Well, I saved a bunch of that art and can view it any time.
I just can’t see why it’d be valuable to anyone, unless they’re just caught up in the hype and don’t think too hard about it. I can however see people taking advantage of the many, many people who feel like they missed out on, say, Bitcoin and want to get in on ”crypto”.
Patreon's been solving the problem of "open source funding" for about a decade without that part.
A problem of PoW based consensus, and will not be relevant to PoS/X based consensus.
> absurdly inefficient distributed database.
A decentralized distributed database with read/append commands available to any participant.
> Patreon
A centralized company.
You're not wrong, but you aren't making any points that people who are interested in crypto don't already know, or care about.
It's relevant now.
"Maybe someday crypto will move off of PoW so you should completely ignore the fact that there the networks exist entirely because PoW is how people get paid" is a bunch of bullshit that does nothing to change the fact that Proof Of Wasting A Lot Of Power On Nothing is how it works right now. Right now I consider crypto finding a way to work that doesn't burn shit-tons of energy to be about as likely as The Year Of Linux On The Desktop finally coming to pass.
Suppose you wanted a distributed system where arbitrary nodes can enter without vetting. You'd need to be robust to adversarial nodes that lie and collude. Distributed consensus under asynchrony and adversaries seriously ramps up the difficulty of already challenging problems typically solved by Paxos derived algorithms. The first moderately scalable solution to consensus within such a hostile environment and with relatively few moving parts was built on a proof of work scheme inspired by hashcash. It's not inefficient, it's just a complex domain.
It should be noted that NFTs run on Ethereum which has been in the process of moving to the vastly more efficient proof of stake scheme.
> Patreon's been solving the problem of "open source funding" for about a decade without that part.
There are a number of developing nations whose citizens cannot participate on Patreon. For others, there are workarounds that involve hurdles like navigating providers with worse customer service rep than paypal, giving out sensitive identification, high fees, high withdrawal friction and chaining various third parties who themselves might disappear or be indirectly connected to fraudulent banks.
Art isn't some magic phenomenon. Many many people know that it has value! They pay a lot of money to exclusively own something that can almost always be trivially copied, not because they care it can be trivially copied, but because they _don't_ care.
Someone can use it to have a really ironclad DRM implementation, guarding the art you saved and to make sure only its approved owner can view it (mimicking the tyranny of physical scarcity of meatspace for cyberspace goods).
The reason you saved it and can view it is that nobody's doing that yet. And because there are way easier and cheaper ways to implement DRM than Solar System-sized mechs, nobody probably ever will use NFTs for that. : p
If NFTs get big enough, there's no reason to believe that the NFT exchanges wouldn't have to register with the government/IRS.
You wouldn't trust your NBA Topshot ownership to .. the NBA? Of course you would - SQL DB strictly better.