Current Events > I still can't understand why people buy NFTs.

(+) Yeah! (+)

So people are paying exorbitant amounts of cryptocurrency so they can "own" digital art, yet the same digital art can be viewed and tangibly saved/archived by literally anyone, free of charge.

Additionally, so many NFTs are floating around and so many people are purchasing them that there's not even a sense of bragging rights as nobody knows/cares who's buying them.

What's the value?

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Yeah i don't get it either. The entire way the internet operates would have to change for NFTs to ever be worth anything. The hilarious thing is if you want to purchase an NFT you cannot pay cash or check or with a credit card, you have to pay for it with crypto which just goes to show how useless blockchain is. You'd literally need to go to an exchange, purchase crypto, then pay in crypto for your useless digital asset which you could have just took a screen recording of...

Not that NFT's aren't ridiculously overvalued, but it isn't a hard concept to imagine that some would have value. The idea of ownership is generally worth something even if you can't control publishing.

You can Google the Mona Lisa and see it, it is still worth a bunch. you can download digital versions of games, but the original carts can command a premium. Yes, NFT's jump that bridge from a physical thing you can touch to something incorporeal, but that doesn't mean the idea of owning something renowned wouldn't have desirability even if the ownership doesn't grant anything beyond that.

In 20 years, those original ape NFTs could be worth a fortune. They could also be worth very little, like the Princess Diana beanie baby. We just don't know. These are highly speculative assets. I wouldn't completely dismiss them, though.

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realnifty1 posted...

You can Google the Mona Lisa and see it, it is still worth a bunch. you can download digital versions of games, but the original carts can command a premium. Yes, NFT's jump that bridge from a physical thing you can touch to something incorporeal, but that doesn't mean the idea of owning something renowned wouldn't have desirability even if the ownership doesn't grant anything beyond that.

I don't understand what the ownership aspect of a digital NFT is. That would be like being the first person to download an AAA game on Steam and declare yourself the owner, meanwhile millions of people are playing the game.

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It's always people who have more money than they know what to do with. I guess if I was sitting on $100 million in Bitcoin I'd yeet a couple of mil into a drawing of a monkey too.

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Very few people actually "believe" in NFTs which is why the conversation around them is all about how much they were purchased for, resold for, etc. Most people who are into them are into them because they think they can flip them (either in the short term or that in the long term people will accept that their NFT is worthwhile and they'll be able to profit off of being in early).

realnifty1 posted...

You can Google the Mona Lisa and see it, it is still worth a bunch. you can download digital versions of games, but the original carts can command a premium. Yes, NFT's jump that bridge from a physical thing you can touch to something incorporeal, but that doesn't mean the idea of owning something renowned wouldn't have desirability even if the ownership doesn't grant anything beyond that.

One of the fundamental problems with NFTs isn't the ownership aspect but rather that unlike the actual Mona Lisa, there's no actual central authority on who "owns" an NFT in any practical terms. I could take a drawing that someone here made and put it on an NFT marketplace and the person who made it could put the same thing up on a different marketplace. The cryptography part of cryptocurrency can do all it wants to say "The digital item that Anteaterking created is owned by this person" but that's external to "Anteaterking actually has any legal rights to the item to sell it in the first place".

Unlike a physical good where outside of someone tricking me into buying a forgery, it doesn't matter if anyone "believes" I own the Mona Lisa if I physically possess it.

If e.g. the US government ran an NFT marketplace where the military might of the US guaranteed the digital ownership, that could work, but that centralized nature would defeat part of the purpose of it as an NFT.

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Pyramid scheme destroying the environment

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Ysmir posted...

Pyramid scheme destroying the environment

this

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You know it's a scam when the furry community doesn't even touch it.

It's for the money they can somehow make through whatever convoluted setup is currently in place, and money laundering. I don't think anyone actually thinks they really own something at this point. That'll change in the future if games start implementing them, which seems like a sad, unavoidable future at this point.

It's stupid to me.

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Who says unregulated currencies are problematic?!

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nfts boil down to verifiable drm on public compute infrastructure

i understand the utility of nft technology, but i really don't get the appeal of the speculation bubble revolving around it

probably just another manifestation of the hyperconsumerist zero interest rate clown economy we have going on

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NFTs look like a money laundering scheme all dressed up in crypto the more I read into it.

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What I don't understand is why pretty much all of the NFTs I see people spending so much money on are CRAPPY art. I'm sure some NFTs are good looking but 99% of them seem like crappy garbage you'd find when you press "see a random pic" on deviantart.