What does the tokens even mean anyway? It doesn't mean "I'm the owner of this one in five paper canvas art", it just means "I'm the owner of this one number, which someone decided is related to that digital piece of art for which there can exist infinitely many copies that are perfectly identical".

What does it even mean? Let's say I buy a NTF $1000 and get a digital copy, what prevents me (barring legalities) to perfectly duplicate it and massively redistribute it (not the token, the distributed supposedly high quality file) for a fraction of $$$ and turn a profit (because since it had such a high price it must be in high demand)? The question is not about the legal consequences but about the thing you own: of you have one original painting you have only one, it's quite hard to exactly duplicate it for resale.

I may be naive (the dropbox-is-just-rsync kind) but I've yet to see a tangible explanation of a use† of CryptoArt/NFT that could not be done with `xxd -l 128 -p /dev/random` and PGP[0].

† No. "being in the blockchain" brings absolutely nothing (except burning watts). If the author wants to reissue anything he readily can. You. Just. Own. A. Number. I also hear some picture the author getting a cut of resales of the token, which is even more crazy when you manage to entertain the thought while trying to keep a straight face.

[0]: https://twitter.com/lloeki/status/1366804865943556106

> Let's say I buy a NTF $1000 and get a digital copy, what prevents me (barring legalities) to perfectly duplicate it and massively redistribute it (not the token, the distributed supposedly high quality file) for a fraction of $$$ and turn a profit

The file is usually publicly accessible, why would anyone give you money for something they can just download?

Some rich dude has bought the "first tweet" for $2.5 million, despite the fact that it's publicly accessible [0]. I imagine it's about showing off how rich they are. They could achieve the same result by throwing $2.5 million into a furnace.

https://twitter.com/jack/status/20

It's not just some "rich dude". The highest bidder [1] (so far) is Justin Sun, creator of TRON crypto [2]. I see this as a big publicity stunt for his personal branding.

Not too different than paying $4.5M to have a dinner with Warren Buffett [3].

[1] https://www.coindesk.com/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-is-offering...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Sun

[3] https://www.coindesk.com/trons-justin-sun-finally-gets-4-5m-...

What rights do you get with ‘owning’ the first tweet? Who could you buy those rights from? Do you get any responsibilities along with that? Like if UNESCO declare the first tweet a culturally significant artifact, could you be held liable for allowing it to fall into disrepair?

And what does the existence of an NFT allow you to do with respect to that bundle fo rights you bought that couldn’t already be done by having someone write down a rights assignment on a piece of paper, sign it and hand it over to you in exchange for some consideration?

The buyer gets to own not the tweet but a "digital certificate of the tweet" which is the actual NFT thing. So what they buy is a certificate although I'm not sure what it certifies.

It certifies two things:

1. That you paid a certain amount for the certificate.

2. That there will never be another certificate for the same thing, from the same brand of certificates (e.g. "Valuables BY CENT").

Pretty much exactly like owning a baseball card, then.

But this would only make it unique on the CENT blockchain, no? What if another blockchain becomes the standard offerer, wouldn't that devalue everything on the CENT blockchain? Further, wouldn't we expect multiple blockchains to be competing to become the "primary" chain in which these items are deemed valuable, i.e. CENT and blockchain A & B & C trying to be the medium which holds a unique cert to Jack's first tweet. Jack's first tweet has a unique copy on each blockchain, but being that each chain has it's own NFT of jack's tweet, the digital certificate of the tweet is not necessarily unique. Or is twitter supposed to maintain their own blockchain that creates NFTs for each of their tweets and users are going to assign the most value to this chain since it's maintained by the company itself?

Further, I don't understand how this works in music/art. Grimes' copy of her music is issued on Nifty Gateway, but isn't that art only valuable as long as users assign value to the Nifty Gateway platform? What stops another art blockchain from becoming more desirable/valuable and creating a NFT of Grimes' art there? Doesn't that erode the value of the original NFTs?

