There’s absolutely no reason for that to be decentralized, only one party can honor the tokens anyways. Like most things crypto they don’t actually make sense for anything.
What does it even mean? Let's say I buy a NTF $1000 and get a digital copy, what prevents me (barring legalities) to perfectly duplicate it and massively redistribute it (not the token, the distributed supposedly high quality file) for a fraction of $$$ and turn a profit (because since it had such a high price it must be in high demand)? The question is not about the legal consequences but about the thing you own: of you have one original painting you have only one, it's quite hard to exactly duplicate it for resale.
I may be naive (the dropbox-is-just-rsync kind) but I've yet to see a tangible explanation of a use† of CryptoArt/NFT that could not be done with `xxd -l 128 -p /dev/random` and PGP[0].
† No. "being in the blockchain" brings absolutely nothing (except burning watts). If the author wants to reissue anything he readily can. You. Just. Own. A. Number. I also hear some picture the author getting a cut of resales of the token, which is even more crazy when you manage to entertain the thought while trying to keep a straight face.
The file is usually publicly accessible, why would anyone give you money for something they can just download?
And what does the existence of an NFT allow you to do with respect to that bundle fo rights you bought that couldn’t already be done by having someone write down a rights assignment on a piece of paper, sign it and hand it over to you in exchange for some consideration?
1. That you paid a certain amount for the certificate.
2. That there will never be another certificate for the same thing, from the same brand of certificates (e.g. "Valuables BY CENT").
Pretty much exactly like owning a baseball card, then.
How many "brand of certificates" are there now, and what is the barrier to entry?
I suspect 1) several and 2) low.
Also, how is "there will never be another certificate for the same thing, from the same brand of certificates" technically enforced?
The enforcement, interestingly, is more traditional; the owners of the "Valuables by CENT" trademark can use existing legal structures to prevent anyone else using that name.
Meanwhile the NFT is digitally linked to the Valuables by CENT smart contract on Ethereum, which will presumably have an 'author' property attached to it, set to the string "Valuables by CENT".
Ah, so they pinkie swear not to do it a second time?
Your average blockchain was founded recently, and have a lot less to lose taking the money and running, or popping up again under a new name, for a second go at the same shtick.
A Merkle chain[0] append-only ledger contains a transaction minting the certificate, and the consistency rules for that Merkle chain mean that any extension of the chain which mints another such certificate is not valid (the same as a extension that spends money from a account with no money in it is not valid).
0: technically a blockchain specifically, but that's not actually relevant
And one should be happy to control the receipt of their purchase of imaginary goods? Ok.
https://medium.com/treum_io/on-chain-artwork-nfts-f0556653c9...
Further, I don't understand how this works in music/art. Grimes' copy of her music is issued on Nifty Gateway, but isn't that art only valuable as long as users assign value to the Nifty Gateway platform? What stops another art blockchain from becoming more desirable/valuable and creating a NFT of Grimes' art there? Doesn't that erode the value of the original NFTs?
What am I missing here?
Not too different than paying $4.5M to have a dinner with Warren Buffett [3].
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-is-offering...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Sun
[3] https://www.coindesk.com/trons-justin-sun-finally-gets-4-5m-...
Which the ARTIST has decided is a digital certificate for the price of art.
Just I could make a duplicate of the supreme brick, my duplicate wouldn't have as nearly much value if I tell people it is a duplicate. Supreme could sell bricks again but they probably won't. There's nothing physical that's stops them but there's still an implicit agreement between artist and buyer.
I may not wish to buy own a supreme brick, but I can at least understand why people find it valuable.
Jesus Christ Mary and Joesph, what is the name of all things pure and holy...
Look, I get it outside of the money laundering scheme to modern art, throwing around how rich you are by buying "stuff". I get it. Tiny pecker syndrome. But let's stop and remember that Rockefeller and Carnegie, the OG capitalist titans, were dick measuring by donating their money. Sure "to the arts"... at least they were building halls and museums. They participated in some solid currency velocity that helped pay the wages to construction contractors. Still, they were assholes, but a lot better than just shoveling money between other rich cunts as a form of showing off.
