I'm a pretty big crypto-skeptic, and I'm especially an NFT skeptic, but this is a weird argument. It's kind of like saying there could be an infinite number of paintings, so why should Picassos be worth very much? Even more, it's possible to create extremely high quality reproductions of famous Picasso paintings, but they would have just a teeny amount of value of the original.

Reason being, with very expensive art, and other things like a signed book or baseball card, what you're really paying for is the provenance of the item, not so much the thing itself. While I'm skeptical that the NFT form of "digitally assigned provenance" will be valued similarly, I can understand the argument for why a piece of digital artwork with an associated NFT isn't that different from a piece of physical art with the artist's signature.

We could mint an infinite number of Picasso NFTs, though. None of them are the actual piece of art.

You could argue that one particular NFT is the official Picasso NFT because it was sold by the owners of the Picasso painting, but it’s still just a fancy hyperlink to a page that says “This is a Picasso NFT”.

NFTs are basically fancy blockchain transactions with a memo field that can say “This represents a Picasso painting” and we’re all supposed to believe that it means something.

The closest equivalent would be something like baseball cards. There is a market for baseball trading cards, but everyone is fully aware that they’re still just arbitrary prices of printed cardboard.

I’m pretty sure the analogy would be that Picasso himself actually issued the NFT. Anyone can “argue” that Picasso issued an NFT, but that’s just like arguing that your extremely skillful forgery is a Picasso original. What’s important is if it actually is an original.

So, a more apt analogy would be Picasso donating a painting to a museum, but trying to sell you a certificate saying that you own the artwork, but you're unable to move it to your private collection or gain any additional access than the general public.

That seems like a pretty raw deal to me.

So with NFTs, its the same, anyone can write a document that says "this certifies ownership of a picasso painting" and it doesn't mean much of anything. However if Picasso writes up a document broadcasts somehow he has done so and the document says you own x painting, then its easy enough to certify to anyone that you own a Picasso from the man himself. The story is not arbitrary, this is precisely why it has value. The arbitrary easily copied stuff is cheap and meaningless and known as such. The "rare" NFTs and stuff selling for massive prices is expensive because it is genuinely so. You can write a comment here about how easily you can create a counterfeit NFT, but how easily can you actually convince someone to buy it from you? You can observe that baseball cards are just pieces of cardboard but how easily can you acquire a card printed when batter X was a rookie?

I'm not saying this sort of value is easily quantifiable, but it is easily observable, identifiable that its reflective of a real element of reality and not (entirely) arbitrarily imagined.

Just smells like laundering to me

In the film, an artist forges works of art by famous artists and fraudulently sells them to museums. It's implied that the museums don't know they are forgeries or don't care. So why is a Picasso more valuable than a perfect reproduction of it?

I think the point is, it's all just perception, and greed.

Cryptography is a highly significant technology, but cryptocurrency and now NFT too often just smacks of a money making scheme, promoted by self-serving people who happen to own a lot of it.

To fix the supply of digital artworks, there has to be at least a loose consensus on what the accepted "canon" of those works consists of. For now, that's an unknown.

Art prices are also driven in part by a partial record of sales, so at least we know what some paintings sold for in the past.

What we don't know about the digital art world is what conventions will emerge, that define the "supply" of works of particular value.

On the other hand, minting a new beanie-baby-NFT takes less effort than making an actual beanie baby.

I'll add onto this that the core technology has no way of verifying which beanie baby NFT is "valid" outside of traditional centralized mechanisms like IP law and large validators. You can duplicate NFTs that point to the same beanie-baby-NFT link, are totally indistinguishable, that don't have any artwork that you own, and nobody can stop you outside of centralized mechanisms. As soon as you try to build a market on top of NFTs, you're right back inside the current system of ownership enforced by legal contracts and centralized validators.

At least with Bitcoin, you don't have to tie your wallet to a Twitter verification system to figure out whether or not your funds are real or just a low-effort scam.

People can disagree with whether Bitcoin has value (I think it's a bad system), but at least it doesn't completely fall apart as soon as you leave Coinbase. NFTs really don't work at all unless they're tied to centralized services, because anybody can make an NFT for anything, regardless of whether they have any real relationship to the asset they're issuing. Even official accounts that are validated: you can mint 5,000 NFTs of the same beanie baby, nobody can stop that from happening. Any scarcity in the system is only self-imposed by the actors within that system.

> But, there's no religious law that NFTs must be a pure blockchain thing.

