NFT's aren't the answer to the problems of digital art

Your point that they are status markers has something, though! Especially given how most of the successful work seems to be operating under completely different aesthetics than those non-filthy-rich people enjoy looking at and funding (seriously all these randomly-generated things are ugly); the "fine art" world has had increasing amounts of work that you have to be trained to see as "good art" ever since photography made accurate depictions of a scene something everyone could have for very little effort.

I feel like a lot of people (particularly on this site) see these kinds of things as shallow, uninteresting, and contributory to a lot of the worst parts of society. It feels… odd… to hear them invoked as a positive/useful thing.

Like, yes, I get it, a lot of people are shallow and want status symbols to fill the voids in their souls and give their lives meaning. But the idea of taking the clout-chasing mechanics that wreak so much havoc on society and going “what if we had more of that?”… well it feels a little like trying to invent digital junk food because real world junk food sells so well.

I think this is a limited definition of what an NFT can be.

I've come round to the position that NFTs are not going away precisely because of this, despite not agreeing with the value proposition myself.

If it's for exclusivity, why hide your identity? Is a list of members the club maintains not good enough?

Umm, hasn't this been a thing since art has been seen as an investment?

>Never in history has anyone been able to buy shares of highly coveted art... maybe now you can

Well, firstly, let's be clear that it's highly contentious whether you meaningfully own the art if you own an NFT. But let's assume that's a solved problem. YOu can already buy shares of highly coveted art - https://www.masterworks.io . It's exactly the same model as NFTs - some individual buys the actual art, then they offering to sell "shares" of the art. The difference is that Masterworks doesn't carry all the risk of being scammed in the crypto market.

My mother-in-law would be as almost dismissive of NFTs as I am, except she doesn't understand technology so she won't be as articulate about it.

I think some crypto enthusiasts hang out with other crypto enthusiasts way too much and that is how they get HODler ideas and drive the price of things up like

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm

People on HN are mostly normies, except technically articulate. Crypto enthusiasts think we hate crypto, but it's because we're reflective of the wider community which feels like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogHtl6UFSSI

I mean, no? Ownership is always based on societal constructs; in the useful sense it means that the state is enforcing it. If someone takes it you can use violence or the threat of violence (legitimately, by proxy) to retrieve it. If someone else claims that it is theirs they can attempt to retrieve it through courts (with the the backing of legitimate violence or threat of violence by proxy again). You may exclude people from the use of the thing you own (with violence or threat of violence by proxy, or sometimes, by direct violence for which the state will excuse you).

It devolves always to the state having an effective monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. This is a social construct in a sense, but NFTs are a poor substitute.

Notably, most NFTs can be replicated bit-for-bit, and anyone else can emit a new NFT with the same exact payload, only lacking the traceability, but otherwise indistinguishable from the original. The only way to prevent that would be legal action, in which case you might as well dispense with the notion of the NFT itself.

In fact, a great business if you want to get in on this scam is to just sell counterfeit NFTs; even openly counterfeit! Call yourself "The Copy-Cat" and just resell Copy-Cat original copies of existing high-value NFTs. Even in the real life art world it has transpired that well-done forgeries have acquired a value of their own.

For the Ellens and Kanyes of the world, it's great, because their work is already in-demand and can fetch a huge price on the NFT market. For the 90% of artists in the "long tail" of content production it's probably a net loss over more conventional funding means like Patreon, commissions, and Bandcamp. Even if these collect a higher portion of their income as fees, there's less up-front investment (and hence risk) for the artist.

Right-Click - Save image. Create an NFT, done. Work from an artist digitally is not unique and can be easily copied ( and even become more popular).

Creativity? Dogs, lost cowboy, punks, pigs, hungry aliens are the typical NFT's. That's not art, they mostly sell avatars.

ML models creating art => Not art and again the most technical knowledge person is getting paid.

Wash-trading has become the new normal. The people who pump and dump their own "art" see attraction and as usual, the average people are getting left behind with no piece of the pie. The most popular people ( not even artists) with the biggest following online win.

Nothing is legally backed. NTF's don't have copyright and you don't have a legal standing. BUT... You can cry on Twitter - https://twitter.com/RookieXBT/status/1421548360868286464?ref...

