NFTs are technically good, with strong fundamentals, and real world applications, the same way ICOs were. But the way they are used has been absolute shit, and nothing sort of utterly useless.
Unfortunately even more than that they lend themselves to raising funds for vaporware, and I don't think there was a single ICO that actually resulted in a real-world product.
NFTs are essentially a reboot of ICO, except instead of a million tokens each representing a small percentage of ownership, you sell a single token representing 100% ownership. I think they could still be used to fund artists (I think of them more as patronage than trading cards), but very few artists are actually raising funds this way, the market is almost entirely trash being wash traded and plots of land in metaverses that don't exist yet.
I think they will suffer the same fate I see in crypto over and over again, any legitimate use case is totally overwhelmed by the number of scams, makes the whole thing wholly unattractive to participate in.
ICO's are a scam because they are essentially unregulated securities.
If all securities were unregulated, then they would all be scams.
The moment you strongly regulate ICO's, then they don't get their pop, they lose their allure, and they make no sense.
There's no material or commercial advantage to Crypto or NFT's, or rather, any advantages they might offer are outweighed by the drawbacks.
And so the big remaining advantage is for scammers, which is why they take advantage of it.
I'm aware there's thousands of dApps and DAOs but I don't know what any of them actually do besides pay early participants with funds derived from later participants.
I keep thinking that all the use-cases for NFT's can be replaced with current digital certificate signing. Transferring something only needs signing with the private key, right?
What are the real-world use-cases for NFT that simple and existing PGP signing won't work for?
You can't do that with PGP. You'd need to run a bank to get most of that and some of that is illegal on a global level so even as a bank you'd have to dip outside the law. These are the real uses of NFTs, not artificial scarcity magic internet tokens associated with procedurally generated soulless art from templates made in paint over 5 minutes.
Can you end the license before expiry? Because if you cannot, then it isn't useful. License holders like to know that they can revoke the license if terms are not met.
> You can create a token which pays royalties to an artist with every sale.
Can you end the royalties? Who gets the royalty when a dispute arises is frequently decided by the courts.
> You can create smart financial instruments which are technically NFTs and which skip the regulation put on the financial industry to perform more risky investments, and even automate functions like profit sharing or paying off a bond.
So, enable one to skip the laws? That doesn't sound very much like something society wants.
> You'd need to run a bank to get most of that and some of that is illegal on a global level so even as a bank you'd have to dip outside the law.
Using a tool or instrument to do something illegal doesn't make it okay to do that thing.
Of course you can, you just need to specify terms. Terms that can be in some reliable way observed by the blockchain, of course, so you'd need a trustworthy oracle or whatever to actually observe activities outside the state.
> Can you end the royalties? Who gets the royalty when a dispute arises is frequently decided by the courts.
If that's part of the contract, then yes. A smart contract is not necessarily a legally binding contract, it's a computer program which can be or represent some actual legal instrument. Once a contract is written, it cannot be revoked, unless it itself contains code that allows for one or both parties to make it not function. At the moment it is created, it becomes just an entity on the blockchain, linked to the parties by nothing but the fact that under certain conditions it will perform certain actions, which can relate to certain accounts.
> So, enable one to skip the laws?
Yes, this is a fundamental belief that can't really be separated from blockchain technology. All data and all things of value are equal before the law and you can sell illegal bonds as easily as a kid can sell him ms paint art. For several reasons, you can imagine the most reprehensible type of data or instrument one could sell online, and blockchain tech would declare that it deserves to be traded on a public market like any other commodity.
> Using a tool or instrument to do something illegal doesn't make it okay to do that thing.
Something being illegal doesn't mean it's not okay to do. Using a method which makes a law impossible to actually enforce makes that thing effectively not a law, and to do or enable that is to declare to the world that this thing should not be illegal. Fundamental, again, I cannot see a way of separating this from blockchains with arbitrary smart contracts.
Actual contracts have some very good properties: they must be legal, and they are open to (some) interpretation in case they aren’t perfectly written. And we have a process for resolving disputes that doesn’t involve forking the entire blockchain.
That the technology is sound is not hugely relevant.
The commercial notion of NFT's is nonsensical.