And that's not even a comment on the artistic merit of many of these, which is a farce in itself, but all you get is your name in a ledger. The work itself is just a file like any other.
I think the analogy to baseball cards works very well. Owning an NFT generally doesn't grant you copyrights over the underlying work of art. Owning a baseball card doesn't mean the athlete now works for you. They can both still have value as collectible items, if that's something that interests you.
The problem is when people start talking about NFTs as if it entitles the holder to ownership of the underlying thing. It's possible to own a work of art, either physically or in terms of copyrights. NFTs are neither.
When Dorsey sold an NFT of the first ever tweet, that didn't entitle the buyer to copyrights or even the ability to delete the tweet. It's purely a collectible that derives value from official endorsement and scarcity. That's not something that interests me personally, but it all seems above board. The problem is when I read Dorsey sold the first ever tweet. He did not. He sold an NFT.
With an NFT there's nothing besides the notion of ownership which separates the owner of the NFT from anyone else who has access to the digital asset.
I'm not saying there's nothing interesting about the notion of digital ownership, but someone would have to figure out a way for that ownership to actually mean something, which has not been achieved in the current iteration.
It's exactly the same for NFTs. Dorsey's NFT sold for $2.9 precisely because it was 'issued' by him, and there's the implicit promise that he won't sell another NFT associated with that same tweet. If you or I tried to sell NFTs to that tweet, nothing would happen to the tweet, but we wouldn't find willing buyers.
> I'm not saying there's nothing interesting about the notion of digital ownership, but someone would have to figure out a way for that ownership to actually mean something, which has not been achieved in the current iteration.
Ownership of digital goods is the domain of copyright law.
There's nothing tangible here What does the "owner" of the tweet actually have that nobody else has? It's an incredibly abstract sense of ownership which doesn't even have any social consensus as far as whether it actually exists or not.
Tangible strikes me as an imprecise word. In a sense, all sorts of things are intangible, from copyrights to money. Does a bitcoin count as intangible?
> What does the "owner" of the tweet actually have that nobody else has?
It's plainly Dorsey's tweet, not mine, and not yours. Dorsey wrote it, published it on his account, has the ability to destroy the tweet, and presumably owns the copyright. It's the same thing with baseball cards, they're valuable because they're official, and the community has to defend against counterfeits.
I think that's the point. With a baseball card, I clearly own the physical card, and can put it in the spokes of my bicycle if I want to.
You mentioned the owner of the tweet is the Dorsey and I agree. If so, then what right did the NFT owner purchase? None as far as I can tell.
Again, owning an NFT doesn't mean you own the underlying work, and owning a baseball card doesn't mean the athlete works for you.
The idea of the floating signifier comes to mind. [0]
> With a baseball card, I clearly own the physical card, and can put it in the spokes of my bicycle if I want to.
Sure, but they both share the property of scarcity, and in the same way. The originator could in principle dilute the scarcity by issuing more (printing more baseball cards or issuing more NFTs for the same underlying asset). Is there anything of interest that changes by making it physical? I suppose the ability to destroy, but I think that's about it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_signifier (not a great article in my opinion but I don't know of a better one)
Also, I made a typo earlier: Dorsey's NFT of course sold for $2.9m, not $2.9.
next year if everyone decides NFTs are nonsense then the demand side of the equation could collapse to zero.
scarce things are only valuable if there's demand for it. things which are only unique are not inherently valuable unless humans decide that uniqueness is also valuable.
...
> things which are only unique are not inherently valuable
Of course. Just like baseball cards. Put more broadly, all value is contextual; there's no such thing as inherent value. In a survival situation, a bottle of water has more value than a gold bar.
1. you could actually want to support the artist. Right now I don't think the popular NFTs are real artists, but there's no reason real public artists can't jump on board. NFT could be a flex
2. Social networks could build in NFTs. Dorsey from Twitter mentioned he wants to add NFT verification into the app, so that could be a thing. And they could give you more prominent placement. It's basically like non-commercial advertising. Kind of like a star next to your name.
3. VR could try to enforce that some objects can only be controlled by the owner. It would be difficult, but possible
2. If it's a feature of a social network, don't you already need a central authority? What's the value of an NFT then rather than just an entry in a database?
3. Similar: whoever is implementing this theoretical VR environment could just be the authority of who owns what. I don't see what an NFT adds here
I'm not "for" NFTs but that seems like it could be used in cool ways.
Again: Every game/environment that you want to bring your NFT-items to has to implement this. And they're not getting paid to do so, because your NFT money is going to whoever is brokering them. Where the hell is the incentive...?
I’m not a big crypto guy at all, but I do see the analogy with the very real digital economies you see on platforms like Steam.
You feel like you own something that the artist can only sell once (assuming they're honest). Also, I don't know if there is a credible receipt for a donation on Patreon that you can use to flex
> 2. If it's a feature of a social network, don't you already need a central authority? What's the value of an NFT then rather than just an entry in a database?
I guess a social network could leverage the hype behind existing NFTs rather than rolling their own. Sure there will be some that will try to have home-spun NFTs, but Twitter indicated for now they just want to use existing NFTS
> 3. Similar: whoever is implementing this theoretical VR environment could just be the authority of who owns what. I don't see what an NFT adds here
NFTs could also be transferable across platforms. Obviously platforms wouldn't like this, but as a user if I buy a virtual house, it would be better not to be tied to any one platform. So new or existing platforms could try to lure me over by saying I can bring my house with me
Yeah I mean I understand the appeal of ownership, but it's just so abstract in this case. If you "own" a picasso, you have something nobody else has. If you "own" an NFT, anyone with a copy of the file has exactly what you have.
> I guess a social network could leverage the hype behind existing NFTs rather than rolling their own. Sure there will be some that will try to have home-spun NFTs, but Twitter indicated for now they just want to use existing NFTS
What would this feature/integration actually look like?
> NFTs could also be transferable across platforms. Obviously platforms wouldn't like this, but as a user if I buy a virtual house, it would be better not to be tied to any one platform. So new or existing platforms could try to lure me over by saying I can bring my house with me
Yeah but why would they? So what would my NFT "house" be? I guess this is a 3D asset, with a model, some textures, and a collision model that can be rendered inside this VR world. Basically every platform which wants to make this asset usable has to bear the costs of supporting and rendering this asset, while the NFT issuer reaps the profits. What is the incentive here?
Couldn’t this be done better, at far lower cost simply by having the artist put your name on it or post a video saying “thanks @bko for supporting me!”? That’d have just as much weight, it’s more personal, and you wouldn’t be diverting a substantial amount of money away from the artists to the finance bros.
At any rate, there are other use cases for NFTs beyond ephemeral pseudo-ownership of art [0]. Strictly speaking, a library card is a type of "non-fungible token". The real magic happens in the social ecosystems and institutions that define relationships using those tokens (same as with fungible tokens, which are otherwise just paper).
[0] https://theblockchainsocialist.com/unlocked-the-best-leftist...
With an NFT, your "copy" of the actual work is totally indistinguishable from every other. The whole concept of ownership here is also incredibly abstract.
I'm not saying there will never be a legitimate use case for something like an NFT, but I think we haven't seen it yet.