It's a digital certificate that is already being used to represent ownership of things like artworks. Not a theory, an active reality where they already serve a useful purpose.

Just because scammers jumped all over it, and even if most NFTs are scams, that does nothing to overwrite the fact that there's a useful technology here, albeit with a niche purpose.

The problem is that people are using the hype to scam, that's human behavior, not an issue with NFTs themselves, which are just boring certificates.

I think blockchains are interesting in theory. I think that the underlying assumption about trust and reliability are interesting. But I still have not seen any use-case for them that makes more sense than what they replace in a real world use-case.

For NFT's this is even worse, because they not only claim to be magic internet money, they also (often) claim to represent a real world object or artwork, so you basically have two overvalued markets reinforcing one another. An NFT does not represent a ownership over anything more than the NFT itself unless it also comes with legal and/or physical possession of the thing it supposedly represents. If it comes with legal or physical possession then the NFT is not the core of the transaction, is it?

In theory an NFT is just anything on a blockchain that cannot be equally substituted. In practice it is a way to hype and scam.

> An NFT does not represent a ownership over anything more than the NFT itself unless it also comes with legal and/or physical possession of the thing it supposedly represents. If it comes with legal or physical possession then the NFT is not the core of the transaction, is it?

Of course, you buy a house, not a deed. The fact that people are hideously misinformed about NFTs isn't a problem with NFTs though. It doesn't make any sense to me to blame the technology for people's ignorance.

> Of course, you buy a house, not a deed.

The question I was asking (and perhaps I should have been more clear): If I'm not buying the house (I can't live in it), and I'm not buying the mortgage (as in a bank would), and I'm not buying a picture of the house (as in having exclusive rights to an image), but I am buying a hash of a specific image of the house, is that not a bit crazy?

And if you think it is but think there are better usecases for NFTs then I'd advise changing the acronym for your use-case because for me and a lot of other people NFT equals either scam or bubble. The term is tainted.

Except we already have deeds, and unlike NFTs they have legal weight. What does an NFT bring to the table?

Can you name some NFT ecosystems that use them to represent ownership of artwork in a meaningful, useful way, and not just as resellable bragging rights?

I know it's possible, but I haven't seen any.