NFT is scary because people don’t know what it means. It is not supposed to be a means of selling jpegs; it is supposed to be a digital untamperable proof of ownership for various uses.
It’s very tamperable. It lacks common safety features like 2FA. Hacks are common and stolen NFTs can not be recovered.
It doesn’t provide any evidence of ownership, much less proof. Anyone can mint NFTs without providing any evidence of ownership or anything. There is no legal requirement that ownership of anything is transferred along with an NFT.
There isn’t just one single way of coding an NFT, you’re talking about an entire class of application here. You can indeed add all sorts of safety features if you want to.
Saying “anyone can mint NFTs” shows a misunderstanding of the specific application we’re discussing here. Not just anyone can mint an ENS name, specifically, which is what we’re talking about. ENS names are minted by the ENS contract, so they can be guaranteed unique. An ENS name isn’t “representing” anything other than the information contained within it, so there are no legal issues whatsoever. If you own the ENS name NFT then that’s all that you need to worry about, it has no other effect or implication other than that.
This is what I was talking about when I mentioned the “scarlet letters NFT”. People have an enormous prejudice about the technology and leap to incorrect assumptions about its uses based on those prejudices.
I had really hoped that the video game industry would use its royalty function to give developers a cut of the secondary market. It would naturally incentivize them to slow down their development cycle, and make games that stand the test of time. Selling games with this technology could have been a virtuous cycle of developers having a vested interest in their work beyond simply selling DLC.
Well, hominids made hand axes for countless aeons without ever really using them. I guess I shouldn’t act too shocked.
No competent engineer would use NFTs for the purpose. It’s inconvenient, slow and ridiculously expensive. No one uses the “technology” because it’s rubbish.
Implementing such a feature is trivial. Steam has a marketplace. They don’t let you sell used games because the developers don’t want it.
It’s glorified receipts that are billed as far more secure than they actually are looking for a problem to solve. The entire usage is people treating it like a casino, just like cryptocurrency. I guarantee you “small” artists and such, the people that are always paraded around as the beneficiaries, are not using it in any appreciable number. Those that tried simply lost some money in the endless sea of “get rich quick” schemes they were sadly duped into participating in. Crypto bros just decided to target creatives, as if they need to be victimized more.
NFT’s are not helping people in any appreciable number. It’s just another relationship of people getting rich on the backs of a bunch of bag holders sold a false promise.
I am describing a usage that is explicitly not like that. A usage that has nothing to do with art. The concept of “NFT” is not somehow inextricably tied to spending ridiculous amounts of money on pictures of apes, it’s a general technology.
This is a perfect illustration of the problem here. People are lamenting about difficult it is to come up with a truly decentralized method of owning domain names that can’t be commandeered by authorities or big business, a system to do exactly that already exists, but it’s based on a technology that people have such an extreme prejudice about that they’d rather downvote anyone who tries to explain it and go back to helplessly lamenting.
What is the NFT component offering that I don’t get from the myriad of other excellent DNS services (many of which are FLOSS) that grant me reliable DNS over HTTPS/other privacy elements? What is the NFT part accomplishing that wasn’t being done prior?
Full decentralization and censorship resistance. In the case of DNS services there’s still an organization of some kind that you’re having to trust to not mismanage your registration. Both now in their current form and in any future form the organization may take.
ENS, on the other hand, is just a smart contract running on Ethereum. Its behaviour is programmed, not dependent on any human decision making. To censor it you’d need to block Ethereum as a whole.
How does your FLOSS software solve the Byzantine Generals problem? If two different people want to use the same domain name, how is it determined who gets it? These are the things that blockchains contribute a solution to.
It’s not enough that the software that everything’s running on is free/libre. Determining who gets a scarce resource (unique names) is the real difficulty here.
NFT is scary because people don’t know what it means. It is not supposed to be a means of selling jpegs; it is supposed to be a digital untamperable proof of ownership for various uses.
It’s not.
It’s very tamperable. It lacks common safety features like 2FA. Hacks are common and stolen NFTs can not be recovered.
