution to a problem which doesn't really exist, and the application of it towards zero-value digital assets is a huge mess.
It depends on what you're using them for. If it's just a URL to an image, meh. But some real assets can be hard to track without a lot of institutional infrastructure. NFTs are a possible alternative to the expensive, hard to grow financial institutions that underpin a formal economy.
Take ownership of a house. When I was buying recently, there was a myriad of companies involved in the sale, including insurance companies in case there was a lingering claim to the property. In a country where possession of any given piece of land has very poor records, transferring ownership is that much harder. But what if instead they built their system around creating NFT corresponding to a an actual specification for the land?
Putting things on an immutable ledger? That is probably one of the worst ways you can transfer goods at all.
How so? It provides a history of the transfer of a specific piece of property.
So what do you do when there is an error?
I'm don't know enough about the area to know if there's a great way to deal with errors, theft, and the like.