Mostly it's a technical person that steals artwork or just hires a digital designer for a couple of hours and then creates the NFT: https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/20/22334527/nft-scams-artist...

That's realism.

This has been happening for 1000s of years already before NFTs.

> Never in history has anyone been able to buy shares of highly coveted art... maybe now you can?

Yes, they have: https://www.masterworks.io/

The problem is that just about everyone here could be a multi-millionaire if they had just taken a few minutes to set up pool mining on their gaming rig back in 2010.

I think there is a tremendous amount of latent bitterness, embarrassment, and frustration about this. I include myself in this group. Folks should pause to reflect on this and determine how much these facts are clouding their opinions.

Crypto is just a new interesting technology. Maybe it will last, maybe not. But the amount of hate and skepticism on this forum is way, way out of proportion to the reality of the thing.

What? Anyone can buy a part-share of any work of art. Want to own a 5% share of the Mona Lisa, just ask. If the owner want they can sell you a percentage of that object. Or you can buy a percentage without ownership rights. Or do anything else you want. Property law and the concept of partial ownerships has been around for thousands of years. Most every possible permutation is available should two parties agree.

No, I don't buy this. Patreon already exists. And when you factor in gas fees, people who use NFTs to support artists are picking one of the least efficient ways to do so. Etherium in its current form is not a scalable model for how to pay for content, the fees make micropayments unnecessarily cumbersome and inefficient.

The fact that none of these people who are using NFTs "to support artists" were interested in supporting digital artists through any of the multitude of existing ways that existed before NFTs leads me to cast serious doubt on their claims that they actually care about the art ecosystem.

So, let's say you actually want to support artists:

----

If you want to buy the digital equivalent of "shares" of an artist's work, use Patreon/Liberapay/etc and join the community of people who are regularly investing into their output. This is the preferable method for many indie artists, because many indie digital artists want predictable income, and Patreon allows you to commit to regular donations instead of one-off payments. Many artists will use Patreon as a way of soliciting early feedback and providing early access to their projects.

If you want to buy specific pieces, donate directly or just buy those pieces on any of the many art-selling sites that exist online (Gumroad, Itch, etc). This is the really straightforward way of saying "this thing that exists is worth money."

If you want to own something more tangible for supporting your artists, look into printing sites and physical products (Etsy, Topatoco, etc). This requires a little bit of setup from the artist, but not any more than NFTs would, and it allows you to somewhat "advertise" your support with physical objects in a more tangible/public way than NFTs would ever allow.

If you want to get something unique and personal out of supporting an artist, commission them. Commissions are often going to be more affordable than buying NFTs, they provide you with an actually unique product instead of just a unique ID number, they allow you to directly interact with the artist you're supporting, and commissions usually come with better IP assignments.

If you want to encourage investment into a piece of artwork, encourage the artist to set up a Kickstarter/IndieGoGo campaign. Kickstarter isn't just usable for funding theoretical products, artists can use Kickstarter to fund predictable work and specific releases. Krita for example used Kickstarter to fund development on specific features, even allowing contributors to "vote" on what features should be prioritized.

If you want status/clout for donating, and you want to be publicly recognized, sponsor artists. Many artists have systems where they'll give you public credit for sponsoring a piece of work. This is also a far better system than NFTs because that clout can't be re-sold or faked, and because the artist directly promotes you to everyone who sees their work; other people don't need to go find your digital wallet and validate it on the blockchain in order to recognize what you've done.

----

So what do NFTs provide that the above solutions don't? A tiny bit of standardization (although it's questionable how standardized they really are), and other than that, pretty much just speculation. NFTs are kind of awful at a lot of this stuff, they're expensive to create and trade, they're complicated to work with, validating copyright/legitimacy is annoying, they're more subject to regulation, they're less private, they can be traded around which devalues the original statement of buying them, a large percentage of them are subject to link rot, the "gamification" of them is laughably bad because gas fees make it impossible to do most interesting mechanics, and even their display/status value is underdeveloped and still in its infancy. But they allow you to gamble that the token you're holding will go up in value and that you can sell it later for a profit.

And that's why people buy them. Not to support artists, all of these people could have been supporting artists ages ago, and they didn't. They buy NTFs because they're a speculative asset. They talk about supporting artists because it makes them feel better and because that conversation feeds into the hype, and that helps their speculative assets grow in value. That's all that's happening here.