Every time someone tells me that verification and enforcement are inherently social/legal processes and not processes that the blockchain is designed to solve, I feel like they're just one step away from finally understanding why people don't like NFTs. The only value of adding all of this math and environmental impact and complication and fragility to the system of buying digital assets is if doing so decreases the social/legal burden of verification. And NFTs don't do that, they don't do anything. They don't even make the secondary market safe.

There are of course systems you could build on top of NFTs that would help solve some of these problems. But you could also build these systems without using NFTs. None of the proposals I've heard about enabling decentralized verification on the secondary market, or making it easier to pay artists, or building a web of trust for issuers -- none of those proposals need NFTs to exist before they can be built. The vast majority of these proposals don't require anything other than basic federation, and many don't even need that.

The blockchain part isn't adding anything, it's useless. We could have the exact same conversation we're having right now, and come up with all of the same solutions for verifying and distributing digital assets without ever needing to talk about or consider a blockchain. It's not adding anything, it's just kind of there.

And you're right, there's no strict law that everything must happen on the chain. So we could also just drop the chain entirely, use the same token issuance systems that have existed for ages, and focus only on solving the problems that actually need to be solved.

NFTs, in addition to being collectibles, can be used to unlock access to features, like an exclusive chat room or give the holder access to bonus content only available to those X number of NFTs which were minted. Furthermore, secondary markets could easily exist for transferring access, something that is not really doable these days with accounts.

I’m with you that the current art/collectible NFT craze seems a bit much, but I actually think the future utility of this “access” property is where things will get interesting.

Secondary markets - why would vendors want or put up with that?! This is explicitly disallowed in most contracts for a reason.

There is no utility here, the use value of nfts for tracking ownership and of bitcoin as a currency are both close to zero.

Most art in the art market is pretty worthless (at least monetarily) - just go to one of a bajillion garage sales to see why. But a few pieces of art will be worth a lot because something about them is desirable.

It's the same with NFTs. There will be a bajillion "beanie-baby-NFTs" that will be close to worthless. And then there will be a few of the "Charlie Bit My Finger" variety that people actually have desire to uniquely "own".

Not necessarily. The original creator that issued that "Charlie Bit My Finger" NFT could also create 1,000 more of them tomorrow. And all of those NFTs would be exactly as valid as the original, it wouldn't be equivalent to making a print of the Mona Lisa. It wouldn't be downstream of the original NFT, the original NFT is just a link to a publicly hosted asset.

You're trusting the creator that they won't do that, but you have no real guarantee that they won't. That's doubly true when you start looking at corporate-backed NFTs like what the NBA is doing. They control the entire supply of the NFTs they issue, you have no way to guarantee that they won't re-issue all of their NFTs that you own.

Right. But also nobody acts like limited print runs are mathematically non-fungible.

If the best argument for NFTs is that they're scarce in the exact same way that existing systems produce scarcity, and that this scarcity is enforced using the same systems we already have, that's not a good argument for the existence of NFTs. You might as well just do normal token issuance using existing technology.

You misunderstand the word non-fungible here. They are non-fungible because 2 copies are recorded like this:

- token 1, owned by Alice - token 2, owned by Bob

Bob and Alice may are may not be willing to make this trade, that is up to them. The two tokens are distinct. After they trade, it is still clear who the owner of each token is.

A fungible token is recorded like this:

- Alice owns 1 unit of token CHARLIE - Bob owns 1.3 units token CHARLIE

If Alice sends their one unit to Bob, he now owns 2.3 units. No one knows which one these 2.3 units was Alices. It's just a counter

Note that no one acts like this is any different than I explained it just now. NFT people do not claim that non-fungible means "you cannot mint two tokens representing the same thing".

What NFT people do is argue that the uniqueness of individual tokens matters. It doesn't. They try to have their cake and eat it too, they try to argue that the NFT's link to the individual artwork doesn't matter when evaluating the technology, but that it does matter when trying to determine whether or not NFTs have value.

There are two ideas being conflated here about fungibility. If you want to argue that NFTs actually represent an artwork in some way, and that owning an NFT is somewhat similar to owning a piece of art or that it carries some meaningful connection to that artwork, then for all practical purposes NFTs are fungible resources. The attributes of an NFT that link it to an artwork are not guaranteed to be unique.

If you want to argue that the part of an NFT that matters is the individual token itself, then sure, they're non-fungible. But if that's all we care about then they're also worthless, because nobody cares about owning serial numbers, they care about owning a token that meaningfully points towards a socially or personally valuable item. They care about the thing that the token represents.