It doesn’t provide any evidence of ownership, much less proof. Anyone can mint NFTs without providing any evidence of ownership or anything. There is no legal requirement that ownership of anything is transferred along with an NFT.
There isn’t just one single way of coding an NFT, you’re talking about an entire class of application here. You can indeed add all sorts of safety features if you want to.
Saying “anyone can mint NFTs” shows a misunderstanding of the specific application we’re discussing here. Not just anyone can mint an ENS name, specifically, which is what we’re talking about. ENS names are minted by the ENS contract, so they can be guaranteed unique. An ENS name isn’t “representing” anything other than the information contained within it, so there are no legal issues whatsoever. If you own the ENS name NFT then that’s all that you need to worry about, it has no other effect or implication other than that.
This is what I was talking about when I mentioned the “scarlet letters NFT”. People have an enormous prejudice about the technology and leap to incorrect assumptions about its uses based on those prejudices.
I can’t believe in 2024 we still see NFT advocates. It was and continues to be a colossal waste of time and resources.
It was a waste of time and resources for a particular application, yes. But the basic technology is useful for many applications.
Those “bored ape” NFTs were for jpeg images, do you also think that the jpeg algorithm was a colossal waste of time and resources?
I had really hoped that the video game industry would use its royalty function to give developers a cut of the secondary market. It would naturally incentivize them to slow down their development cycle, and make games that stand the test of time. Selling games with this technology could have been a virtuous cycle of developers having a vested interest in their work beyond simply selling DLC.
Well, hominids made hand axes for countless aeons without ever really using them. I guess I shouldn’t act too shocked.
No competent engineer would use NFTs for the purpose. It’s inconvenient, slow and ridiculously expensive. No one uses the “technology” because it’s rubbish.
Implementing such a feature is trivial. Steam has a marketplace. They don’t let you sell used games because the developers don’t want it.
It’s glorified receipts that are billed as far more secure than they actually are looking for a problem to solve. The entire usage is people treating it like a casino, just like cryptocurrency. I guarantee you “small” artists and such, the people that are always paraded around as the beneficiaries, are not using it in any appreciable number. Those that tried simply lost some money in the endless sea of “get rich quick” schemes they were sadly duped into participating in. Crypto bros just decided to target creatives, as if they need to be victimized more.
NFT’s are not helping people in any appreciable number. It’s just another relationship of people getting rich on the backs of a bunch of bag holders sold a false promise.
I am describing a usage that is explicitly not like that. A usage that has nothing to do with art. The concept of “NFT” is not somehow inextricably tied to spending ridiculous amounts of money on pictures of apes, it’s a general technology.
This is a perfect illustration of the problem here. People are lamenting about difficult it is to come up with a truly decentralized method of owning domain names that can’t be commandeered by authorities or big business, a system to do exactly that already exists, but it’s based on a technology that people have such an extreme prejudice about that they’d rather downvote anyone who tries to explain it and go back to helplessly lamenting.
Then please show us a valid usage currently occurring.
I just did. The ENS system, a decentralized replacement for DNS. That’s what started this subthread.
What is the NFT component offering that I don’t get from the myriad of other excellent DNS services (many of which are FLOSS) that grant me reliable DNS over HTTPS/other privacy elements? What is the NFT part accomplishing that wasn’t being done prior?
Full decentralization and censorship resistance. In the case of DNS services there’s still an organization of some kind that you’re having to trust to not mismanage your registration. Both now in their current form and in any future form the organization may take.
ENS, on the other hand, is just a smart contract running on Ethereum. Its behaviour is programmed, not dependent on any human decision making. To censor it you’d need to block Ethereum as a whole.
FLOSS software is not dependent on trusting an organization. That’s a significant part of the appeal.
What else?
How does your FLOSS software solve the Byzantine Generals problem? If two different people want to use the same domain name, how is it determined who gets it? These are the things that blockchains contribute a solution to.
It’s not enough that the software that everything’s running on is free/libre. Determining who gets a scarce resource (unique names) is the real difficulty here.
So then nothing related to NFTs at all but instead a specific application of a specific blockchain…
An ENS name is represented by a token that follows the ERC-721 standard. It is literally an NFT.