Getting paid for my work is a solved problem, I can draw a thing for a client and get money via PayPal or any of the other payment processors competing with it. I have a Patreon campaign to let my fans toss money in my tipjar for me to go draw whatever the heck I want to draw. So do people who make videos and 3d work. I see them doing it all the damn time.

Neither of these methods involve a system where huge numbers of people are converting energy into waste heat as they compete to be the one who gets the token reward for recording a pathetically small number of transactions.

"Proof of ownership"? How about "I have the source file and you don't"? How about "I have an email chain with the artist that goes from asking if they're open for work, through agreeing to a contract, and multiple WIP files, to a final rendering, source file, and settling up of the finances"? Why does converting energy into waste heat in competition to be the one rewarded for recording a tiny number of transactions need to be involved at all?

Which to me is very sad and uncreative. The entire point just flew straight over-head at ten thousand miles per hour. Yeah, centralized systems already do this; what is necessary to create a world where they don't? Where people can transfer value without the help of a centralized authority.

Ok so: "How do you verify authenticity". Two responses:

1) What if you don't? What if the NFT itself is the value? We already see this with, for example, the Bored Ape Yacht Club; people can create duplicates, but the originals are cryptographically verified. They created value out of thin air, which is where all value comes from at the end of the day.

2) And in other situations, where the value comes from something real outside the blockchain like the original artist; use centralized systems! It's not all or nothing! Centralized systems are great at verifying providence. Use 'em! "This NFT was the one the artist tweeted about".

Then they follow up with: "Lol I can just copy-paste".

Yeah! Isn't that fantastic? NFTs create value for the people who want that value, by having a concept of "ownership of the original". But nothing is stopping all of us from also enjoying it.

Finally, the end-stage of any debate always arrives at "its destroying the planet".

This is, of course, typed as a comment into a website via a computer burning dirty coal power, through 3,000 miles of underground plastic fiber and fifty network appliances, to a beefy server running in a data center. Afterward, Captain Planet will hop in their gas-burning car to drive to work, drink a grande Starbucks coffee from a disposable cup, flush the toilet ten times throughout the day, pick up the newest iPhone from the Apple Store on the drive home, then watch an hour of Foundation on their 65" TV with 5.1 surround sound.

I'm obviously being a dramatic. More generally and accurately; humanity is destroying the planet. We're really good at it. People act like NFTs are destroying the planet, while every day doing far more to destroy the planet than NFTs ever will. It's a bad argument, especially when NFTs (and ETH in general) present a fantastically optimizable solution to the problem of value ownership; they'll get more efficient over time. Data centers can easily be powered by clean energy.

Here's the axiom I've noticed: the pro-NFT crowd has seen every single argument against them. I don't know if the people who post articles & comments like these think they're being original, like they're the first one to notice that verifiable providence is a difficult problem, but trust me; many people in this community have been thinking about this long before you first heard the word "cryptocurrency". Your inability to exhibit creativity in reasoning about a solution to the problems you present does not mean there is no solution, or that the technology won't continue to flourish.

It did not. There are already plenty of ways artists can get paid for their work. If you had said "this creates another way for artists to get paid," sure (ignoring all the NFTs that are blatantly stolen), but asserting that this is the only way is false.

> The promise of NFTs is that they offer a different way for people to interact. Ownership is always based on social constructs, so folks that are involved in this space need to have some consensus of what it means to "own" an NFT on whatever chain.

I see "ownership" tossed around so often. But I just pulled up two recently sold listings on OpenSea (one from Bored Apes, the other from Cryptopunks), and unless OpenSea hides information if you're not logged in, there were no rights transferred for the original works themselves - you just own the NFT listing. What's the point of shelling out six figures for mass-generated artwork when you don't even have any IP rights?

Sure, there's the "exclusive community" of Bored Apes (though you can apparently have your NFT stolen but still be in the community, so...not sure how exclusive it really is), but other than that, it just seems like a way to flex on everyone.

I have more legally enforceable rights to a $20 drawing I commissioned (paid for on ko-fi) than many NFTs going for $100k+.

It's either a speculative bubble which will burst eventually, or the community is worth the price (plus the flexing privileges).