The only reason why one NFT is worth more than another is because of who issued it and what it's linked to. So to argue that the individual token's uniqueness is the only thing that matters is to reject the entire relationship between NFTs and artwork.

I brought this up elsewhere, but if I pull a $20 bill out of my pocket, it will have a unique serial number on it that corresponds to only that bill, and no other bill. So technically, by your criteria, a $20 bill is just as non-fungible as an NFT. It's technically unique in the same way that an NFT is.

But what I'm getting at with that comparison is that it's not enough to have each NFT be technically unique. They have to be unique in a way that matters, they have to be unique in a way that somebody would care about. Otherwise you might as well just collect $20 bills. Back to my original point, if the only thing that NFTs are providing is that the token itself is unique, that's not an improvement over any of our existing systems. You can already issue unique tokens without bringing NFTs into the equation, issuing a unique token is easy.

I don't really understand your concerns to be honest. It is exactly as you say. The connection to the artist and art matters.

Yes if an artist releases 10-editions for their JPEG image (which happens frequently), then those 10-editions may be semi-fungible, in the same way that say "floor-price cryptopunks" are, where many people are sort of happy to put them in a basket and trade the floor without caring too much about whether they have token 1 or 3. But someone might well decide to care, because token 1 is the one their grandfather used to own many years ago.

Some people may value the edition number 1 more than the remaining 9, but maybe edition 8 was previously owned by Elon Musk and carries a premium.

beeple can decide to release 10 thousand more tokens representing the artwork sold at Christies for $69m, equivalent in every way except the serial number It's anyone's guess what would happen, but presumably it would cost him in reputation, and the original would still be able to command a large premium.

Artists releasing physical prints also on occasion release another series some years after the first; Damien Hirst is releasing more dot paintings, and they are all so fucking similar they may well be considered fungible.

It sounds like the current system is working, that the social system for determining value based on context is working. NFTs aren't making that better or worse, we're using the same social process that we used before.

And I mention elsewhere, NFTs aren't even really helping that much with the distributed ledger either, they still have to hook into the existing systems for determining seller trust and authenticating that the NFT you're buying is "real". There's little benefit in decentralizing the ledger when sellers have to coordinate with each other to ban bad actors anyway.

So we have two systems that already work, that have worked for ages, and now they're linked to the blockchain because... why? All of the use-cases people talk about with NFTs are stuff that you could always have been doing, you don't need a blockchain for any of this. And it's not clear that the blockchain makes any of it easier to do.

"I control some arbitrary bits on an arbitrary blockchain" will never have the same cachet.

But the reverse is not necessarily true. NFTs are just fundamentally a lot worse than cryptocurrencies. They have every problem that cryptocurrencies have, except they're also not scarce, require centralized verification mechanisms, have bad incentive structures around hoarding, are prone to link rot, etc, etc, etc...

NFTs are much harder to justify than cryptocurrencies are. They're all of the drawbacks with virtually none of the upsides. I don't know anyone who likes NFTs but dislikes cryptocurrency.

They are both vehicles for gambling with no real world application or value.

Well unless you count ransomware as value.

Sure, technically you're making a new NFT when the same creator mints an NFT that points to the same work as before. But also technically you're making a new dollar with a new serial label when the government prints money, and we don't call paper money "non-fungible". It's not a kind of uniqueness that matters to anyone.

That's metadata, to display or use it in dapps, this is not how you uniquely identify an NFT. The metadata is optional.

For the vast majority of people hyping NFTs, the metadata is the only part they care about. The metadata is the part that links the NFT to an actual piece of artwork -- the issuer and the work that it's linked to are the only reasons why some tokens are worth more to collectors than others.

Without the context of the person who issued it and the work that the token is being paired with, you're just trading numbers around and assigning completely arbitrary values to them.

Which to be fair is a common criticism of NFTs. It's just weird to hear an advocate lean into that argument themselves, normally advocates are trying to convince me that NFTs mean something.

Note that the argument that NFTs are useless if you need to rely on social consensus to link token and asset is not valid - the use case is in having a common ledger to track ownership of the token.

You voice your objection to this point below, and I'll get to that, but I just want to be clear: the NFTs are adding nothing to the existing social systems we use to determine value. We could have a collective memory/agreement without NFTs.

We're going to get to having a shared ledger below, but I just want to be clear about where we're starting -- NFTs do not add any value to the link between a token and an asset, we use the same social contracts that could always have been enforced before.

