Hackernews loves to hate on crypto, if there is any part that should be hated on its nfts. Because they're a giant worthless scam.
- NFTs to manage licenses for digital works. Portable transferrable licenses would solve many of the evils of walled garden IP platforms (ex amazon video or itunes), especially if cross platform. I refuse to "purchase" digital content in a way that I'm subject to arbitrary platform rules and threat of my library disappearing: it's all effectively renting with fraudulent UI labels.
- Media use licenses: I'd love to be able to buy an NFT for use of a song, 'point' the NFT at a youtube URL and that makes the video live and youtube would exempt me from their content ID system destroying my work with erroneous IP claims. If I get bored with my video, I could resell that license to someone else. Performance rights and public viewing rights for theaters could also use a similar system. It's currently very hard for a third party to independently validate a license, would be sweet if it was just an API call.
- Cross platform game items: ex. someone could create a P2P MMO where people can host their own servers and items are durable. Would take some thinking to make 'drop' logic fair across servers (can't create a server that drops every item after killing any mob), but I think it's a tractable problem if smart people put enough work and thought into it.
But yeah, buying a pointer to a URL which happens to currently serve a given image is a brittle ridiculous system that will likely come crashing down within a decade.
It can be "an NFT of that person". The NFT is the contract and the image, name and descriptions can be considered metadata. I think you're unnecessarily picky here: Strictly speaking, you're also not buying "a song of the Beatles", you're buying a copy/recording of an encoded piece of convoluted sinus waves or whatever.
Relevant art work: "Ceci n’est pas une pipe.", La trahison des images from René Magritte.
You can call them a scam but they're clearly not worthless.
Flipping NFTs can be incredibly profitable.
Just because there are currently people willing to pay a lot of money for something, and there are currently people making money flipping that thing, doesn't mean that thing will be valuable in the future.
Every time I see a discussion about NFTs, it seems people assume that other people value things the same way as them. It’s a major cognitive bias called naïve realism.
People value things differently then you. I literally pay more money for things made by bands I like, for example.
So assuming you've done your research, it is known up front to be worthless and yet you are buying it anyway with the intent to defraud someone else. Or you haven't done your research and you end up being the sucker in this setup. Either way, art NFTs are pretty definitionally a scam.
The word "scam" is thrown around far too much by critics of cryptocurrencies. Think what you will of bitcoin or ethereum, but neither one is a scam. NFTs, on the other hand, unequivocally are scams.
You can think of NFTs as being overvalued or worthless, but that doesn't make them a scam. Just don't buy them. Likewise, NFTs don't come with any promise that they gain in value, that too is on the buyer.
The better marketplaces include verification of authorship. Adobe is including proof of authorship into its suite of tools.
There's bots now crawling for knock-offs and cross chain mints.
So in the best of cases...if a verified author mints a verified work, which includes a copyright/usage statement, and I buy it...what do I legally own?
I think that's a question for the lawyers.
Heck I have old things that I want to get rid of but because no one really wants it, I can’t sell it for any price that’s worth the effort, despite being a physical item having intrinsic value.