Maybe if everyone was really "believing" that ownership really originates from the Ethereum blockchain (just like beliving that strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is a basis for a system of government), then the ownership could be recognized socially without any coertion or violence. But so far the only people really beliving in this system of values are elites and crypto enthusiasts, so if you really are one of those people who want NFTs to be a basis for ownership, you've be better off pandering to the government to enact laws to arrest people for right-clicking.

Thus, its baked into the price; plenty of counterfeits exist, but the "real" one ("this is the one Deadmau5 tweeted about") will be worth the most.

The argument that this is antithetical to the distributed goals of blockchain are missing the point; its a marriage of old-school centralization and new-school peer-to-peer. Centralization is great for some things, like verifiable providence. It's been a negative force in other things, like limiting or taxing access to financial services & marketplaces.

Furthermore, if you're in the camp of "zero centralization"; it's great for that too. Imagine an artist publishing their GPG key, creating an NFT of a piece of art, then signing some part of the content of that NFT with their GPG key.

I've just enjoyed watching my Solana go up so that I have a way to make money off of this silliness. Just need to time the exit before the fad goes away.

Also to avoid scams as an investor, you'd typically want to invest in artists with a reputation.

If---in the traditional art world---you buy a $35,000 fine art photograph from a limited edition of 10 prints by the photographer, you also trust that the artist will not make a second run of 100 prints. Or if they do, that the second run will be denoted and priced differently, so that the original run retains most of its value.

TL;DR: NFT's are a money laundering and tax evasion scheme. There is no value for average consumers, unless the NFT appreciates in value over time and there remains a buyer's market for them. But that's highly volatile and uncertain.

In a way they do, they solve the problem that crypto was only about fungible stuff (money) before, now there's also non-fungible stuff. I think the point of NFTs is not exactly to prove that you own something, but to offer people an easy and non-fungible token to exchange with other people. The goal is not ownership but exchange (some would say speculation). At least that's how I understand it.

Maybe it is better to think about NFTs as public official (blockchain-backed) certificates of donation (or support) rather than assets.

This has been said time and time again about each and every "blockchain/defi" project for the past 10+ years: all the guarantees of blockchain protocols are within the blockchain. The very moment you try to put literally anything relating to outside of blockchain all you have is extremely inefficient append-only database - nothing more, nothing less.

NFTs are datums with an URL. That is all there is to an NFT. It's not a receipt for art, it has absolutely nothing to do with an art in question. To translate it to business it is a receipt for an entry to the Louvre with a URL pointing to an image of Mona Lisa. It does not prove your ownership of Mona Lisa. Anyone can access said URL without the receipt. There can be unlimited number of different unique receipts with same/similar URLs to same/similar image on Mona Lisa.

It is merely an overly complicated way of transferring cryptotokens.

This is fundamentally wrong.

NFTs allow you to show off who "owns"[0] something.

[0] for some generalized, possibly meaningless definition of "own". I say possibly meaningless, then again, what is property really, just a government-managed, non-fungible, token? Don't gaze too hard at the abyss, unless you are willing to let the abyss to gaze back.

You can not buy ownership of a digital artwork because the whole concept of owning a digital work is nonsensical. Ownership in the world of physical goods is not a law of nature but a legal concept. Ownership is essentially the right to control some resource. A collective of people agree that you have the right to control (by force) some physical thing, which is useful because otherwise everyone would be fighting violently for the possession of that thing. In the typical case the sovereign enforces the property rights. In the digital world this makes no sense because you can't possess information and you can't enforce property rights. Anyone can make a copy and everyone can have that information without anybody else losing anything. NFT is only a record that tells you who supposedly owns something but ownership means nothing without possession. NFT is like buying a land deed from a dysfunctional state: Yeah, everyone who beliefs in that state may agree that you are the owner but what use is it to you if a bunch of guys with guns are squatting on "your" land and you can do nothing about it? That is ownership without possession.

One thing to remember is that the first stage of a technological advancement is the bubble stage that leads to an influx of capital to build out the infrastructure.

Eventually we will be able to use this infrastructure to build out businesses with more economic value.

NFTs provide no new tools or even solutions for tracing, enforcing or indeed arbitrating licensing of a thing. Its just a hash. Photo stock sites already have perceptual hash tracing.

