> You're not 'buying' anything. You're just making a non-deductible donation.

You are buying something in that you will be able to sell it later, which I think is the main point.

Yes, but what that something is is not what people think they own. They own a unique reference to an item, not the item itself.

Hmm, analogy I just came up. This would be same as buying piece of paper with name of the art work and then signature by artist(possibly fake). So some value, but on average not really. Unless artist was very popular and those signatures were exceedingly rare...

You're buying a receipt.

correct me if I'm wrong, but a receipt dressed up in a brochure that in most cases is being marketed as "art". The address to this brochure doesn't change but the "art" at the end of it can change without your notice?

Another analogy: you own the pointer not the value stored in memory.

I'd argue it's more similar to buying a signed copy of a book by an author. It doesn't prevent them from printing more copies, but it is also worth more than an unsigned copy.

the author's signature has value because the author has a very limited amount of time in his life to give out signatures. moreover not only it takes time to sign stuff but it also takes effort. these two combined, plus some subjective personal feelings about the author and their importance, give value to a physical signature. digital signatures on the other hand are effortless and automatic, the author doesn't have to do anything beyond generating a public key pair once

More like a torn out page with signature, without the book. The book itself is nearby, but another person holds it in his hands and can open it for you when requested.

Those are fair points, but my understanding is that it's not specific to NFTs iteself:

- buyers not knowing exactly what they buy is something that happens all the time in the real world. That doesn't make it right, of course, but that doesn't make all those sales "non-deductible donations".

- artists already use a lot the same kind of mechanism used for NFTs. For example, limited editions of a reproduction of a piece of art. You won't own the original piece, but you will have a copy, with a certificate that proves its authenticity. Part of the price is usually a high quality reproduction, but an often significant part is the certificate and the scarcity of the item.

I think my point is that "limited" NFTs as in "multiple NFTs for one piece of art" are something already natural and established in the art world. I agree with you that "unique" NFTs as in "one NFT for one piece of art" are more confusing and already somewhat existed before in the form of copyright holding. One difference that I can think of is that with NFTs artists can keep the copyright and thus control over how their art is used, while still allowing people to "own" and speculate on the art itself.

All of that is just about the NFT concept by itself. There is also the implementation part (crypto), how it's used, and arguments like "is it even a good idea to do artificial scarcity in the first place?". I don't know enough about those subjects to have an opinion on them.

Some tokens have license in their metadata allowing the token owner to monetise and redistribute the artwork. The original author still has author' rights.

> Some tokens have license in their metadata allowing the token owner to monetise and redistribute the artwork.

the problem is that these rights must be linked to a physical real person, and not just a public key pair. in the real world if I want to acquire the rights to a piece of media I have to contact the author or some kind of middleman and specify exactly who I am and sometimes even how I'm planning to use the asset. instead if ownership is linked to an anonymous private key then I could simply share the same key with some of my friends and they could all use the piece of media in their works and present some proof that they have the private key with them in case of questioning.

so even if in theory NFTs could in fact be used to automatically make a public record of whoever has bought the rights to something, then we would need a public record that links real people's identities with their private keys (so a good old public keyring) but that would destroy any semblance of privacy and we're back to square one.

Except most probably that license itself and rules regarding it's usage are stored in a centralized way somewhere. Simply because NFT can't store anything this big inside, not even a sufficiently long text only file. The tech doesn't allow this.

The license and rights do not have to be centralised. The owner just has to hold on to some documentation showing they have ownership. If the original artist challenges it, you pull out the email/letter/receipt that shows you originally paid for it.

Fraudulently inventing proof is a serious crime. None of this required any blockchains or decentralisation. In fact it was never centralised to begin with.

NFTs serve absolutely no purpose that wasn’t already solved in better ways.

The majority of NFTs store their metadata on IPFS

So? It is a system external to the blockchain with NFTs, that's the problem. One of the problems.

Because IPFS is decentralised permanent storage. Blockchain handles ownership, IPFS handles metadata, visual assets, etc. It's kinda how things work in real world with real estate, for example. There is a registry and there is physical property. Same here.

You own the token. The NFT.

Okay?

I can sell you (and a dozen other people) a photo of the deed to my house, and it's very nice that you own this photo, but I don't understand why you would pay me real dollars to buy it.

Unless your plan consists of selling it to a bigger fool.

But not the piece of art, as many people claim.

Edit: Missed to not. I assume it still was clear

and that art is ON SERVER NOT ON BLOCKCHAIN, so how many times you had service go bust/eol and you lost your data in past on internet?

Even worse, the blockchain can't really be accessed decentrally, at least not in most cases and this will possibly worsen as time goes on. https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

The decentralization is interesting question. How much resources you need to run fully qualified node. That is one that has full history, mempool and so on. And how many of the users actually do this anymore? And how long it takes to bootstrap for new user...

And now multiply this for all the chains you want to use/support... And with BTC you aren't even paid for this service...