If you buy this, you are scammed.

    • I think the biggest place it has genuine benefit would be for something like deeds to homes, titles for cars and stuff like that. A permanent, auditable and public system for tracking the transfer and ownership of things.

      Unfortunately it comes with its own caveats, such as “what if I lose the wallet containing the deed to my home, and I want to sell it?”

      I never really understood the whole thing about picture based NFTs though.

      • We already have that without adding a completely useless layer of complexity. You’ve been able to look up property records online for decades. NFTs would add zero value to that system, and as you’ve correctly pointed out, have serious dowsides including lost, hacked, or stolen tokens.

        • You pay for something and get a receipt. You get ownership of an original image, such as a painting, transferred by a verified owner or creator. It’s mostly used for art now because the reputation hasn’t matured enough for an authority to link it to a physical item. But being able to own a 1 in 5 Nike release with a receipt that never decays and that you can transfer to others and verify the authenticity of on your phone just seems like the next step in ownership. Same with video games, for example, it’d allow a true second hand digital games market if game ownership was verified by owning a copy on a blockchain.

          • “It’s mostly used for art now”

            Do you call a procedurally generated monkey art? In stores, you get receipts for things that are actually usable. The hell are you going to use a JPEG for?

            “Verify authenticity”

            If that JPEG is shared, other people will have access, and your “ownership” will be nothing, since people can just repost it on other NFT shit sites and start the loop all over again.

            “with a receipt that never decays”

            And what if the NFT site suffers link rot or actually goes down? Your digital “never decaying” receipt would be useless and/or inaccessible.

            • The hell you gonna use a painting for then? Like it or not, there’s physical art and digital art. Both are easy to copy, so it’s good to have an easy way to indicate ownership of an original.

              Why does anyone pay for art when they can just copy paste it? Why do people pay for an original when a copy is just as good? Do you just not understand the concept of digital ownership? It doesn’t even have to be something like art, you could own one of a million copies of a movie and the token gives you cryptographic proof that you’re allowed to watch and sell this movie to others.

              The receipt still never decays, link rot is pretty useless when the token just says “This art/media/object belongs to this person” as long as the art/media/object still exists the token is proof of who actually owns it and (hopefully in the future) who owns the rights to it.

              If the NFT site goes down you still have your NFT registered on a publicly accessible verification chain. Anyone with or without original NFT site can see you own something.

              I get that it’s new and I get that it’s scary when such big technological changes are made and people are testing them out in the real world but they’re here to stay. They’ve proven to be quite useful to people who got into them because of the ridiculous digital art NFT price speculation trend.

              Turns out, the receipts are basically as bullet proof as a torrent, seeded by a couple of million people. That’s why decentralisation is so nice, you’re on Lemmy, I assume you understand.

          • But you’re not the owner, though, you don’t get a copyright, the image is hosted externally, anything besides the receipt is just a contract which needs to be enforced via regular legal means and can be broken.

            • Copyright is something legal, so as long as the law is out of date, there’s no support for digital copyright transfers. But ownership and authenticity is certainly transferable.

              Anything better than the “you’ll own nothing and enjoy it” state of the internet today. It’d be amazing to own my movies and be able to transfer them to anyone I want.

              • Think of an NFT as a membership card to a club. You can sell your card to someone else, but there’s nothing stopping the club from changing their system and no longer accepting old cards, not letting someone in despite having a card, or going out of business.

                And you’ve never been able to own movies or video games, unless you made them yourself. NFT’s don’t change that either, you may own a receipt for access to something, but the club analogy still counts.

    • Okay but I own the ring, even I’m not holding it.

    • Well… No, the ring is Sauron’s for legal reasons. You own a picture of it on the shared ledger.

    • Okay, so I can expect this picture to be under my control and ownership at least?

    • Well… No, you don’t “own” own it, and it’s not the picture either, really. It’s just a number. But! The number points to a row in Opensea’s database of pictures.

    • Okay, so I have ownership and control of that picture in Opensea’s database?

    • Hahaha no, they can remove it or change it and you can’t do a thing.

  • But it isn’t though right? Like if this was all it was there wouldn’t be companies selling houses with the deeds on Blockchain and that skateboard company that issues image NFTs of the boards you buy.

    •  jcg   ( @jcg@halubilo.social ) 
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      It’s all there is to NFTs. What you’re describing are systems outside of NFTs. It’s similar to saying there’s “more to this excel spreadsheet” because the company uses it as a ledger for all their accounting. When it comes to buying a house or a skateboard, you have a physical house or skateboard. You also likely did due diligence beforehand for the house, like having somebody look over the actual papers registered with the government to make sure the sale is legit, actually seeing the house, etc. The Blockchain part is completely invisible in those cases.

      But in this analogy, some people really do pay money just to have their name added to the spreadsheet. No house, no skateboard, just their name added to the ledger and a digital image that the ledger now says they own. But the thing about digital property ownership is in an actual sale of, for example, music rights, there is a governing body that enforces your ownership. No such thing for the NFT images people have been “buying”. And buying is in quotes because it’s crypto, there are no official receipts.