However for them its useless as they only ever sell licenses to use the artwork, not "ownership". They still retain the original copyright, which allows them to sell licenses to use the image/sound/thing

Suppose you take an amazing photo (or create digital artwork), and pack it up as an NFT on platform A using token/blockchain technology Alpha. Alice buys this token, and has some sort of limited ownership of your picture.

I (a nefarious user) take the same digital photo you displayed on your website, and sell it to Bob on platform B with blockchain Beta.

I also take your digital photo, make some minor alterations and put it up again on Platform A with Blockchain alpha and sell it to Charlie.

Alice, Bob, and Charlie all think they own the picture, and while they do own their own versions, how do we know Alice is the “right” owner of your photo?

Especially in the future when you’re not around to confirm the version Alice has is the right one?

So I claim this is worse than a regular license because you have to jump through crypto hoops that most people don't understand.

NFTs aren’t providing anything beyond what a COA provides, and the COA comes with a physical handwritten signature. Neither is any actual protection against determined forgers. As an occasional artist and photographer, I wonder if the solution to authenticating and valuing digital art is to sell the copyrights along with only a single digital and/or physical copy of the art, and then delete it. Make it unique to the buyer the same way a sculpture or painting is unique.

Granted, it's probably happening to some degree amongst the rubes. But I'm more convinced by the argument that the main driver behind NFT sales is a kind of pyramid scam: artists at the top get paid by anonymous "collectors" (read: crypto investors), which causes swarms of smaller artists enter and the price of eth to go up.

Much like an online game when you buy cosmetic digital goods to improve the look or performance of your game/player, to show off really.

In the meta/game world there will be unique digital goods that could be built to use an ownership/db system that isn't proprietary to the game/app/world. This is almost a psychological operation or training mission for that type of setup from games to the "real" meta world.

Besides that, NFTs at the root were created as a product to buy with crypto that still essentially stores value. Like art today, they are a way to pass value, in some cases that will be to evade oversight, in other cases that will be to share, on other cases to own, in others to speculate. People buying actual goods with crypto would make it go down, so NFTs are a hedge to offset that essentially to keep speculation high.

Essentially cryptocurrency creators/developers wanted a way to increase circulation, but not decrease the value, so they chose art/interactives as that product. It was a product created for crypto and potentially the future. Whether NFTs are that solution or not, digital goods do need some way outside systems to share across other worlds/views/apps/games.

We have this already pretty much there with just the internet, but some want a large market within these systems with unique products being a way to create scarcity and potentially demand by limiting supply, but an external digital rights system.

In the end though the root cause of NFTs being created was increasing cryptocurrency circulation with a way to essentially "lock up" some value like a vault or staking would do.

I'm more interested in things like CityDAO where you can buy land and get a city-minted NFT that represents land ownership.

This a social/economic problem, not a technological one.

The Internet itself is built on open protocols and could well be decentralized. Instead we've allowed corporations to build walled gardens on top of it.

Blockchains won't magically solve this. They're just infrastructure, like a cloud database. From a meaningful decentralization perspective, it doesn't matter who's offering their computing resources to make it work.

What matters is the applications and access points that are built on top of the infra. Like the modern Web, this is exactly where we'll see centralization, censorship, etc. happen. Again.

Twitter isn't promoting Mastodon, it's promoting NFTs. Reddit isn't opening up its APIs to 3rd parties, it's minting tokens. The fact that the same sites that centralized the web in the first place are interested in NFTs is strong evidence that they don't see NFTs as a threat to their control.

Sure, it might go back down to being a genuine decentralised currency as it was always meant to be, but the same could be said for the old currencies that became investment vehicles like gold.

As for NFT's, I'm steering clear of them for now, but from what I know they're actually quite centralised, even though from a technical standpoint they don't have to be.

If ethereum was 0.001 as valuable and thus could be x1000 more resource efficient and x1000 more affordable to build on, it would be neat. At this point the only thing that seems worth building are things to further pump value, and POW is a monster that we will not be able to get back into it‘s cage.