What am I missing here?

This is the argument that gets me applied to bitcoin. It's first mover advantage. And the "gold2.0" market value is this perceived incorrectly if there is no other moat. That's why today we are announcing ... Bitquan!

That's correct. Which makes it all even more absurd. Although the smart contracts are there forever, so at least it can't "go bust" (although the web front-end certainly could).

> it certifies ... that there will never be another certificate for the same thing, from the same brand of certificates (e.g. "Valuables BY CENT").

How many "brand of certificates" are there now, and what is the barrier to entry?

I suspect 1) several and 2) low.

Also, how is "there will never be another certificate for the same thing, from the same brand of certificates" technically enforced?

> Also, how is "there will never be another certificate for the same thing, from the same brand of certificates" technically enforced?

A Merkle chain[0] append-only ledger contains a transaction minting the certificate, and the consistency rules for that Merkle chain mean that any extension of the chain which mints another such certificate is not valid (the same as a extension that spends money from a account with no money in it is not valid).

0: technically a blockchain specifically, but that's not actually relevant

Correct. Although there is only one brand that has sold a Tweet NFT for $3mil.

The enforcement, interestingly, is more traditional; the owners of the "Valuables by CENT" trademark can use existing legal structures to prevent anyone else using that name.

Meanwhile the NFT is digitally linked to the Valuables by CENT smart contract on Ethereum, which will presumably have an 'author' property attached to it, set to the string "Valuables by CENT".

> The enforcement, interestingly, is more traditional;

Ah, so they pinkie swear not to do it a second time?

It would be equivalent of Sotheby's starting a second brand competing with themselves, but yes.

Sotheby's was founded in 1744 (1). They have a track record, a _brand_ to maintain.

Your average blockchain was founded recently, and have a lot less to lose taking the money and running, or popping up again under a new name, for a second go at the same shtick.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sotheby%27s

But when you buy a baseball card you get a card. Here it seems that you only get a receipt stating that you have paid (aka the certificate) AND NOTHING ELSE.

If I understand it correctly, that receipt in conjunction with your keys allows you to prove you own the NFT and can control it on the blockchain(sell it, trade it, etc).

But the NFT is the receipt, if I understand correctly. You own a receipt (the NFT), and you can trade it, but why are people buying and selling receipts? You make a payment, you get a receipt, and nothing else, which makes absolutely no sense. Usually, when you buy something you get a receipt for free and then the actual thing that you have bought.

I think at that point the platform upon which the receipt resides will prevent people from making duplicates on their chain, and the owner of the receipt have control over buying/selling it.

> If I understand it correctly, that receipt in conjunction with your keys allows you to prove you own the NFT and can control it on the blockchain(sell it, trade it, etc).

And one should be happy to control the receipt of their purchase of imaginary goods? Ok.

Currently, when it comes to Dorsey's tweet? Yeah I agree. But there is more going on and it will not always be "imaginary goods".

https://medium.com/treum_io/on-chain-artwork-nfts-f0556653c9...

If you have essentially bought a jpeg image, you have as much control over it as anyone else: Anyone can view, transmit or edit it, etc. Your "proven purchase" grants you exactly nothing extra.

There's no social validation in throwing $2.5 million into a furnace. Spending $2.5 million on a tweet means you are validating everyone who believes that NFT's are real and an industry with a promising future. Especially in an environment where these objects are so hyped and driving a lot of venture capital investment, participating has large social benefits.

I don't think that's the question. That guy paid for the exclusive NFT thing, but no one else is going to make a profit selling cheap copies of that tweet.

Everybody who wants a copy already has one for free, that's what "publicly accessible" means.

Why do people pay extra for signed books? A signed copy is literally identical to a non-signed copy aside from the signature ink.

I'm not sure how that's relevant to the question of reselling stuff?

My prior response was at the "why would someone pay for a NFT when you can download an identical version for free" question of the parent comment.