> the use case is in having a common ledger to track ownership of the token.

Now, a common ledger is a nice thing, but it also doesn't require NFTs, you could set up the exact same system with a little bit of federation.

Of course, federation would require some degree of trust and moderation, but here's the problem: NFTs require all that too. The only way that the NFT community has figured out to deal with copycat NFTs is to introduce secondary off-chain validation of which NFTs are "real" and which ones aren't. You end up recreating the exact same ecosystem of services that validate which NFTs are safe to buy, and the end result is that the secondary market isn't safe to use unless you run it through one of those services. Those off-chain validators will log fraud NFTs and refuse to validate them. As the ecosystem grows, they'll eventually shift to only validating NFTs that come from sources they trust. It's the same systems of moderation that already exist.

It's really hard to claim that NFTs add any value in the form of a trustless distributed ledger when one of the biggest recent events inside the space is Twitter verification. How much more centralized than that can you possibly get?

I bring this point up in a previous comment, but for all the criticism I have of Bitcoin (and I have a lot), Bitcoin at least doesn't suffer from this problem quite as much as NFTs do. The entire ecosystem for Bitcoin doesn't fall apart as soon as somebody stops trading on Coinbase. The NFT ecosystem has no idea how to keep the secondary market safe from copycat NFTs for normal buyers without cloning the same centralized systems for "genuine product" guarantees that we already have today.

And since NFTs aren't changing anything about our social consensus of value, and since NFTs aren't changing anything about how we verify goods on the secondary market, what on earth are they doing that's of any value? It's just an over-complicated system trying to reinvent federation. If the secondary market for NFTs was safe to use without hooking into a 3rd-party validator, or if the distributed ledger was safe to trust in its entirety without filtering out a socially determined list of bad actors, then you might have a point. But it isn't safe, NFTs have done nothing to make it safe.

- Paper certificates of ownership of ideas/ingantible works, which have been used for art in the past going back some decades, and maybe somewhat more common now with certain conceptual / digital art pieces.

- A centralized leger, as the folks from Blain|Southern tried to do with seditionart.com.

- Or, maybe you can do something with federation, as you suggest?

That is just a tech argument of whether a blockchain (say Proof of Stake-based to avoid the energy argument) or something else is better, but note: It changes nothing about what the NFT is (and we can still call it that for simplicity). It would seem to do nothing to alleviate the concerns of people who don't understand paying for a pointer to a media file; since that is still what the federated ledger tracks, right?

If people feel a federated system works better for this, they can certainly build it. But Twitter is just Instagram from a purely technical perspective. There is more to product-market fit than the underlying database.

The whole thing came together with blockchains, maybe because you need an easy way to buy that stuff too, because there was a bunch of rich crypto people actually willing to spend money (when no one before was much interested in paying digital artists for their work), maybe cause the tech was there.

In general, I don't see what the argument is about; the ledger works quite well on a blockchain, and would work less well in a federated system from a trust perspective. I.e. your analysis about the trust vectors involved making the chain useless is wrong. Sure, platforms can choose not to show certain NFTs, and OpenSea has some dominance in the space, but when OpenSea kicked off a Cryptopunk Clone project no one lost their tokens, they continued to be traded elsewhere, and the community still chose to value their possessions, even if it maybe inhibited their growth.

There is really nothing centralized at the center of it in the end. Artists publish work on their own websites and their own contracts all the time, and if deafbeef posts on Twitter about his new NFT on this website, I will trust the existing social verification system (my friend telling me about it, his Twitter account being a known-entity).

This is distinct from Twitter avatar verification, which I predict a) will not happen and b) is indeed useless unless Twitter wants to be in the business of deciding which Punk-derivative project is looking too much like the real thing, which I doubt it wants to do.

A) the technology

B) the average consumer's understanding of the technology

I think we need art-tokens to be on a blockchain, and in a lot of ways the blockchain might even make this kind of stuff even harder. It's often desirable when working with non-fungible tokens to be able to easily update their metadata, block them, or link them together. NFTs are slowly making movement in this direction, but they're moving very slowly, and it's not clear how the blockchain is helping with any of those features.

I also think it's worth asking why this scene exploded specifically with NFTs even though the systems to make it work existed long before NFTs were on the scene. Frankly, I don't believe you that the average NFT investor understands that the ledger is just a ledger. I've talked to people who are involved in casual NFT collection, and they think the technology is magic. They think that the blockchain magically makes their tokens valuable.

