Maybe I could clarify my question. Are they not just a dumb techno fad?
Are they not just a dumb techno fad?
I would say no, because they have definite utility.
As a trivial example: Imagine you are a poker player. Right now your experience is basically:
- Go to site
- Make account
- Enter payment details
- Buy chips
- Play
With an NFT representing a "poker account" you could prove who you are anonymously AND have your "pot" of chips be represented in a platform (poker game client/website) neutral fashion, so that going to a new poker platform/client would instead be:
- Connect your poker account address
- Play
Instead of having to give out your credit card to every single site in existence.
The point is that even though people are using it for incredibly stupid shit it still has uses that aren't stupid and can confer a lot of convenience to the user.
Now that’s an explanation. Thanks. I’m a frigging Luddite when it comes to crypto.
All good. It's not readily apparent due to the way people explain what it is based on how they're using it in the mainstream normie fashion.
Also my example maybe isn't the best because the non-fungible portion of the NFT in that scenario would be more useful for holding a unique ID (so for instance if you signed your messages with the username someguy123 on a platform using a given public key, people would know you are that particular someguy123 that wins a lot or whatever, vs some one using the same name (you could also theoretically enforce uniqueness of the names)) and then you'd have fungible tokens, i.e., regular crypto coins, as the poker chips. Though you could have it so the ID was linked to a certain fungible token address (and optionally have the ability to change that).
For a use case that I think is really nice but currently doesn't have a decentralized file transfer service to make it actually make sense, a good example is ebook files. If you're like me you read a lot and I personally pirate most ebooks because unlike regular books they hold zero utility for me after reading them (real physical books I can both resell and have look nice on my shelf for guests or whatever), and I would absolutely pay for them if I could resell them, but right now without something like NFTs there's no way for authors or publishers to do that in a way that doesn't invite piracy anyway.
That's pretty similar to the image use case that all these newbs use it for but I think makes a lot more sense because a book actually makes sense to resell, AND you could theoretically build into the selling contract that some portion of the second-hand sale go back to the author.
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