> "I'm the owner of this one number, which someone decided is related to that digital piece of art for which there can exist infinitely many copies that are perfectly identical".

Which the ARTIST has decided is a digital certificate for the price of art.

Just I could make a duplicate of the supreme brick, my duplicate wouldn't have as nearly much value if I tell people it is a duplicate. Supreme could sell bricks again but they probably won't. There's nothing physical that's stops them but there's still an implicit agreement between artist and buyer.

I may not wish to buy own a supreme brick, but I can at least understand why people find it valuable.

The all-caps "artist" brought this to my mind:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist%27s_Shit

A can of old shit sold for €275,000???

Jesus Christ Mary and Joesph, what is the name of all things pure and holy...

Look, I get it outside of the money laundering scheme to modern art, throwing around how rich you are by buying "stuff". I get it. Tiny pecker syndrome. But let's stop and remember that Rockefeller and Carnegie, the OG capitalist titans, were dick measuring by donating their money. Sure "to the arts"... at least they were building halls and museums. They participated in some solid currency velocity that helped pay the wages to construction contractors. Still, they were assholes, but a lot better than just shoveling money between other rich cunts as a form of showing off.

Personally I think these should have a legal license associated with them. Like if the author transfers NFT it transfers the creative license as well (so the purchaser actually owns the art). For instance, Nayan Cat beanie babies can now only be manufactured by owner of said token, and whenever the new owner transfers the token the license goes with it. Etc.

Basically, if Token == Intellectual Property ownership then it makes sense.

This would mean if a creator, say a musician wrote a song and transferred the NFT and it became a wild success in the future, the owner would earn profits from the investment, but so too would the content creator receive the mentioned dividends proportional to the value.

There is a reason. Just not a technical one. It becomes obvious when you ask the simple question: why hasn't it already been done? The answer is that it's in no actor's local incentives to create the public commons.

Why is there no global market place for reselling digital event tickets? Certainly Ticket master and the other retailers could agree on an open standard protocol, pay for a centralized clearing house, and create a digital market place. But they don't. And they don't because it isn't in any of their local interests to maintain such a thing.

This problem, which is fundamentally social and economic in nature, is what is solved by smart contracts. It allows the creation of a public commons, not one that technically couldn't exist, just one that no private actor is ever incentivized to create.

The example you give - reselling tickets, is actually something that is directly something ticket sellers want to discourage, crypto doesn’t solve that.

And there's always a necessary third party to a p2p ticket exchange anyway: the entity that actually puts on the event the ticket gives entry to. Where they want ticket exchange (or at least refunds) to be possible they can do so in a centralised manner and when they don't, they're not a middleman that can be cut out.

One could imagine it being a kind of emergent community-organized event, somewhat modeling a decentralized peer-to-peer network itself. There will still technically be at least one intermediary of a sort, but hypothetically the only real intermediary could be restricted to the single person or group who initially proposes the event and issues the batch of ticket NFTs.

There are plenty of major concerns here, like how security and access are physically enforced if there are no official organizers or designated volunteers, but in theory you could maybe distribute a phone app so everyone is automatically scanning for unauthorized people, and just rely on physically capable attendees and police to deal with potential security incidents. Still probably a recipe for utter Fyre Festival-esque disaster and lawsuits in many cases, but feasible in theory.

Why would that be so? My understanding is that they want to discourage scalping.

Digital tickets tied to digital identities that can only be transfered at market price. That's not a difficult smart contact to create.

Scalping is also selling tickets at market price - after first making sure the market price is a big multiple of what it was before scalpers got to work.

If I wasn't clear, the market price is just a variable that could be set. If they wanted they could set this at the initial sale price.

I like the idea of building in a percent cut taken out of the resell price and given to the venue/artist. It taxes scalpers and allows artists to benefit from secondary markets if they mispriced their initial offering. Its also easy to do in a contract

If I’m in ticket selling business, if I can maintain a level of control with crypto I can, but back tickets and resell them, but most importantly I can capture any upside I missed by selling the tickets for too low of a price, and the purchaser resells the tickets for a profit given I get a cut of each and every transaction

How do you guarantee the person trying to get into the event is the owner of the ticket?