Every cryptocurrency that exist is built on the same fundamental principle: people with the most existing wealth (hash power in PoW, existing crypto in PoS, storage space in PoST) make the most income (whatever crypto in question). All cryptocurrency fundamentally is built on the basis of enriching the already-rich. Yes, cryptocurrency is decentralized, but decentralization alone is not a magical recipe for something being of benefit to all mankind.

Take BAYC, for example. Tradeable membership to a "community" whose only significance is that you purchased membership into an ever-expensive community to belong to. We can say what the price of a membership is quite easily, but can we say what the value of that membership is? If the price of membership goes up, does that make the community "better"? It is decentralized, is it therefore good? The drug trade is decentralized, is it therefore good?

In non-crypto assets, what percentage of wealth is owned by the top 1%? How about in crypto assets?

as for IPFS: You put something on IPFS, what is the guarantee that it will continue to exist on IPFS? It's entirely consensual; there's no guarantee that such a thing will continue to exist on the network unless someone consents to store it. So if you want to actually deliver on that guarantee, what do you do, run an IPFS node that always hosts that file? Feels like you're back at square one, needing to run a server to guarantee that a given file continues to be available.

Now, that's not to say IPFS isn't useful at all! It's very cool! The promise of duplicability and the way in which frequently-accessed data will be more widely replicated is incredibly fascinating on its own, and has tremendous value. I'm a server operator, so the notion of setting up a node to permanently host a particular item in IPFS doesn't bother me. But we shouldn't pretend that IPFS is a magic solution that guarantees the permanent storage of everything put on it. It's a nice addressing and content replication system.

I'm really optimistic about the concept of NFTs in the long run, and about the applications of solutions to the double-spend problem generally. My pessimism is not in the concept of NFTs, it's in the concept of blockchains, which are fundamentally only capable of increasing inequality. The entire concept of what makes blockchains secure is "in order to attack it, you have to have a lot of wealth, so you'd be destroying your own wealth": the security paradigm is "a rich person would not elect to sacrifice their own riches". The entire system is based on this premise.

When we have non-blockchain solutions to the double-spend problem, or NFTs that can be implemented without this promise of increasing inequality, I'll be excited about the space.

Let's compare it to it's earliest predecessor technology: Git[0]. This is a very useful technology within the problem domain of how to store and synchronize source code repositories (although it's UI sucks). However, individual users still need to choose who to synchronize with and what commits to accept. What blockchains add are restrictions to this model that make sense for the problem domain of digital currency: namely, you need to burn energy in order to commit, and you have to follow specific validity rules in order for your commit to be valid. These rules are specifically crafted to ensure scarcity and control over the resource the blockchain ledger tracks.

The problem is that most decentralized applications do not need a notion of scarcity. The whole damned point of P2P is to punish artificial scarcity. If I want to communicate to someone else over a decentralized network, I don't need a Sybil-resistant ledger to do so. I just need a private/public key pair and some means to match interested recipients and senders. Same with a lot of other decentralized use cases, which also don't need to be able to track scarce assets.

My personal economic theory is that we should try to maximize this effect. Make as much value as we can digital and try to make all digital value as free as we can make it. This should in theory create huge value in the world at very low cost. So to me, even if NFTs could prevent copying, it would be going in entirely the wrong direction. The whole desire to lock down digital goods in the first place seems like the biggest economic foot gun I can think of.

Just like software.

The value is in a piece of blockchain which makes it speculation scam. That someone made money from a speculation scam doesn't make it less of a scam.

the NFT thing is fine, but I just don't think it hits the same as wandering around a friends house and seeing a cool painting on the wall. You having a NFT with a link to an image that's hosted on some site that's in some kind of NFT wallet or on your personal website just doesn't have the same effect.

Not sure why some NFT prices are so high, maybe some people are just very rich and are having fun.

For example, how Ububtu authenticates its Linux installers, https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/how-to-verify-ubuntu#1-overview

NFT is just a JSON with a URL, and if the URL isn't guaranteeing immutability, then NFT isn't either.

https://c2pa.org/

I'm actually unsure what you gain from NFTs over simple PGP except the buzzword factor.

If you're speaking and two different news agencies record it, there will be two slightly different recordings, which will have two different files, with two different hashes.

Hell, NFTs don't work like this. They are a hash of an entire file. If I take a slice of a speech for a deep fake, that's a different "file" from the whole speech and will have a different hash.