Basically, if Token == Intellectual Property ownership then it makes sense.
This would mean if a creator, say a musician wrote a song and transferred the NFT and it became a wild success in the future, the owner would earn profits from the investment, but so too would the content creator receive the mentioned dividends proportional to the value.
Why is there no global market place for reselling digital event tickets? Certainly Ticket master and the other retailers could agree on an open standard protocol, pay for a centralized clearing house, and create a digital market place. But they don't. And they don't because it isn't in any of their local interests to maintain such a thing.
This problem, which is fundamentally social and economic in nature, is what is solved by smart contracts. It allows the creation of a public commons, not one that technically couldn't exist, just one that no private actor is ever incentivized to create.
There are plenty of major concerns here, like how security and access are physically enforced if there are no official organizers or designated volunteers, but in theory you could maybe distribute a phone app so everyone is automatically scanning for unauthorized people, and just rely on physically capable attendees and police to deal with potential security incidents. Still probably a recipe for utter Fyre Festival-esque disaster and lawsuits in many cases, but feasible in theory.
It should be noted that private keys can be shared if the owner wishes. In the case of using NFTs as event entry the event organizer would still need to keep a record of which NFTs have been used already for a given event because the wallet can be shared. Third party services will almost certainly pop up to fill this need.
This could be enforced for real-life events by handing out a wristband with a GUID QR code to the first person to demonstrate they possess the private key that owns a particular ticket token, then never handing anything out for that token again, and also triggering an alert if the same QR code is ever seen on more than one person (to mitigate "pirates" who might offer identical or similar-looking wristband material and "replay attack" with an existing assigned QR code).
There are probably other attacks I'm missing (including obvious existing stuff like people just sneaking in and evading wristband checks), and there are lots of questions about whether an NFT or decentralized blockchain is a smart idea for a given live event, but from a security perspective I think it should probably be feasible if an event organizer does decide they want to do it for whatever reason.
However, there are other analogues that I think are much less feasible or perhaps totally infeasible. There are some NFT... apps? platforms? companies? DAOs? that are providing some service where an NFT grants you access to something like a restricted Discord server. Even aside from how valuable or sensible that may or may not be, there's absolutely nothing stopping a token-holder from just sharing their Discord account email and password with as many people as they want. The platform and the Discord servers would have no idea if anyone's doing this and how many people could be sharing any given account. (Discord employees could potentially detect some cases but I doubt they'd play any part in this.)
For a real-life physical event, someone can't just copy your body and make it a shared proxy for pirating, but any NFT ticket use case short of in-person events is probably often just going to rely solely on the goodwill of people to not abuse/pirate things, and we all know how that goes - especially in anonymous online communities.
The rubber-meets-the-road real-world crossover part is where NFTs and "Web 3.0" in general tends to become really shaky. I'm still mildly optimistic about it in the long-term, but I think a large percentage of existing use cases are going to fizzle as pointless dead ends that are surviving purely based on flavor-of-the-year hype and fad waves. Things are obviously stuck in one such fad right now.
This is quite close to what unlock-protocol[1] did for several conferences pre-covid. Overall it worked, though there are some key difficulties: gas prices make interesting on-chain things too expensive for most people, and wallet ergonomics aren’t great for this sort of thing.
(I am a former unlock-protocol employee)
Digital tickets tied to digital identities that can only be transfered at market price. That's not a difficult smart contact to create.
If there was an mmo framework that is shared between different games, I guess. But even then, why have a universal currency instead of just making it framework/platform specific? It's less work and is all handled in a fast centralized DB. At that why create the extra work of PoW or PoS or whatever algorithm solving process it'll use. currencyAmount += tradedAmount is way easier and makes more sense on the game dev side.
All these anti NFT arguments amount to is, "This is solutionism at its finest, but people already bought koolaid in bulk...so enjoy the show."
Even then, there are still a lot of questions: what makes the d-game actually interesting/novel/unique/fun and an appropriate, creative, and clever use of a decentralized blockchain.
And although I mostly agree with this essay and the Medium essay it's referencing about environmental impact, I do think NFTs have some potential use cases outside of games, art, and bilking greedy people. I think those use cases just have to be a little further along the "blockchain from end-to-end" spectrum.