They can verify ownership by signing something with the wallet that the token is associated to (signing is free). They're only able to do so if they own the private keys of the wallet.

It should be noted that private keys can be shared if the owner wishes. In the case of using NFTs as event entry the event organizer would still need to keep a record of which NFTs have been used already for a given event because the wallet can be shared. Third party services will almost certainly pop up to fill this need.

Exactly. It'll have to be like a software license key: in theory you can share your key, but the service can just authorize and lock in the first device/entity that presented the license key. This kind of DRM is often annoying for regular customers since you may have to manually contact customer support in order to request a transfer of the license to another device you own, but it does help mitigate non-paid use to an extent.

This could be enforced for real-life events by handing out a wristband with a GUID QR code to the first person to demonstrate they possess the private key that owns a particular ticket token, then never handing anything out for that token again, and also triggering an alert if the same QR code is ever seen on more than one person (to mitigate "pirates" who might offer identical or similar-looking wristband material and "replay attack" with an existing assigned QR code).

There are probably other attacks I'm missing (including obvious existing stuff like people just sneaking in and evading wristband checks), and there are lots of questions about whether an NFT or decentralized blockchain is a smart idea for a given live event, but from a security perspective I think it should probably be feasible if an event organizer does decide they want to do it for whatever reason.

However, there are other analogues that I think are much less feasible or perhaps totally infeasible. There are some NFT... apps? platforms? companies? DAOs? that are providing some service where an NFT grants you access to something like a restricted Discord server. Even aside from how valuable or sensible that may or may not be, there's absolutely nothing stopping a token-holder from just sharing their Discord account email and password with as many people as they want. The platform and the Discord servers would have no idea if anyone's doing this and how many people could be sharing any given account. (Discord employees could potentially detect some cases but I doubt they'd play any part in this.)

For a real-life physical event, someone can't just copy your body and make it a shared proxy for pirating, but any NFT ticket use case short of in-person events is probably often just going to rely solely on the goodwill of people to not abuse/pirate things, and we all know how that goes - especially in anonymous online communities.

The rubber-meets-the-road real-world crossover part is where NFTs and "Web 3.0" in general tends to become really shaky. I'm still mildly optimistic about it in the long-term, but I think a large percentage of existing use cases are going to fizzle as pointless dead ends that are surviving purely based on flavor-of-the-year hype and fad waves. Things are obviously stuck in one such fad right now.

> This could be enforced for real-life events by handing out a wristband with a GUID QR code to the first person to demonstrate they possess the private key that owns a particular ticket token, then never handing anything out for that token again, and also triggering an alert if the same QR code is ever seen on more than one person

This is quite close to what unlock-protocol[1] did for several conferences pre-covid. Overall it worked, though there are some key difficulties: gas prices make interesting on-chain things too expensive for most people, and wallet ergonomics aren’t great for this sort of thing.

(I am a former unlock-protocol employee)

[1] https://unlock-protocol.com/blog/checking-key-in

They pay their token when they want to go in?

When it comes to in game items... why should one game honor another game's items? EVE Online and World of Warcraft dont exist in the same context. Even if you did it between Guild Wars, Elder Scrolls online and WoW, you still cant interchange the items due to stats, style and general game mechanics let alone the coding rework to have these items function the same way between games.

If there was an mmo framework that is shared between different games, I guess. But even then, why have a universal currency instead of just making it framework/platform specific? It's less work and is all handled in a fast centralized DB. At that why create the extra work of PoW or PoS or whatever algorithm solving process it'll use. currencyAmount += tradedAmount is way easier and makes more sense on the game dev side.

All these anti NFT arguments amount to is, "This is solutionism at its finest, but people already bought koolaid in bulk...so enjoy the show."

