NFTs are nothing but a new way to record ownership. It does fuck all about the actual thing it is about.
I could use NFTs to sell my copy of Star Wars to another person. But doing so wouldn’t mean that I actually lose my copy of Star Wars. And neither would it mean that the other person gains a copy of Star Wars. NFTs are not better than a piece of paper recording a sale.
And there are far cheaper ways of recording a sale.
It’s a little more than that. It’s a way of trustlessly proving ownership. Certainly, a company like Valve will be against NFTs because they benefit from having complete control over things like the CS skin market. But I also play Warframe. The main market is an unofficial third party web site which let’s you copy text into chat to organize a sale. It’s clunky. I think the Warframe trading situation would benefit from items being associated with an NFT so the third party service could actually make the trades rather than simply facilitate. DE benefits from trading being a bit awkward so people buy plat instead of trade for it, so that’ll never happen.
Overall, I suspect NFTs will be the most likely of the crypto ideas to actually find some real use cases. Not needing a central authority to verify ownership is too useful of an idea.
But just because I sell you a Warframe NFT it doesn’t mean that you have a Warframe item. Sure, you could go to court over it, but that is the case for any other type of contract. NFTs don’t solve any problem.
The more I think about it, Warframe is a bad use case. What would give the NFT power would be the game recognizing it which is still a central authority. DE would be better served by implementing an API that the market could use to make trades.
I think the best use case for NFTs doesn’t really exist yet. The “NFTs don’t solve any problem” argument is limiting your imagination to problems that have already been solved. I think at some point a type of game or software will emerge with no central authority. Maybe a FOSS project with lots of popular forks or a connected network of games from different developers. In this environment, ownership of a digital asset may be something that’s good to transfer between instances or trade between users without having to get all the developers to agree on who gets to control the market.
In that court, you have to be able to provide a lot of documentary evidence to prove the contract was breached as a factual matter. NFTs can be set as immutable events in a log of massive data to sort through.
There are other logistical challenges to it. My point really boils down to the technology got massive negativity publicity while in infancy due to being exploited by con artists.
Trustlessly transferring ownership is handled in human society by contracts, enforceable in courts. NFTs are only useful in proving ownership to the extent they are enforceable by state power, which, at the moment, is no extent at all
NFTs are nothing but a new way to record ownership. It does fuck all about the actual thing it is about.
I could use NFTs to sell my copy of Star Wars to another person. But doing so wouldn’t mean that I actually lose my copy of Star Wars. And neither would it mean that the other person gains a copy of Star Wars. NFTs are not better than a piece of paper recording a sale.
And there are far cheaper ways of recording a sale.
It’s a little more than that. It’s a way of trustlessly proving ownership. Certainly, a company like Valve will be against NFTs because they benefit from having complete control over things like the CS skin market. But I also play Warframe. The main market is an unofficial third party web site which let’s you copy text into chat to organize a sale. It’s clunky. I think the Warframe trading situation would benefit from items being associated with an NFT so the third party service could actually make the trades rather than simply facilitate. DE benefits from trading being a bit awkward so people buy plat instead of trade for it, so that’ll never happen.
Overall, I suspect NFTs will be the most likely of the crypto ideas to actually find some real use cases. Not needing a central authority to verify ownership is too useful of an idea.
But just because I sell you a Warframe NFT it doesn’t mean that you have a Warframe item. Sure, you could go to court over it, but that is the case for any other type of contract. NFTs don’t solve any problem.
The more I think about it, Warframe is a bad use case. What would give the NFT power would be the game recognizing it which is still a central authority. DE would be better served by implementing an API that the market could use to make trades.
I think the best use case for NFTs doesn’t really exist yet. The “NFTs don’t solve any problem” argument is limiting your imagination to problems that have already been solved. I think at some point a type of game or software will emerge with no central authority. Maybe a FOSS project with lots of popular forks or a connected network of games from different developers. In this environment, ownership of a digital asset may be something that’s good to transfer between instances or trade between users without having to get all the developers to agree on who gets to control the market.
In that court, you have to be able to provide a lot of documentary evidence to prove the contract was breached as a factual matter. NFTs can be set as immutable events in a log of massive data to sort through.
There are other logistical challenges to it. My point really boils down to the technology got massive negativity publicity while in infancy due to being exploited by con artists.
Trustlessly transferring ownership is handled in human society by contracts, enforceable in courts. NFTs are only useful in proving ownership to the extent they are enforceable by state power, which, at the moment, is no extent at all