Comment by hpoe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hpoe | Hacker News Reader

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You could probably remove the frist 2 words and the article would be just as good. It feels to me like NFTs are one of those things that sounds really good in concept and seems so sensical and appealing from people in the "business" but looking at it form the outside it seems like just complete nonsenese.

The closest thing to compare it to is MS BizTalk, XSLT, or half a dozen of those other "enterprise" services and technologies that always promised to change the world but seem to never really pan out, and everyone who hears about the project responds with a "WTF why are you doing it that way?" it seems like it is trying to solve a metaproblem that not many people have.

But I'll admit maybe I don't understand the whole thing and am just not enlightened enough to see the brilliance. I know plenty of architects who are fluent in powerpoint that would tell me the same thing about Enterprise Integrations.

>It feels to me like NFTs are one of those things that sounds really good in concept and seems so sensical and appealing from people in the "business" but looking at it form the outside it seems like just complete nonsenese.

I would have almost said the opposite (for certain use cases).

From a totally rationalist point of view (which many tech people like to think they have), artificial scarcity of digital artifacts--especially those related to fashion--seems like nonsense. However, if you concede that there is a such a thing as fashion, collectibles, etc., why wouldn't it extend to an online environment?

IMO, it breaks down once you aren't owning a digital thing and it just becomes effectively an online receipt for something you don't actually own. But in a game/online world environment it makes as much sense as a lot of unique collectibles. What is also true though is to the degree those collectibles exist within one company's playground, there's no need for decentralized ledgers.

> it seems like it is trying to solve a metaproblem that not many people have

A particular disease of people deeply engrossed in a field is the tendency to come up with interesting solutions and reverse engineer the problems they solve after the fact. Right now that's about 80% of 'interesting' things happening in computing.

You’re right… BizTalk was this box you could just draw in the middle of a spaghetti mess of systems and it would just magically make everything work. Blockchain is just this thing people bloop into your systems diagram and it will then magically make your idea work.

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