In my opinion, it only has the possibility of making any sense if a game itself is (largely or entirely) an Ethereum dapp. I think a WoW NFT would make zero sense (and I think Blizzard would agree, barring the hypothetical potential of trying to exploit a fad purely for extra profit), but an NFT representing an asset in your Ethereum-based Second Life "d-game" could possibly make some sense. I know some dapp games exist and more will be made, but I'm not sure how practical or fun they are or can be.

Even then, there are still a lot of questions: what makes the d-game actually interesting/novel/unique/fun and an appropriate, creative, and clever use of a decentralized blockchain.

And although I mostly agree with this essay and the Medium essay it's referencing about environmental impact, I do think NFTs have some potential use cases outside of games, art, and bilking greedy people. I think those use cases just have to be a little further along the "blockchain from end-to-end" spectrum.

I dont know about theres a "use".

Remember that crowdfunded, over engineered juicer? It was some $400 and claimed to do like 100 pounds of force on a pre-juiced juice packet to squeeze into a glass for you. Some other article showed you can just squeeze these packs by hand into your glass with barely any force. This was "the Keurig" of juicing.

Total shit show of over engineering and solutionism.

I see the same thing with crypto and NFTs currently. Everytime I have this discussion in person, I always say that I do believe there will be a viable digital currency of some sort in the near future. The current gen of tech has proved the want, which is important, but now a real how is needed along with commonsense.

Like, theres a real want for an easy to go, healthy juice. Just bottle it and sell it that way. Why go through the extra step of a juicer if the shit is already juiced. I won't doubt their drinks were good. But they got caught up in solutionism gimmicks. Digital currencies are caught up in the blockchain gimmick.

The want it proved is people want to get rich fast. It’s important not to mistake want for wealth, for want for NFTs.

When it's owned by an external party, you might not be able to (easily) trade it. When it's decentralized, nobody can stop you from trading it.

But of course there’s only one place you can redeem them. That means either that party is ok with transfers (in which case your point is moot because they can offer that themselves like Ticketmaster does) - or they’re not ok with the transfer in which case they won’t honor the token, making your point moot.

So how does the party best offer a trading infrastructure when they are OK with it? Implement it? Good luck. Easiest right now is to offer an ETH based token, and you can trade it for anything you want.

It is funny: there are essays in this thread, authors clearly breathless to explain the utility or lack thereof of NFTs.

Yet your two sentence explanation is the most comprehensive.

NFTs enable the possibility of a market that is orthogonal to the channel that distributed the token.

The viability or existence of such a market is not guaranteed, but the likelihood that one could emerge at all has gone up thanks to the novel properties of NFTs.

Yes it does because within the token, you can program that the token creator gets a share of the profit.

Mark Cuban talks about this regarding dallas mavericks tickets. Suddenly the ticket creator can still benefit from scalpers buying everything. Or, you can set the next sell price to be limited to only 10 percent more. etc.

There is a reason for artists and musicians to move to NFTs as well, as royalty is built in. See kings of leon releasing their album as an NFT.

There is a collectible card game under development which i think is similar to Magic The Gathering. https://coa.se/ In this case it makes perfectly sense. It will be released on the Tezos blockchain which is already LPoS. https://tezos.com/

I guess, but if the web front end goes down all you own is some digits. Cool.

When people loose interest in stamps you have some scraps of paper. :)

You still might want to hand out tokens to third parties to trade but not copy. I agree that a decentralized structure is not necessary.

If that’s what you want throw a “transfer” button on your site. There’s already a button to do this on the Ticketmaster app.

> If that’s what you want throw a “transfer” button on your site.

Well when you buy a ticket from ticketmaster you can’t exactly dictate what features they offer through their platform...not to mention ticket master is a 3rd party service that they take a massive cut.

blockchain is cutting these 3rd parties out in these use cases, allowing the event holders to easily mint the admission tickets and users take advantage of peer to peer open source technology. Meaning easily trace the tickets and buy/trade/sell without relying on Ticketmaster.