Every defense of NFTs is always like this, flailing around, misunderstanding basic reality, human interaction, even their own technology, just to try to keep the grift going. It's frustrating.

As far as I can tell every one I see talking about or collecting NFTs are adults. I doubt you are looking at them honestly if you think they were designed to take money from kids. NFT art could be bad or good regardless but you seem motivated by your ties to the 'old way' based on your comment.

All this other stuff is just weirdness borne of weird people being weird during a weird time.

Isn't my favourite open world space game ultimately managed by a centralised developer, creating a centralised game; and recognition of my "ownership" only as meaningful as the developer happy for it to be?

Put it another way, what difference is there for me as a user compared to "owning" a ship in my open-world space game today?

The NFT is worthless bunk, because the company is free to print just as many of the items as they please.

What you seem to be describing is "Here's something you might want to do in a game, and here's how you could implement that with NFTs" but what you seem to be missing is I can do exactly the same thing without NFTs, and in most of your scenarios as the game developer the NFT solution gives me less flexibility, less control and potentially restrict my ability to monetize. As a game developer I need to be able to step in and fix the economy if it breaks.

What you need to be doing is demonstrate scenarios that we can't trivially solve through traditional methods. The steam store already exists, you're not solving a problem by re-writing it to use NFTs.

Where's the decentralised part there? A game maker can already add a row to their database saying your account owns the item with a lot less overhead. You already have to rely on the game maker anyway to allow you to use it in the game, whether it's a row in a table, a digitally signed message, an NFT or a paper certificate.

NFTs would add lots of complexity to the cases you mentioned, but I don't see that they're bringing any value other than buzzword compliance.

Nintendo can do this all currently. NFTs, crypto, Blockchain all have nothing to do with it.

> I myself have invested in it's foundations for the long term

Ahhhhhhh there it is.

Normally its etiquette to start the post off with *Disclaimer: I have financially invested in foo, bar, baz which are companies that do the idea im promoting"

This seems like a win-win to me. Gambling is a waste of money and NFT gaming sounds like an awful slog ("play to earn" indeed) combined with "pay to win" for those that can afford it.

No thanks.

How can the value of a t-shirt in Animal Crossing be preserved beyond the life of the game?

The amount of effort it would take to support every item for every single game in every single game is impossible.

That means developers will:

1. Have to actually care about implementing items from many other games. 2. Have to choose a subset of items to implement (the valuable ones)

meaning that the only things worth owning NFTs of are the most valuable items in the game.

Also, NFTs are literally just pointers to data, there would be absolutely nothing stopping any game developer from inferring hash 0cd42e... as an entirely different item, or one with entirely different stats.

What appeal does this actually serve? Developers of different games and companies have to collaborate still, and they could just do that with an SQL database and APIs. Infact, that approach would be millions of times quicker, more efficient, and with no blockchain overhead.

Nothing is really new under the Sun.

sometimes this metadata matters, other times it doesnt at all. its just a handshake between two people.

relationships matter. if you mess up your metadata, rugpull your audience, remint the same works, break the trust with your audience, thnen your not gonna have a good time. but if you understand your community, be transparent and giving, and participate, you will have much stronger connections with others.

nft critics ironically cant see past the money.

But the actual solution has been around for centuries. An artist can sign their work or tailor it directly for the purchaser. Artists have been doing commissions online forever now and you can have them write your name if you want. Anyone out there "stealing" work you bought is either saving something with your name on it, or they're modifying it to remove your name.

No artist views NFTs as a solution to an already solved problem. They're either seeing it as a scam and avoiding it, or they're seeing it as a scam that they can quickly cash in on. Countless artists are on twitter and various places online making rock-solid careers out of selling art commissions. NFTs were never a part of it. The people proposing it as a solution are the ones "investing" in NFTs.

Has anybody tried to use this to provide scarcity for a digital artifact besides game developers?

A picture can always be screenshotted, so instead think more a 3D digital environment, sort of like a FPS but without the guns, instead a painting or sculpture you can walk around in.

its actually a really neat way to onboard users to chain without needing to go through a cex and spend money.

NFTs seem pretty ineffective. At best you can argue a walled garden might end up being the most popular incarnation of the metaverse, but its not fundamental to it.