this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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There are uses for NFT, but it is clearly not what they are famous for.
NFT aren't pictures of monke, they are a way to authenticate something in a decentralised way, so no trust in another entity needed. The picture isn't the NFT, and that is why you can just right click-copy it.
You can't however just copy the NFT, the actual token. Having a token that's verifiably owned by someone is useful for certain things. It's like a certificate of authenticity, but digital.
Digital certificates has already existed for half a century. There’s nothing new. A certificate doesn’t get any more legitimate just because it’s recorded on a blockchain.
Yes but NFTs are held in trust by you, not a 3rd party business. If you want to sell your NFT to a friend you can do that without brokering the exchange through a middleman who can/will charge a cut
Don't blockchain brokers charge a transaction fee?
Yes.
How you transact the ownership of NFTs is a different story. I’m reacting to the claim that NFT is “like a certificate of authenticity, but digital”, which is not unique to NFTs at all.
This claim is also often misunderstood, since the NFT can only verify the authenticity of the certificate itself, not the art/asset it’s pointing to.
I can easily create an NFT of Mona Lisa. The blockchain will see no problem with it at all. Heck, I can create 1000 NFTs of Mona Lisa if I want.
Rookie numbers, I can create billions
This is still solved by certificates, I can make my own self signed certificate that says it me and sign whatever I want. The only thing that crypto “solves” is over the wire man in the middle attacks, which aren’t even really a problem in the modern internet
How do I know you haven't made 10 copies of that same certificate and sold 9 to other people?
If it was an NFT I could see you issued 9 other copies of it before I was approached with the sale. Any other way I either have to place blind trust in you or rely on a 3rd party to handle the issuance/transaction
I could just use 10 different URLs for each NFT. All pointing to the same image. I can also use 10 different wallets to obfuscate it more. For that matter, I can use different blockchains as well.
Now it’s 10 completely different NFTs pointing to the same image. To verify there are no duplicates, you need to check every NFT in existence (across all blockchains in existence).
Why are people so obsessed with bringing scarcity back on the internet
Why would I want that, I’m not selling you anything
There's basically 3 ways to verify a certificate.
In all three you need to trust someone, and ask three are a pain to transfer something to new owner.
NFT gives a fundamentally new option here, that's transferable and doesn't require trust. That it's been used for and gotten known for monkey scams is a shame.
And how do you verify that the NFT can be trusted? With any of the 3 methods you mentioned!
Blockchain doesn’t circumvent this need of trust.
The thing blockchain eliminates is the need of a timestamp authority when doing transactions. Satoshi even called his invention “distributed timestamp server” before people started to call it blockchain. You don’t need timestamps when verifying the authenticity of an NFT.
Not really, signatures on blockchains is just another TOFU or WoT variant, because how do you know the original token is the legit thing you wanted in the first place? It's only after you have identified it that the existence of the blockchain becomes relevant in that it can track ownership without central authority.
Are there any practical (non-theoretical) uses for NFTs that couldn't be done ~~otherwise~~ easier/better without them though?
Edited to make it easier for NFTs to show their worth.
insert word jumble about unrealistic scenarios made up in my basement while stoned
https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/nft-use-cases/
It is just a tool, it's what you do with it that gives its worth. Monkey pictures... Well that's not worth anything
These are the same promises the emergence of the blockchain gave us. We're now nearly a decade later, and the most useful application has been get-rich-quick schemes. Yet, all these listed applications are still not in use, and/or better than their non-blockchain counterparts.
Hell, if you know why electronic voting is not, and will never be a good idea, you definitely wouldn't want them as an NFT.
How you can really know electronic voting is a bad idea - all the people who would be the ones to be hired and paid a ton to build and implement it, cryptographers and infosec experts, are the same people who loudly oppose it.
There are so many different problems;
Assuming you manage to build the perfect system, can you actually explain it to people? If you put a prospective voter in front of the real deal, a secure electronic voting machine, and put a fake replica next to it, will ANYBODY EVER succeed in telling them apart? Or will you be forced to continuously audit the hardware from production to shipment to use, and somehow still respect voters' privacy as they use the machine?
And how can you be confident your implementation is secure? You can to prove the algorithms are correct, that the implementation is correct, that the implementation behaves as end users (voters) expect, and that even the hardware is flawless (both in terms of logic and protection against manipulation).
How do you ensure people only vote once, yet also protect their privacy, but ALSO prove to them their vote was really counted? Individual keypairs? How do you distribute and protect them? Physical ID cards? What if they get stolen (in significant enough numbers)? What if a significant fraction of the population won't use the new system, do you still run old school voting and combine the results?
How do you give somebody a receipt they can understand without enabling coercion to try to force people to vote a certain way?
Yeah, that about sums it up.
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NFTs have never once not been very blatant fraud.
NFT aren't monkey pictures.
I know what they are. They're a "solution" to a problem that doesn't exist and very probably never will exist.
They have never once been used for anything even neutral. Every single case has been outright malicious.
It's called a database.
An inefficient one
I reckon the meeting about the tokens went something like "okay, how can we monetise this?", "Okay hear me out here... monkeys!... digital monkeys!"