Nice.

No matter how much I read about NFT I still don't understand the point of it, especially why anyone would spend money on it
Also are fungible tokens made of mould?

You know how art's "value" is what people will pay for it and this is treated as somehow intrinsic merit? NFTs are the same except that what people are paying for it is kept on a separate record that SOUNDS more trustworthy but isn't so it's trickier to see if someone's paying other people to buy their stuff from each other (this happens a lot with other commodities too, mind). It's also not taxed properly yet, at least in the US. So it's a bunch of scams upon scams to generate artificial value and then hand it off to a mark who is then surprised when nobody wants to buy this "valuable" ugly picture they were assured was only going up in value. That's bad enough as it is, but in a couple of years the IRS's new laws kick in and whoever's holding these items at the time will have to pay taxes on the fake value.

It's the same sort of thing you saw with other fads like pogs and beanie babies but those were tied to physical items with a history while there's no limit to NFTs that can be created. It's an item whose only value is in convincing someone else to buy it from you. and that means a lot of scams based around convincing those people they can scam someone else, or that it isn't a scam and value magicly only goes up.

...insert capitalism reference here.

Money laundering, scamming people, destroying the environment... What's not to love?🤷‍♂️

So, people commented on the bad side of NFTs, and I agree that basically NFTs today are more or less all scams or tulip fever, etc etc.

What an NFT could be is a way to own a digital thing. So, I think Twitter is doing some integration with some NFT, who cares. But let's say Twitter says "Your profile picture can be something you upload or you can use an image from an NFT you own."

Pepsi and Taylor Swift or whoever comes out with a special Romeo and Juliet Twitter Profile Imagine and have a giveaway for 1,000 of them. So there are 1,000 of these unique digital items. Sure you can copy the image or whatever, but you can also photocopy a Banksy drawing too - the original is still the original. So, you win one of these and now you can change your profile pic to this stupid Romeo holding a pepsi up to Juliet imagine on twitter.

But again, who cares? Well, it's interesting because you -own- that digital item. So, if Facebook, I know all the winner here, say "You can link your profile pic to the same NFT" then you can use it there. And if you want to sell it to some idiot in 10 years for $100,000 because it ended up actually being an image that Banksy got a job at Pepsi to draw or whatever, then you can sell it and someone else can then use that imagine digitally online and you lose your ability to.

"Do you own this digital thing?" is a thing that people have realized... generally "No, you don't." You don't own the digital video game you bought (but you could with an NFT), you don't own that iTunes song (but you could with an NFT), you don't own the movie, etc etc.

-In Theory- NFTs could solve these problems. They won't. But they could. And that's what's interesting about them. But like Bitcoin, real money is too entrenched in making money the way money makes money so it seems highly unlikely it gets farther than as far as Bitcoin has gotten.

And a fungible token is basically cash - a ten dollar bill is just a ten dollar bill and any ten dollar bill will do. It doesn't matter which bitcoin you send me, you just need to send me one or I won't decrypt the data on your server I've encrypted illegally.

A non-fungible token just gives an identity to each one. You can't send me any bitcoin... you need to send me the one that's named "Taylor Swift's Pepsi Romeo and Juliet Challenge 2021 #567/1000".

And when I say bitcoin, I'm just using it like xerox... it's not really bitcoin, it just whatever blockchain is holding these things.

The efforts Capitalism goes to create scarcity out of a technology that breaks scarcity is mindblowing.

Originally there was using actual art to launder money, evade taxes, move money around illegally, etc. Then came crypto currency, which got rid of the need for the physical art. But crypto currency fluctuates outside of the users control, so the ideal would be a single digital “art” where the buyer and seller (frequently the same person) has complete control over the value.

NFTs in games are basically glorified CDKeys, except the game issues a CDKey for every piece of gear so they can squeeze in microtransactions to rip off everyone in the future.

It being URL-based makes it pretty fragile too, yes?

Your million-dollar NFT can break tomorrow if you’re not careful

Like paintings, NFTs need to be properly maintained.

At first I thought this was about near field transmission, like amiibos. It made about as much sense.

An NFT is basically a glorified CD Key for a game. The idea seems to be create unique licensing for literally every piece of digital data, which is pretty much the polar opposite of the original decentralized freedom crypto enthusiasts originally chased.

key point to NFTs you are all missing. they allow for the minter to be paid a percentage of the fee everytime it's sold. it's another way for artists to ensure royalties

But that's not unique to NFTs. Any digital marketplace out there could be doing that. The weirdest thing I get out of all this NFT shit is that NFTs don't even have a DRM solution. You're not actually buying the object, you have no protection to maintain scarcity of the object, you're just buying and trading rights to say you own it. NFTs are basically an opt-in into a collective mental construction that's just voluntarily recreating all the worst things of the physical world into the digital world.

The real shit that no one's talking about is that Silicon Valley has been trying to do this with microtransactions for years and years now, because that's the end goal here; it's tokenization of all the data you create online so that in lieu of actually allowing you privacy they can just claim you've opted-in to profiting from sharing your data despite the Network Effect not leaving you a choice in the matter. Jaron Lanier posited almost this exact kind of setup in his book Who Owns the Future back in 2013, and it doesn't lead anywhere I would want to live.

‘Who Owns the Future?’ by Jaron Lanier

In “Who Owns the Future,” Jaron Lanier proposes that individuals get paid for their roles in online sales.

The weirdest thing I get out of all this NFT shit is that NFTs don't even have a DRM solution.

Wait, what??? That is literally the only thing that seems like it could be a good argument for NFTs, and it's not even true? Fuck this noise.

I think artists/creators deserve fair compensation for their work, despite the fact that the United States firmly believes that they're just dirty hippies who enjoy what they do and thus don't deserve to be paid anything unless they can help someone who matters do some money laundering. If, as I have heard some people propose, blockchain could be used to ensure that, then I am willing to learn more about how that would work - as long as it isn't really a secret way to control what people do with media and information. But if NFTs don't actually enable the "owner" to exert any kind of control over the thing they supposedly own, then the people sinking money into them are even stupider than I thought.

"It's just like a contract, but it also burns down a rainforest tree every time anyone reads it, and an acre whenever it's renegotiated."

Definitely sounds like something humanity is in desperate need of.

I hate this fucking timeline, someone hurry up and invent a time machine and go back and murder Hitler so we can reboot it and try again.

They tried to warn us multiple times not to turn on the LHC, but did we listen? Noooo....