The difference between most[1] NFTs and Netflix/Steam/Apps is with the latter, you are buying access to something. With most of these NFTs that are just a picture, owning the NFT doesn't confer any special right to you. We can all enjoy the Disaster Girl meme, you don't have to have bought the NFT. The owner of the first ever tweet cannot actually do anything with it, edit it, destroy it, put it in a private collection so only they can look at it.

The only thing buying one of these NFTs gives you is I guess "bragging rights" but I think it remains to be seen why anyone should care that you paid money for 0x3B3ee1931Dc30C1957379FAc9aba94D1C48a5405,25046.

[1] The only exception is maybe these NFTs that interact with something on the blockchain like an item or place in a videogame, in that case owning the NFT provides some sort of utility.

Yes, that's definitely the case for a lot of NFTs being minted and sold.

And if an NFT did represent the right to download and play a particular game from Steam (like, you had to present proof of ownership of an NFT to Steam to be allowed to play the game), such that I could sell that NFT outside of Steam to someone else... well, the value of that NFT is only as good as Steam's willingness to abide by the agreement it embodies, which they can unilaterally withdraw at any time, so there's little value in Steam honoring such a thing. If they wanted to permit game resale, they can do that, inside their own database, without any NFT nonsense.

So yeah, it's still a bit of a mystery if or whether this actually adds anything, but I'm just trying to put myself into the mindset of people who are excited by this and trying to figure out what excites them, rather than just assuming they're all dumb because they think buying numbers is going to change the world.

It really shows the dishonesty in crypto "innovation:" they claim "security" and "trustlessness," but it all reduces to simple human/institutional/contractual trust relationships as soon as you need to deal with anything with real-world practical value, whether that be access to games on Steam or tracking a package or whatever.

With all this fancy software and energy spent on mining, what then is the point of all that effort?

I think some of that directly connects to the (intentional) confusion in terms of "smart contracts" and old fashioned "contracts". "Smart contracts" are programs and there's a sense that they are "better" and easier to "trust" than old fashioned "contracts" because computer's enforce them ("fairly and equitably", or so proponents believe [1]) and not people and institutions.

But people don't run "smart contract software" in their own brains and at the end of the day if these things are to be meaningful to people they have to interact with people and institutions and good old fashioned "contracts". It's trying to solve sociological and political problems with code, but we don't have a real world substrate for those "programs", what we instead have millennia of institutional history and contract law and at the end of the day those still matter more than what the computer says even you personally don't trust those institutions for whatever reason.

ETA: [1] Don't forget that it's a common fallacy among tech idealists that computers are unbiased and objective "because math" rather than machines that will reflect the biases and subjective opinions of those that program them.

Yeah I agree, and that's why I'm generally skeptical of any smart contract ideas that have to interface with real life (supply chains, land registry, and so on). I think they make more sense when they are concerned with things entirely contained within the blockchain, like swapping tokens or mapping names to addresses. Frustratingly enough, it's the former type ("let's put cows on the blockchain") that seem to get the most mainstream attention.

I've passed beyond skeptical of smart contracts that try to apply to real life to a concern that much more real contract law needs to apply to smart contracts.

Ethereum is already full of fun stories where "smart" contracts did extremely dumb things because they took a programmer's word extremely literally rather than a programmer's intent.

In a world where programmers are assumed to be ordinary, fallible humans that's a ton of pressure to put on a programmer to never make a single mistake. While there's a lot of active research into trying to bring technical solutions to that human problem such as strict "formal proofs" and such of the programs being made into smart contracts, I'm increasingly of the opinion that would benefit them the most would be political and sociological solutions such as classics like "courts of appeals", "trials by jury of peers" to determine intent over literal substance, and so forth.

Those aren't "fun, technical" solutions, and would require placing trust again in institutions and people, so I absolutely have zero optimism that any smart contracts system would embrace them. I just think that they need such political structures to exist otherwise you left with merely a lowest common denominator tyranny of software bugs (no matter how formally the best contracts mathematically prove their claims/efforts).

Using a court of appeals assumes a shared widespread understanding of the topic of disagreement, often the only people with the expertise on the topic are going to be the parties involved and teaching a 3rd party can be impractical and prone to steering.

I can see smart contracts working with very low volume specialized scenarios for this reason.

Also traditional dispute resolution is expensive plenty of times where both parties would be willing to accept the risk of a bug over paying lawyer fees

The shape of trials in a court of law is built around discovering the topic of disagreement and sourcing enough expertise on the topic to get a judgement from a jury of "peers".

Whether or not that is an expensive process is orthogonal to the question: if a "smart" contract makes a mistake, how do you fix it? Right now there is just zero recourse and everybody shrugs their shoulders at it, "oh well, that's just how software bugs work, sorry about your loss". That's an awfully hard pill to swallow for the average person. Real contracts built up a lot of mechanisms to keep contracts fair and equitable by making sure that when one goes wrong there are ways to deal with it.

Right now with "smart" contracts it's a wild west of whether or not escrow accounts exist and you can maybe, optionally get people (or institutions) involved to fixed something about to go wrong or in the process of going wrong, and there's just about no way in most "smart" contracts to fix things after they've gone wrong. But critically it's a "right" in most contract law-based countries to challenge a contract in a court of law and get a human opinion from a jury of your peers, and I don't see how average citizens can trust a system where that "right" is not given as such and is an "optional" feature that they generally have no idea exists in a specific "smart" contract code (much less if that feature itself is buggy or not).

I realize (per above) that this is often a "feature" and not a "bug" in "smart" contract design today. Most of the designers don't trust institutions (and maybe not even people) and like the "freedom" of "smart" contract platforms with few regulations, few "required features", and few places for instutional/personal intercession. I just don't think that's a good situation for most people to ever trust "smart" contracts in the real world.

