[clxxx]

A lot of negative backlash towards NFT’s seem to based on the hype and seemingly worthlessness of ‘owning’ a monkey jpg. And I think to an extent it’s valid, and much of these ‘meme’ nft’s will devalue significantly as the narrative progresses.

But what we have here is an overblown reaction to a working proof of concept of a valuable idea. NFT’s as I understand is just a digital sign of ownership. The twitter author suggests this is useless because “you don’t really own a gun in a shooting game” (paraphrasing here) but downplaying digital ownership of things people find value in is downright silly. If people find something to have value, it does, and that’s that. Being able to transfer digital signatures of ownership for digital assets is a good way of trading that value without much third party intervention (in theory).

For example one idea I can see working if implemented properly is digital ownership of games (some of the GME hype seems to be based on this). Transferring ownership for games used to be owning the CD and having a serial code. Moving proof of ownership to an immutable ledger seems like a great way to ensure only one copy belongs to one person, and opens a digital good’s ability to be bought and sold like a physical good.

Or perhaps a way of tokenizing real estate cheaply and securely. Or tokenizing digital brand good from artists. All with less takeaway from a middle man (hopefully).

I find the whole scene fascinating, and although I’m not invested in anything because I think the proof of concept is overblown and the value attributed will dwindle as people realize that the use cases of NFT’s are much much broader than just art, I find the technology to be a promising use case for blockchain in the real world. The entire scene still feels like it’s in its infant stages and it’s putting a lot of value on memey things (I guess that’s just for the times call for) but I think the value proposition of NFT’s could potentially be massive. Time will tell.