That being said, with NFTs I have never met any truly technologically knowledgeable person who could explain me in detail why it solves the problems it (wrongfully) claimed to solve.
Suppose I'm a small indie game studio. I create a game, and this game has skins for characters, weapons, what have you. I want to build a real money economy around these assets, but don't have the manpower to deal with payment processors, build a marketplace, etc. My company could just represent the skins as ERC721 tokens and instantly have access to the wealth of infrastructure that already supports the ERC721 standard. People can buy and sell on a marketplace of their choosing (Opensea, Blur, etc.), they can manage their assets using a wallet of their choice (Metamask, Rainbow, Frame, Coinbase Wallet, etc.).
This is just one example, but can be applied to literally any non-fungible asset that be represented digitally. And although the application I mentioned is primarily a financial one (because Ethereum is the internet of finance), there are certainly non-financial use cases for having a fully interoperable, decentralized representation of a digital good.
It's important to understand that NFTs didn't invent digital scarcity. This is an idea that's existed for a long time. Downloading a song I have to pay for, League of Legends issuing a limited edition skin, even the notion of a privileged role on a website (e.g. moderator) implies some sort of digital scarcity. People value having status, people value having scarce things, NFTs didn't invent that idea, they just make it much easier to represent these things in a very standard way and plug into mechanisms that allow for price discovery of these things (which I repeat, already are deemed to have value, but have extremely high friction to trade).
Maybe you don't understand because you aren't a digital native. I grew up playing World of Warcraft, and even from a young age I understood the power of having something other people didn't have. When I saw other players with their Naxxramas gear and I'm sitting there in normal Uncommons, it implied a difference of status. There was value in getting this gear because it made you feel special and important, or part of a certain community. The entire premise of the game revolves around the idea of scarcity (people have to work to get the best gear). If people had the best gear from the start, they wouldn't show up to raid every week, they wouldn't spend hours and hours farming materials or gold. That's digital scarcity, it's always existed.
It's not a real money economy when you're asking your customers to first convert their money to crypto magic beans. Dealing with crypto exchanges has been shown to be a great way to put your money into scammers' pockets. Customers will blame you when that happens.
If you want to sell skins, why not let customers pay with real money via Stripe or another payment API? It's certainly a much easier integration task than reconciling your game database with the Ethereum state of those assets, and the end-user UX is lightyears better so you'll probably sell a lot more skins.
This Instagram NFT shutdown demonstrates again that the mainstream has no appetite for crypto despite the breathless claims of the past ten years.
Because stripe takes a massive cut?
"the end-user UX is lightyears better so you'll probably sell a lot more skins"
for now
"This Instagram NFT shutdown demonstrates again that the mainstream has no appetite for crypto despite the breathless claims of the past ten years."
Everybody in the community already knew this. Like you've said, the UX isn't there yet. That's obvious to anyone that is in the space. Nobody was sitting here applauding Meta for their obvious bandwagoning onto the latest thing. Maybe if they actually wanted people to adopt NFTs they should work on improving the UX or build some fucking infrastructure instead of just leeching off the community trying to make a buck. If you want people to display their art as NFTs on instagram, then create an Oculus App that's a virtual art gallery, allow people to display their instagram NFTs in that gallery. Interface with other technologies that already exist in the space. Use your billions and billions of dollars to make the experience better for everyone. They didn't even fucking attempt to build anything.
With crypto prices trending down, your game skin business is probably going to lose more money just to the crypto exchange rate than they'd pay out to Stripe... And meanwhile you didn't get any of the convenience of using Stripe, so your revenue is probably a lot smaller because your players just aren't using the feature.
2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction, sure, but after that you have actual fiat money that you can use to pay salaries and suppliers.
Ethereum isn't free, either. You gas fees, withdrawal fees, and the volatility in selling. Probably comes out to a little less in total, but is a 0.5% saving worth adding all that attrition to your sales process?
People want to pay in their local currency with their local bank account not jump through shady hoops. I want to play videogames not chat with little girls in the Philippines.
Shows complete lack of understanding of what you're talking about.
NFT seems only useful if there is a zero trust situation and irreversibility is wanted, but I see nearly no situation where this is the case.
The ability to say this with a straight face and realise nothing is amazing.
Then there's no need for Ethereum.
I mean, knock yourself out, and build your tower of Babel where every next layer is an increasingly complex patchwork of workarounds, but don't pretend that this is somehow good, great, fats, amazing, better than grilled cheese etc.
Or a database on the game server…
People keep trying to shoehorn blockchain whatever into places where a simple database would suffice and already exists.
Nobody is going to save in game character state in a Account Abstraction and Application Specific Rollup.
Many times while playing the game, I changed my main character, but had skins for other characters I no longer played (maybe they got nerfed or something). It would be great if I could exchange those skins for other skins of equal value for the character I switched to.
Yes, the company itself could implement all these different features, but at that point you're re-inventing the wheel. We have a set of standards regarding digital assets, and the technology already exists to do the things I mentioned seamlessly. The only thing the company needs to do is implement their assets as part of that (ERC721) standard.
I hope you understand that for the same reason, Riot does not want you to be able to sell your skins?
The NFT spec doesn't even guarantee the basics of what it needs to support.
The game publisher still has the final authority on whether a skin is displayed in game or not, and no blockchain is going to change that.
The reason Riot doesn't do this is that it would reduce profits. If they would make more money otherwise, they would be doing that already.
One look at this line and all further delusional house of cards falls down. There are no technical possibilities for NFTs to represent anything, it is technically impossible for current chains. There are only two exceptions - punk pixel art because they live fully on chain, and ENS records which are somewhat useful but only inside tokenbro industry.
But doing all the work to integrate ERC721 into your game might take the same time (or more) than a simple centralized payment system (not to mention that transacting these ERCshits is costly, more than 5USD per trade most of the time). So why bother?
The DX can continue to get better, but that’s not what is holding game devs back from choosing an L2.
If another, which one? Take in account that L2s are based on a network of channels. You can only transfer value atomically among a network of channels if the tokens being transferred across the channels are fungible, otherwise what you transfer from Alice to Bob is not the same than what you transfer from Bob to Carol.
Why do some people insist that if others disagree with their opinion, it has to be because those others don't understand?