This was an insightful thread, but I think these arguments miss the "bigger picture" that NFTs carry with them. Yes the popular use case right now of expensive art and "selling a JPG" is rather silly, just like the art world always has been. What I see in the space however is a lot of opportunities to grow community-building tools - POAPs for example are rarely sold for profit (some still try to) and are a great way to encourage participation and attendance of events, with added functionality of rewarding said participation after an event for example. A lot of media coverage is on the absurd art market use cases, and though the possible profits make it a loud use case, it is just one sliver of potential of Blockchain technology. I am excited to see NFTs move beyond these cases, and I see that happening quite often.
danpalmer|4 years ago
Technological solutions to what are fundamentally social problems don't typically work out.
dTal|4 years ago
osigurdson|4 years ago
LurkingPenguin|4 years ago
There's nothing silly about "selling a JPG". Billions of dollars are spent annually on digital copies of photos. People pay for (high) resolution and rights.
Selling an NFT is usually "selling an NFT", not even "selling a JPG". Most of the time the NFT just points to a piece of digital media accessible to anyone, and it conveys no rights of ownership or use of that digital media.
meheleventyone|4 years ago
Or very surprisingly any guarantee that the media pointed to is immutable or won't disappear.