Some are and they are overfitting those cases to an entire technology. It's understandable to see that nuance get lost on Twitter, but disappointing to see on a tech forum. It's like discounting email because it enables nigerian prince scams.
https://www.wired.com/2001/12/buy-a-star-but-its-not-yours/
But good news! You can also get your star registered on the blockchain now. Whether that's any better than the ISR's legacy offering (a certificate and an entry in their own ledger) is up to you.
https://nftevening.com/star-naming-registry-gets-an-nft-twis...
Really, both products are just selling a story- a physical ledger in a vault in Geneva in the first instance, now updated to be an entry on a distributed ledger. These blockchain NFTs just make it easier for people who don't have the infrastructure of a company like the ISR to share one big ledger and dump whatever they want on there and call it an NFT.
The equivalent of email here is the blockchain ledger technology, the equivalent of Nigerian email scams are NFTs.
I suppose there might be some genuinely useful or interesting non-fungible blockchain tokens, but entries on a ledger that say you own a jpeg or whatever are not any more interesting than entries in ISR's Genevan vault.
Like, imagine if JWTs were 99% part of an MLM scheme and 1% used for authentication. People would be skeptical!
Tell that to Uniswap: https://uniswap.org/blog/uniswap-v3/
It's when people started hyping up NFTs as their own thing that stuff got weird and stupid. Like, phone numbers are useful, but vanity phone numbers definitely aren't solving any problems other than proving you have one:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/world/wp/2018/02/13/feat...
NFTs are a technical detail, but they're exciting. I'm also excited about webrtc and webauthn. These technologies enable new businesses to exist, like Uniswap.
> phone numbers are useful, but vanity phone numbers definitely aren't solving any problems other than proving you have one
Vanity phone numbers aren't a terrible comparison to the current NFT art craze.
But also, vanity phone numbers have been popular for as long as I can remember, in every location around the world. This has been true since the invention of the telephone.
It used to be that having a 212 area code number was very prestigious. That was true because it created the appearance of doing business in NYC, which meant you must be important. After all, your business exists in NYC!
Also every possible analog of vanity phone numbers that I can think of has been wildly successful. Squatting domain names comes to mind, but also registering your nickname first on whatever the next hot tech service is. If your Twitter username is <4 characters, you're probably somewhat important, because at the very least it means you were early to Twitter.
The article you linked about phone numbers is exactly the reason why art NFTs are working and will continue to grow.
> “This number gives the impression that I am distinguished, which helps me get business, especially among officials in the state ministries who I am dealing with,” he said. “If I call them from a regular number, they wouldn’t answer my call, but when they see this number, they can’t ignore it because they know a VIP is calling them.”
> “It helps me with marketing the company,” he said. “After getting one for $100, it’s helped my business grow.”
> “He cherishes it,” Mohsen said. “Just like wine, the older it gets the more valuable it becomes.”
This all seems like very normal human stuff to me.
I would encourage you to try turning on no clip or “god mode” for a game and see how much fun you have and for how long.
It was my experience that it’s fun at first but then gets boring real quick. There is value in constraints as it gives you something you can work at and achieve.