> but when OpenSea kicked off a Cryptopunk Clone project no one lost their tokens, they continued to be traded elsewhere, and the community still chose to value their possessions, even if it maybe inhibited their growth.

It's not really the blockchain that makes this happen though; federated systems can split from each other and route around each other just as easily. If a federated ledger tries to remove tokens, communities can still choose to recognize those tokens and either fork the ledger or run in parallel alongside it.

What you're seeing with OpenSea and clone projects is the social side of this, not the blockchain part.

Except no, not easier to trade/verify if you have to hook into off-chain validators to verify that the token is legitimate. The part of transaction security that matters for most people are the trust parts that NFTs explicitly don't try to solve.

The big problem with trust in any token system (and really any art market) is figuring out which tokens are being issued by whom and whether the token/work you're looking at is "real" and actually issued by the artist.

Which NFTs don't even try to help with; they leave that to off-chain validators.

Right now, there are no mechanism for extraordinary digital artists to make their art expensive like IRL art. The best thing is you can do commissions for people, but it's hard for them to maintain their rights (both for artist and customer).

Maybe NFT will be more prominent with some "data registry" between platforms to make it global to check your rights on items, and great artists can sell their art for a more reasonable price. For now, IRL art is like a "club for friends," and digital artists are not taken as seriously as they, even when digital one draw some almost masterpieces and spent 3-6 months on every item.

Note that there are definitely currently ways for digital artists to make expensive art, and that's in the form of commissions. If you really want to support an artist, find one you really like, and pay for a commission from them. You may also be able to pay more for forms of copyright (like reproduction).

NFTs are the worst possible way for artists to make money from digital art.

NFT buyers are clearly more respectful of an artists craft: They buy the work the artist really wanted to create, and they respect the fact that they cannot be the owner of the work in a moral sense.

Consider this statement: Scarcity is fundamental to any store of value. There are an infinite number of potential cryptocurrencies.

By definition, every non-fungible token is its own unique snowflake. There are new snowflakes made every day. Few ever trade, and the ones that do are probably wash trades.

I'd say most of the value of Bitcoin comes from the ability to do payments that are not possible in the current legal system. Some of them may be illegal. Some of them might be genuinely useful like in El Salvador.

Which is why alt coins are our generation's version of penny stocks. But specific coins have scarcity built in.

Right, the "limited edition" sales ploy (limited to how many they can sell).

Because they can also mint a "new collection".

Most paintings don't have (much) value. Behold my latest work, the brown ring of quality... do I hear... 5 cents?

A few paintings have value, primarily due to the fame of the artist or the history of the piece (It hung <place>). Supply is frequently capped by the fact the artist is dead...

It's much more impressive to those people to have paid to support the original rather than having a knockoff... This has been true as long as goods have been produced.

This is a funny way of saying "to enter a speculative market with foolish money."

That doesn't mean there is an infinite number of any given collection.

For digital collections, there are an infinite number. The only finite thing, in this case, is the NFT.

NFTs are not digital representations of art. They don't create scarcity. They're digital trading cards: their scarcity is only relevant and verifiable in and of themselves.

You're making a future prediction about an entire category invoking a specific instance from physical collectibles. Have all physical collectibles been subject to the fate of beanie babies?

Limited to how many we can sell.

I'm sure we'll see much more interesting use cases for NFTs emerge over time, and I'm excited about that.

It's ok though, because at least the original will definitely be the one to be valuable, and not the 42nd, 69th, or 420th. Right? Right??

This is a difficult concept for people to get their heads around because of the obvious but incorrect parallel between original art and reproductions. It would be slightly closer to say that an NFT is a photo of a Vermeer. Anyone can make more originals at any time and there's nothing you or anyone can do about it.

There are an infinite number of made up currencies as well.

Because neither of them function as a currency then they are the same thing, the difference being, with NFT's you own some 'art' or something like that, with Crypto you own a 'number'.

The 'potential usefulness' of Crypto makes it feel like it has more material merit, but in practice, they're not useful (not yet), so they might as well be NFTs.

There are no Crypto models today that make sense in any real systematic way, other than some governments reasonable attempts to be more digital, which comes wit a bunch of scary caveats as well.

Currency is a form of social credit that is fundamentally tied to the economy in which it is used as a means of transaction, there is no escaping that reality. We can't just magically make up some thing that is independent of that underlying reality.

