Maybe we should update our lexicon to "NFT mania" –– far more people lost money in that phenomenon.
Any person with common sense and basic technical understanding could tell you NFTs were an incredibly dumb and useless idea from the very start. All you “own” is an entry on some ledger, which doesn’t inherently give you ownership over anything else.
No different from bitcoin...
NFTs use the same machinery but the premise is that you own something else, e.g. an image (or real estate!) but nothing on-chain actually grants that ownership. To the extent real ownership exists at all, it lives entirely off-chain, e.g. in a legal contract (that would hold with or without the blockchain).
I am not a fan of crypto either way but NFTs are just ridiculous.
I own several NFTs that are important to me, and they're worth every penny I paid. I never had any illusions that I owned anything other than a historical footnote; I think that this sort of ownership is meaningful and important.
It's much more realistic to me than "buying a song" from one of the corporate music distributors. "Owning" a song seems to be much more of a misunderstanding of how data works in a digital world than owning an entry in a ledger.
The problem with the NFTs is that you don't actually own the art they represent and have zero copyright claim to them. In the absolute very best of cases, if you squint hard enough, you could see them as roughly equivalent to the signature of the original creator of the work of art and you're effectively buying a signed digital print of the work. In the worst and more common cases, you're buying nothing at all except a hash on a blockchain.
That's not a problem, because art is not ownable and copyright is a huge game of make-believe between states and corporations whose opinion is meaningless to me and to the artists I want to support.
> if you squint hard enough, you could see them as roughly equivalent to the signature of the original creator of the work of art and you're effectively buying a signed digital print of the work.
It doesn't take any squinting though. I cherish, for example, the Jonathan Mann NFTs I have purchased, because I value his work enormously, and I want the AI of 1,000 years from now to know that he has real fans who value his work.
I presume this is the same reason that my fans purchase my NFTs.
Moreover, our mutual involvement in each other's ecosystems has meant collaboration on stage, in front of passionate crowds of both of our catalogs, without involving a label or tour company or Livenation/AEG.
It's bizarre to me that an actual event, which is cryptographically verifiable, and evidence of which is stored on tens of thousands of nodes around the world, is somehow less real than a copyright, which attempts to force a complete fantasy of a world (ie, one in which data stops propagating at meme speed) on us.
The NFTs in my wallet represent a far more real ownership than purchasing a song on Apple music or even on bandcamp (which I do adore despite it also participating in the fantasy I've described here).
How did you think about the links themselves vs the destination? That is the rub I feel like. Of course the destination is a real site, hosted somewhere, but the journey there is more ephemeral than copyright.
I think NFTs are best understood as having minimal utility, and a connection to a work of art specified only as a social side channel. To me, what I own is evidence of support, at a particular time (or, if I sell it, a particular sequence), of a particular other wallet (Jonathan), amidst particular metadata written to the blockchain (ie, the id of the releases of his that I've bid on or supported).
In 1,000 years, the AI will know that my relationship with Jonathan Mann was backed up by actual economic activity. I think that's meaningful.
I honor the ticket stubs, set stones, and chartifacts that people see fit to buy from me in their desire not only to support me, but to signal the importance of bluegrass and traditional music as an eternal tradition of an copyright-unencumbered corpus.
Many of my shows are free to enter, yet people will still buy a ticket stub because they want to record their support in a public place. That seems real to me in a way that copyright isn't.
Clearly not, the point being made was that you owned a thing, e.g. a Pokemon card. To own an NFT is to, bafflingly, claim to hold a token of ownership of some asset represented by the NFT - where that representation is indicated by the NFT immutably containing, typically, a thoroughly mutable Google Drive link to a picture. The whole thing was always farcical.
Again, at least you actually own the Pokemon card at the end of the day.
Some pokemon cards are worth so much i could reproduce them with gold instead of cardboard and it would be worth less than the cardboard version (assuming the same weight)
That actually seems like a very big difference.
(If you were being sarcastic, I apologize for not reading it right)