I don’t really care about fad stuff so I never bought any but also I never really understood how they worked practically. Like if I bought a famous tweet or jpg or what ever, how would I use the token to verify owner ship of the thing or sell it?
They were too ridiculous even for money laundering.
The Greater Fool game finally ended.
The current game: AI.
After AI: Quantum computing.
Once Kevin Rose got into it it all went to shit.
For that we can all thank him.
NFTs, like block blockchain in general, are public write-only databases. The only difference is that NFTs also contains references to things such as media (pictures).
They’re still around, but like all other fads that are poorly camouflaged pondicherry schemes, they’re practically worthless.
An NFT doesn’t dictate ownership, neither de jure nor se facto.
While I find the concept of public write-only databases interesting feom a technological standpoint, an actual use case has yet to be discovered.
A commercialised use case known to you, perhaps, but they have some very useful actual use cases.
E.g. a commercialised use case is supply chain verification
And a really cool use case that hasn’t been commercialised is transferrable/sellable digital licences, e.g. for video games. NFTs even have a royalty system that would ensure the rights holder gets paid a small % with each second hand sale too
Simply put, “Fungibility” is the ability of a thing to be just like any other thing. Like how a dollar bill is just like every other dollar bill, even though it has a serial number which makes it special.
Cryptocurrenties were designed to be fungible, even though all they are is really large random numbers protected cryptographically by other large numbers. The NFT folks realized that you can add context to those random numbers to make them “one of a kind” - Non-Fungible. Kind of like how some Pokemon cards are more expensive than others (of the same rarity) because of what’s printed on them.
That’s it! That’s all it is. No clue why they got to be worth a thing more than a Pikachu.
At best, they were a money laundering/ponzi scheme. The value cratered, and now we don’t hear about them anymore.
The blockchain (think notepad, with non erasable sharpie) had an entry that would link that item to you. You could sell it to someone by writing their name below yours. It didnt tangibly transfer anything though, and the items were all very easy to duplicate, so ownership meant nothing.
And the ownership was more often than not a url. So whoever owned that domain decided what was at that url. But yeah it was a number of people who made money off
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory
And then a number of people who lost money thinking they weren’t the greater fools
What were NFTs? Uhhhhh…stupid, and a scam. That’s the best way I can describe them.
Bro, you’re the only one who owns the purple gorilla in the yellow hat, it’s a gold mine.
You hit the nail on the head with the problem in your question. Other than a website that has a text banner that says “This person owns this” there’s nothing binding to prove that. Sure, there’s the actual computer work that goes into generating the token just like Bitcoin, but that’s only as useful as someone respecting its value.
It’s literally a badge that the outside world has to decide is valuable for it to mean anything.
You could say that for everything though. NFTs are just another cryptoscam. Designed with “encryption for ownership” but, its a digital image. Not hard to steal an image in comparison to bitcoins. With A.I. even worse in value since they let everyone steal anything as long as you say it was A.I.
NFTs weren’t even an image. It was a link to an image. NFT owners never owned the image, they just “owned” the link.
I understand the scam angle and I agree with it, but I think I can provide some additional insight in this thread. NFTs are also called “smart contracts”. Banks and non-bank institutions use them and smart contract engineering jobs are still available. People may now be completely unaware that they are interacting with NFTs (or rather, the institution is for them).
They are a unique crypto entity with one owner, rather than a coin which can be exchanged for any other coin. The ape image thing also tried to tie ownership to admittance at some event but I don’t think that panned out and it was a scam. This is a good idea in theory, since you can fight counterfeiting and scalpers.
NFTs may contain code, be interactive or have animations, point to images on websites or embed images on-chain, and can be verified with zero-knowledge trust methods. Just like with crypto, don’t go buying it lol.
Major stock exchanges are tokenizing stocks which will allow same day settlement and transfers between institutions. They arent giving you the token, but it is or will be used more and more behind the scenes. Maybe they’ll give you access to it in the future too.
Edit: theres some small scale tokenized exchanges that operate 24/7 as well.
The token would have a designated link stored on the blockchain (public ledger) that pointed to what you “owned”.
So you bought a monkey or whatever, you received a token. When you looked up that token on the block explorer it would have a link to the “original” jpg that you “owned”.
Why do this? Cause people are stupid and you can sell monkey pictures for big money (back then). What happened to them? People realized how stupid NFT pictures of monkeys were.
There was a possibility to use a decentralized proof of ownership of digital goods for something not stupid but that never materialized. I still somewhat like the idea of a NFT concert ticket that can be sold and transferred without needing a third party middle man like stubhub. The receiver would be able to verify they were receiving the ticket they were buying was what they wanted and the seller wouldn’t be able to counterfeit the ticket due to the non fungible nature.
But yea that never happened and NFTs got the hate they deserved and people moved off of them to the next get rich quick scheme
Retrospect.Yes, thank you. I googled retro spec before posting because google usually show corrections but it didn’t and I assumed it right lol
Like any market item it only has what value anyone is willing to pay for it.
It’s an interesting concept from a proof of ownership standpoint, same way you can ‘own’ a piece of crypto by holding a specific key.
Of any practical use though, say someone wanted to put the deed to a house as an owned token, the adoption across jurisdictions, the costs to maintain this ledger, the risk of electronic theft that simply doesn’t exist with paper records, it all makes real use more complicated than it needs to be.