If we could merely overcome the kludigness of banks, and the transnational cost of VISA - and make something a little more easily internationalized ... those things would help, but those probably are going to have to be a function of 'good governance'. Maybe the experiments in New Zealand and Sweden etc. will pay off if they can find something that works, that can be expanded upon.

[1]: https://wiki.c2.com/?TheyLaughedAtEinstein

Can I have the title to your car? After all, it's just a piece of paper.

NFTs are access tokens to social communities, where owning a particular token grants you access to a community that shares ownership. Collab.Land is a tool communities use for NFT ownership based roles, revoked upon sale. NFTs are a distributed system of title. I'd be shocked if every concert ticket isn't a form of NFT in ten years--you can transfer them verifiably on the secondary market while giving a royalty to the issuer, use them to access a concert, and keep them as a souvenir like a traditional ticket stub. And yes, some people make profile pics, and generative art projects. You don't have to like or participate in those. But dismissing all NFTs as idiotic is not a position that is going to age well.

Granted, I really can't be bothered to care about all the stuff going on out there with nft's but i'm not going to let it sour me on those trying to build decentralized alternatives for systems people like to engage in now while cutting out the centralized platform rentiers/censors.

[0] https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/785611286100049941/88...

[1] https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/785611286100049941/88...

> without having to solely trust the company issuing the nft ticket

For the transaction yes, but what about the thing you are buying? Perhaps I am not thinking creatively enough, but I can't think of a use case where there isn't ultimately some trust required other than solely digital assets.

Using your hotel example, you will end up at the hotel where they can choose to honor your ticket in the same way as their traditional booking system. There was no need for this to be on a distributed ledger as the asset (a hotel stay) was between you and the hotel.

You are not cutting out the middle man of some SaaS provider, you are substituting them.

Perhaps, but its ok either way, it's not really limiting the DAO or the places leveraging the DAO to pursue this stuff.

> Using your hotel example, you will end up at the hotel where they can choose to honor your ticket in the same way as their traditional booking system. There was no need for this to be on a distributed ledger as the asset (a hotel stay) was between you and the hotel.

Its not just about honoring the ticket for the duration of any particular booking, but also mitigating the risk between multiple parties and being able to easily integrate such information with as many decentralized protocols are needed for the parties involved without extra dev overhead to connect them.

For some places, you need to have a card on file in case of damages (this is where the decentralized escrow/dispute and resolution protocol come in) and rely soley on visa/mastercard and the hotel unilaterally being able to say that you were the cause of an issue that may come up or being able to decided whether or not you are on the hook.

Incentivized actors (these need not be people, it could be automated, but since everything has an address, no one can tell the difference) of those other protocols on chain need visibility with the address that held the nft. So yes, its trust the protocols and incentives associated with them around handling dispute and resolution and non custodial locking of collateral in escrow (or allowing another protocol to time lock collateral on ones behalf).

And this assumes that the place someone buys an nft stay has the in house capability to do all that without using a particualr nft stay protocol (which alot of places dont esp for random bnb) or ok with giving a large cut to airbnb/booking.com/visa etc if they don't.

> You are not cutting out the middle man of some SaaS provider, you are substituting them.

Yes, for code that can take a lot less of the cut than existing SaaS providers (if any at all). A protocol != SaaS provider, even though a SaaS provider could manage a protocol[0], or a protocol can just be an set of immutable contracts deployed on chain, or anything in between.

[0] https://aws1.discourse-cdn.com/standard21/uploads/shinedao/o...

Do I print a piece of paper? Do I show them a picture on my phone or something? Can't the previous owners of the NFT show the same picture? Can't anyone show the same picture on their own phone?

Your NFT could have an associated QR code read at the door. In case of conflict there’s only one owner with access to the associated wallet and will be able to proof ownership via app / website…

I suppose your right that it usually wouldn't matter, but in case of conflict you better be prepared to sign something with your private key. If NFTs make most of society familiar with public and private keys, message signing, etc, it will be a win.

Yep, if someone else tries to access with your ticket you can always sign with your wallet somewhere to resolve the conflict.

We will probably see crypto wallets integrated in our phones and associated OSs pretty soon to make everything smooth.

Or just have your phone broadcast the public keys via radio to a turnstile.

Thus, anyone can make QR codes that show the 2 public keys. It's trivial. This is the "showing a picture" scenerio I mentioned above. Anyone can show the right picture, especially since the picture that needs to be shown is public information.

Which of these can you not do on TicketMaster today?