Pretty much every profile pic NFT now (hottest form of NFTs right now) comes with some huge list of utility and roadmap behind it (look into BAYC for a good example), if that's the sort of thing you're looking for. Also, "bragging rights" or flexing, it turns out, is a pretty huge part of not only the physical realm but also digital as well if you look at the existing digital skins market.

Skins are an interesting comparison. I feel like that falls under the utility category I mentioned, like when you buy a skin you are really buying the right to use something at a particular place and time (a cool looking gun during a match), and nobody else has the right to use it. In contrast, whenever I see the Disaster Girl meme posted somewhere on the Internet I don't see any indication of who "owns" it.

It has an owner. Its copyright belongs to the photographer who took it - Dave Roth, father of Zoë Roth, the girl in the picture. If you ever see it reproduced in a newspaper article you’ll see him credited.

The NFT Zoë Roth sold doesn’t convey any rights over that image or its use. It’s got the faint frisson of exclusivity to it - kind of like if you had a print of that photograph signed by Zoë Roth. It’s a little bit special that it’s an NFT minted by her in specific reference to the meme; and it has some additional cachet as a historical artifact of being maybe one of the first meme NFTs, so there’s that.

So sure, I can sort of see there being some value in the bragging rights of being able to say “look, I have the private key to the ethereum wallet that has the right to transfer ownership of this binary string to someone else, and look - this cryptographically secure chain of numbers shows that that very same binary string is the one Zoë Roth cryptographically signed with her own private key way back in 2021…”

Just, that’s going to be a lot to explain, for the bragging rights, I think.

Compared to pointing to a picture in a frame and saying “yeah, that’s signed by the person in the picture”.

> It has an owner. Its copyright belongs to the photographer who took it - Dave Roth, father of Zoë Roth, the girl in the picture. If you ever see it reproduced in a newspaper article you’ll see him credited.

Note that we casually may call him the owner, but having certain legal claims such as copyright is not the same thing as the legal concept of ownership.

This is relevant, because pointing to a picture on the wall saying "yeah, that is an original Disaster Girl print" is a very different social flex than saying "I am the artist of this well-known photograph". The latter doesn't really need nor benefit from an authenticated digital print on the creators wall; of course the artist can print dozens of copies and they are all authenticated.

For Dave Roth to sell the the copyright or certain license rights to the image is just such an entirely different transaction that I am not sure why NFT critics keep mixing them up.

Those are good points. The comparison to an autographed photo is actually really fair and puts it in a different light for me. But half a million bucks for an autograph from the girl in that meme? It still sets off my BS detector but I'm open to the possibility that I just don't get it.

Roadmaps! Like those spicy ICOs in 2017! I wonder if 90% of them failed, or is it 95%?

I think 'utility' might be a stretch for the BAYC roadmap.

That model of NFT is very much on the MLM end of the scale.

Not really, because there is still no utility in owning the rights to an NFT.

I've only ever seen two kinds of interest expressed in NFTs.

The first is immensely wealthy people who are looking for a trendy way to flaunt their wealth, because they've exhausted all traditional options. This is what leads someone to pay $3M to "own" the first tweet.

The second is people who aren't immensely wealthy but are hoping they will become so by buying/minting an NFT and selling it for an huge profit, presumably to someone from the first group (or a sucker from the second). This makes up the majority of NFTs by volume, and is where the pyramid scheme similarities become hard to dismiss.

Haven't seen anything resembling a third kind of interest that, under scrutiny, doesn't ultimately fall into one of these two groups.

It seems to be exactly the opposite. In digital age you can consume stuff without buying anything and people care less about ownership per se, but "people who don't get it" buy stuff like NFT.

Maybe. Or maybe it's that people less used to the concept of ownership can be more easily defrauded by "as a Service" businesses and people peddling crypto alike.

> consider some of the things you likely have bought recently: a ‘twelve month Netflix subscription’, a ‘Steam library game’, an ‘app’… you bought those things with no expectation you could resell them later because you don’t think of those as ‘things’

Yes and no. The subscription is very much "a thing". Think of this like a mental jump you've made when you understood functions as first-class values - code that your program can grab and pass around. I may not be able to sell the underlying media library to which I'm granted access, but I can very much sell the access itself. Or borrow it to a friend. Or charge money for it. People are[0], in fact, trading access to subscription services like Netflix.

> if you grew up digital native and the only things you’ve ever been able to buy are non transferable digital pointers to rights to use something, maybe the idea of a transferable digital rights pointer seems like a crazy innovative new idea that changes everything?

That's... a couple decades of dystopia ahead of us. People growing today are still buying food, toys, medicine. Children develop understanding of ownership before they develop understanding of money.

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[0] - Or were, last time I checked, which was some 2-3 years ago.

“Look what I found in the loft! Grandma’s old Netflix subscription from 2021!”

NFTs are all about owning, in fact they are more about owning than almost anything on earth. The ONLY advantage you get from owning an NFT is the knowledge that you own it. Everyone, owner or not, can enjoy looking at the jpeg in the same way. That's not really true for anything else.

So, far from representing the move away from ownership, they are a distillation of the ownership concept.

I do, in fact, expect to be able to use my paid for Android app at any time in the future.

I'm not counting on updates and new features, I just want the same version I bought to work on the same version of Android it works on right now.

Obviously, that's all in my stubborn old school brain, but it doesn't stop me from hoarding .APK files and Android images.

I had a lot of great very old software on some CDs that I regularly reburned/copied until I lost them over a decade ago and I'm still pissed about that :D