Remember that crowdfunded, over engineered juicer? It was some $400 and claimed to do like 100 pounds of force on a pre-juiced juice packet to squeeze into a glass for you. Some other article showed you can just squeeze these packs by hand into your glass with barely any force. This was "the Keurig" of juicing.
Total shit show of over engineering and solutionism.
I see the same thing with crypto and NFTs currently. Everytime I have this discussion in person, I always say that I do believe there will be a viable digital currency of some sort in the near future. The current gen of tech has proved the want, which is important, but now a real how is needed along with commonsense.
Like, theres a real want for an easy to go, healthy juice. Just bottle it and sell it that way. Why go through the extra step of a juicer if the shit is already juiced. I won't doubt their drinks were good. But they got caught up in solutionism gimmicks. Digital currencies are caught up in the blockchain gimmick.
Yet your two sentence explanation is the most comprehensive.
NFTs enable the possibility of a market that is orthogonal to the channel that distributed the token.
The viability or existence of such a market is not guaranteed, but the likelihood that one could emerge at all has gone up thanks to the novel properties of NFTs.
Mark Cuban talks about this regarding dallas mavericks tickets. Suddenly the ticket creator can still benefit from scalpers buying everything. Or, you can set the next sell price to be limited to only 10 percent more. etc.
There is a reason for artists and musicians to move to NFTs as well, as royalty is built in. See kings of leon releasing their album as an NFT.
Well when you buy a ticket from ticketmaster you can’t exactly dictate what features they offer through their platform...not to mention ticket master is a 3rd party service that they take a massive cut.
blockchain is cutting these 3rd parties out in these use cases, allowing the event holders to easily mint the admission tickets and users take advantage of peer to peer open source technology. Meaning easily trace the tickets and buy/trade/sell without relying on Ticketmaster.
The secondary markets in ticketing exist because there's an excess of demand and entities who can exploit access, speed, or technical know-how for arbitrage. Blockchain ticketing companies don't fundamentally change that statement - they enable it.
No one likes Ticketmaster - but to call them a 3rd party service that takes a massive cut is inaccurate. Ticketmaster is owned by Live Nation, which usually owns both the venue and the artist's tour schedule. And owns the primary and secondary ticketing sales. So Ticketmaster is usually the first, second, and third-party in ticketing.
Blockchain doesn't magically fix this. It doesn't change the deep relationship Live Nation has with labels and artists, their fodness for excluding artists who play at rival and independent venues, their habit of defining contract requirements that can only be fulfilled by Ticketmaster software...
Blockchain is solving all of the wrong problems in ticketing. I don't need a distributed, trustless ledger of who owns a ticket when all of them are issued by and redeemed at the same location. The only real reason to push for blockchain in ticketing is to help scalpers hide what they're doing.
I don't buy "excess of demand" as being fundamental, though, except in the most technical sense. Imagine a super niche event, where the organizers know there are exactly 200 fans on the entire planet, and they offer that many tickets on sale. It still makes sense for a random scalper to take a loan, buy all 200 tickets, and resell them with a markup. It would still make sense if the organizers offered 300 tickets, i.e. greater supply than demand in terms of heacount! A scalper could still come ahead buying all 300, selling 200 at a high enough markup, and feed the remaining 100 tickets to a cat.
I think scalping (arbitrage) can occur in any situation in which the supplier isn't charging the maximum the market can bear (perhaps that's what is meant by "excess of demand" and I'm missing some technical definitions here).
[0] http://www.personal.psu.edu/dxl31/econ2/pizza_market.png
Is this an argument? We're talking about ticketmaster moving to a chain, why can't we talk about them moving to a cheaper better service that isn't based on crypto?
And besides, crypto isn't free. The network takes a cut. Doesn't it cost like $20 to perform a transaction right now?
So basically, decentralisation doesn't serve the vendor, only the consumer.
Those two things are not a given.
If you want to use your ticket to go see the event, use it. If you don't, simply do not go. If you do not want to go and want to recover your costs, sell it back to the venue at the purchase price.