NFTs are great if you need cryptographic proof of ownership. I believe this actually has a ton of unexplored utility, even though people now associate "NFT" with pictures of monkeys.
The only NFTs I currently use are from Uniswap, but I think it's likely I'll use them for all sorts of ownership in the future.
NFTs can also make things like subscription services and club memberships transferable by allowing secondary marketplaces where they otherwise would not exist, which should be good for both businesses and customers. POAPs are pretty interesting too.
You can get that with a cheap smart-token that we all call a "chip-enabled credit card", which provides cryptographic proof of ownership each time you use the chip or NFT reader.
There are also cryptographic proofs of ownership with every cell-phone enabled application, as well as HTTPS client certificates (rarely used on the public internet, I find them in use in private intranets, SSH keys, and the like).
You know, "cryptography", the kinds of which we've been using since 1980. Not the "new fangled crypto" that forgets about older solutions that still work today.
The special thing about NFTs is that they're securely transferable on a public ledger, which isn't really the case with client certificates or ssh keys.
Let's say I buy a ticket to a show as an NFT and I want to give it to you. I can simply send it to your wallet address, and now you own it and can prove you do at admission time.
If I resell the ticket to you at a premium, perhaps the performer gets an additional cut to help them capture some of the resale value and reduce scalping.
I'm not sure how you'd do this with SSH keys or private certificates, but I think you would end up needing some kind of registration/directory/ledger service, and then you've just invented cryptocurrency again.
Scalper creates "Scalper Account#1234". Scalper uses Account#1234 to buy the NFT, then sells the account in it entirety to Alice. Alice then enters the show.
There's no way to prove that Account#1234 was legitimately purchased, or if it was from a "scalper". Honestly, it looks like you're just playing games with 1990s-era verification methods, none of which worked.
The "solution" today is to install a rootkit of some kind onto people's phones and/or PCs, to stop this kind of behavior. (Anti-cheat software for video games). Leading to TPM and so forth. But at no point is NFTs actually solving the problem (and many people online consider the TPM stuff immoral anyway, because it forces the ticketmaster to control your computer/devices).
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Perhaps this can all be solved with long-lived accounts. Its easier to trust a 10-year-old account with a long purchase history rather than a fresh 2-month old account. But there's ways around that too (see Reddit accounts: some dude in a 3rd world country owns an account for 2-years+ with basic posts and then sells the account to a reputation manager).
So its not like you can trust long-term accounts anyway, not as long as 3rd world countries are willing to sell legitimate long-lived accounts for $$$$.
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At no point am I seeing this "scalper problem" solved. Nor do I see how NFTs even help at all.
Ownership-like-responsibility, on the other hand, is a place I can see NFT's sticking. Like: the calls get routed to whoever has the on-call token. If the token is for something that most people don't want, then everybody except the holder has an incentive to buy in.
Also, shaming (e.g. for the purpose of directing sabotage). If you want to oppose something, it's no good to just pick a fight with whatever you see that happens to resemble that thing, you ought to go find the strongest example of whatever you want to oppose, and go interfere with that. NFT's could help us have consensus about such things so that we can collectively create incentives to not be the most prominent example of a problematic practice.
Like what specifically?
It's remarkable how much of this sounds like the lamentations we have for Web 1.0, back when the Internet was fun and creative and there were no corporate sites to speak of.
We now come full circle, with Web3 speedrunning the history of the WWW.
https://www.coindesk.com/web3/2023/04/20/nft-marketplaces-sa...
Those of us who aren’t blockheads are happy with the situation because we are hearing very little about NFTs except from the occasional slow moving corporation that decided to get into NFTs a year ago and is now heading into the dead mall.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_o3nZHzCwA [video][4 mins][bill maher, ben mckenzie]
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpqreZlmHGU [video][8 mins][ben mckenzie, cnn]
The whole thing was always fake. To the extent NFTs were a thing, they were another speculative asset for crypto degens. That's all they ever were.
ENS is, to me, a perfect usecase for NFTs. What you "own" is a hash that represents a human readable name. That ownership is stored in a global database that isn't owned by anyone and can't be tampered with.
Now you have a cryptographically secure human readable "address" you can use just like a domain to point to anything you want.
And just by being deployed on Ethereum your domain or subdomains can receive money and tokens directly. It can be used to receive encrypted communications. So much other stuff.
Think about this the next time that you hear something like "but $newHype is nothing like NFTS!" No, of course not, that's not guarantee of authenticity.
