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Comment by gnrlst | Hacker News Reader

Parsing out the gold rush from this whole industry is difficult, and the speculative nature of NFTs has understandably turned a lot of people away.

However, NFTs are more than digital art, and frankly have nothing to do with art. Art is just a very superficial and speculative application, and has become synonymous with NFT, fueled by craze and media attention. It's akin to someone saying an electronic device is another word for tamagotchi.

I know this tech gets a lot of hate on HN, and I resonate with a lot of it, but I'm also trying to see beyond this gold rush. What I find interesting and promising is the ability to give uniqueness to THINGS in the digital world (not art necessarily), and to do so in a decentralized manner so that anyone can build applications that integrate those things in a certified and safe way thanks to trustless authenticity and consensus.

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What I find interesting and promising is the ability to give uniqueness to THINGS in the digital world (not art necessarily)..

That's not real though. Any scarcity in the digital world is people pretending that they have some sort of unique object. Just look at the number of people who post "bored ape" JPEGs in the comments on any story about NFT ownership - very obviously there is no uniqueness or scarcity or even ownership there.

Abundance is a fundamental property of digital data. It's trivially copyable at basically no cost. You can't remove that property and still share whatever the thing is with people.

I see this a lot, and I somewhat empathize with you for wanting there to be something interesting there. But what you're describing is just nonsensical. There is no such thing as a digital "THING". Any digital "THING" is only a thing via interpretation by a computer program that musts be TRUSTED to interpret it correctly. That fact makes the concept you're describing dead on arrival.

Cryptocurrencies and the very most-boring versions of "smart contracts" are the only things blockchains can do. Any time you're dealing with anything that's not:

1. Tokens themselves 2. Rules for transferring the tokens themselves

blockchain is purely worse than a non-blockchain alternative. Because you're necessarily involving 3rd-party trust, which is antithetical to the reason blockchain exists.

NFTs don't give uniqueness to things any more than URLs. Give a URL to a thing (whether it's a JPEG or something else) and that thing has a clear name and a clear domain, but the association to the thing is one-way and somebody else can still present the same content at another URL.

Whether the URL is verifiable with the domain's key is HTTPS and still doesn't do what you claim.

> What I find interesting and promising is the ability to give uniqueness to THINGS in the digital world

That's hashes you're thinking of. NFTs require hashes, but hashes don't require NFTs.

Whenever any cryptocurrency-related thing seems useful, you're seeing the potential of the underlying cryptography. Not the potential of the cryptocurrency thing.

Everything after that phrase does require the blockchain though- not individually, but as a sum it would be very difficult to bring that all together in a centralized manner.

Nope; you just need a P2P network. Exhibit A: BitTorrent. (Surprise surprise, the blockchain also requires an underlying P2P network.)

A blockchain is actually more centralised than the underlying distributed network; it introduces centralisation-related problems that wouldn't otherwise exist.

Yeah I agree. Though seems pedantic to imply blockchains aren't useful because they're "just" composed of cryptographic primitives. Shared state under potentially-adversarial conditions isn't an easy thing to achieve, and has usecases for which other P2P networks aren't sufficient.

I'm sure blockchains are useful sometimes. I have never seen such a case in real life, though. (Until a few months ago, I was still looking.)

I don't think they're useful to most people right now (or maybe ever), but there are some cool things in DeFi that are normally reserved for large institutions/not possible in traditional finance:

1. Being a liquidity provider to get a cut of exchange fees (https://docs.uniswap.org/protocol/concepts/V3-overview/conce...)

2. Flashloans for arbitrage (https://aave.com/flash-loans/)

3. Autonomous governance for protocol updates (https://compound.finance/governance)

4. Decentralized perpetual contracts (https://www.perp.com/)

5. Decentralized mutual insurance (https://nexusmutual.io/)

Many/all of these depend on speculation to derive value, but there's added value nonetheless

> What I find interesting and promising is the ability to give uniqueness to THINGS in the digital world

So DRM. Laundered through jargon to seem cool to some techies.

But what purpose does giving uniqueness to things that are by nature infinitely and indistinguishably replicable have?

The limitless perfect replicability of digital things is one of the key benefits of beeing digital. Imposing uniqueness is an artificial limitation.

That's not what NFTs are.

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