The thing that makes ticketing difficult is not minting and selling unique items of inventory - that's a well understood problem with many viable solutions. Nor is verifying at any given moment if a single piece of inventory is valid and who owns it - again, that's a solved problem.

The secondary markets in ticketing exist because there's an excess of demand and entities who can exploit access, speed, or technical know-how for arbitrage. Blockchain ticketing companies don't fundamentally change that statement - they enable it.

No one likes Ticketmaster - but to call them a 3rd party service that takes a massive cut is inaccurate. Ticketmaster is owned by Live Nation, which usually owns both the venue and the artist's tour schedule. And owns the primary and secondary ticketing sales. So Ticketmaster is usually the first, second, and third-party in ticketing.

Blockchain doesn't magically fix this. It doesn't change the deep relationship Live Nation has with labels and artists, their fodness for excluding artists who play at rival and independent venues, their habit of defining contract requirements that can only be fulfilled by Ticketmaster software...

Blockchain is solving all of the wrong problems in ticketing. I don't need a distributed, trustless ledger of who owns a ticket when all of them are issued by and redeemed at the same location. The only real reason to push for blockchain in ticketing is to help scalpers hide what they're doing.

> The secondary markets in ticketing exist because there's an excess of demand

I don't buy "excess of demand" as being fundamental, though, except in the most technical sense. Imagine a super niche event, where the organizers know there are exactly 200 fans on the entire planet, and they offer that many tickets on sale. It still makes sense for a random scalper to take a loan, buy all 200 tickets, and resell them with a markup. It would still make sense if the organizers offered 300 tickets, i.e. greater supply than demand in terms of heacount! A scalper could still come ahead buying all 300, selling 200 at a high enough markup, and feed the remaining 100 tickets to a cat.

I think scalping (arbitrage) can occur in any situation in which the supplier isn't charging the maximum the market can bear (perhaps that's what is meant by "excess of demand" and I'm missing some technical definitions here).

Excess demand refers to a situation where a good is underpriced, resulting in a quantity demanded that exceeds the supply. [0]

[0] http://www.personal.psu.edu/dxl31/econ2/pizza_market.png

>Well when you buy a ticket from ticketmaster you can’t exactly dictate what features they offer through their platform...not to mention ticket master is a 3rd party service that they take a massive cut.

Is this an argument? We're talking about ticketmaster moving to a chain, why can't we talk about them moving to a cheaper better service that isn't based on crypto?

And besides, crypto isn't free. The network takes a cut. Doesn't it cost like $20 to perform a transaction right now?

People who issue tickets through Ticketmaster absolutely get to dictate terms. Otherwise they wouldn’t use Ticketmaster and would use a competitor.

Agreed. I still think there's some charm to the idea that it can be supported passively but as you say the fulfilment is ultimately not passive, so it doesn't really gain you all that much.

It serves the token holder if said party just declares the ticket or other item a forgery or otherwise invalid, and doesn't let you in the venue or locks your account. It also serves the holder if they want a safe secondary market to resell or trade tokens.

So basically, decentralisation doesn't serve the vendor, only the consumer.

This assumes that the centralized minter (and ultimately redeemer) of the, say, tickets, is both willing and able to run a secondary marketplace for them.

Those two things are not a given.

How would you resell a stadium event ticket with a centralized setup? You'd need the event organiser to run the marketplace, which isn't always desirable.

Same way this has been happening for as long as I’ve been alive.

Why is a secondary market in stadium tickets a desirable thing?

If you want to use your ticket to go see the event, use it. If you don't, simply do not go. If you do not want to go and want to recover your costs, sell it back to the venue at the purchase price.

The blockchain is only infrastructure. It is an open decentralized cloud for financial services/contracts. Sure vendors could also have their own service and marketplace but why should they. This way they just print and sell some NFTs and that's it.

Yes there is. If it is decentralized (properly), you can't be canceled or locked out of your account, you can trade your good at any time.