Comment by Bjornir@programming.dev on A key feature of NFTs has completely broken / Web3 was supposed to make sure the original artist always got paid. Not so much anymore.

There are uses for NFT, but it is clearly not what they are famous for.

NFT aren’t pictures of monke, they are a way to authenticate something in a decentralised way, so no trust in another entity needed. The picture isn’t the NFT, and that is why you can just right click-copy it.

You can’t however just copy the NFT, the actual token. Having a token that’s verifiably owned by someone is useful for certain things. It’s like a certificate of authenticity, but digital.

Digital certificates has already existed for half a century. There’s nothing new. A certificate doesn’t get any more legitimate just because it’s recorded on a blockchain.

Yes but NFTs are held in trust by you, not a 3rd party business. If you want to sell your NFT to a friend you can do that without brokering the exchange through a middleman who can/will charge a cut

Don’t blockchain brokers charge a transaction fee?

How you transact the ownership of NFTs is a different story. I’m reacting to the claim that NFT is “like a certificate of authenticity, but digital”, which is not unique to NFTs at all.

This claim is also often misunderstood, since the NFT can only verify the authenticity of the certificate itself, not the art/asset it’s pointing to.

I can easily create an NFT of Mona Lisa. The blockchain will see no problem with it at all. Heck, I can create 1000 NFTs of Mona Lisa if I want.

Rookie numbers, I can create billions

This is still solved by certificates, I can make my own self signed certificate that says it me and sign whatever I want. The only thing that crypto “solves” is over the wire man in the middle attacks, which aren’t even really a problem in the modern internet

How do I know you haven’t made 10 copies of that same certificate and sold 9 to other people?

If it was an NFT I could see you issued 9 other copies of it before I was approached with the sale. Any other way I either have to place blind trust in you or rely on a 3rd party to handle the issuance/transaction

I could just use 10 different URLs for each NFT. All pointing to the same image. I can also use 10 different wallets to obfuscate it more. For that matter, I can use different blockchains as well.

Now it’s 10 completely different NFTs pointing to the same image. To verify there are no duplicates, you need to check every NFT in existence (across all blockchains in existence).

Why are people so obsessed with bringing scarcity back on the internet

Why would I want that, I’m not selling you anything

This sounds completely logical, until you realize it’s for selling JPGs and expecting them to only exist in that one buyer’s hands.

There’s basically 3 ways to verify a certificate.

TOFU - trust on first use - save the certificate print first access and remember it so you know if it gets changed
WoT - web of trust - other certificate holders verify the certificate and hopefully you find a chain to someone you trust.
Central authority - the most popular. A central entity verifies and goes good for the identity.

In all three you need to trust someone, and ask three are a pain to transfer something to new owner.

NFT gives a fundamentally new option here, that’s transferable and doesn’t require trust. That it’s been used for and gotten known for monkey scams is a shame.

And how do you verify that the NFT can be trusted? With any of the 3 methods you mentioned!

Blockchain doesn’t circumvent this need of trust.

The thing blockchain eliminates is the need of a timestamp authority when doing transactions. Satoshi even called his invention “distributed timestamp server” before people started to call it blockchain. You don’t need timestamps when verifying the authenticity of an NFT.

Not really, signatures on blockchains is just another TOFU or WoT variant, because how do you know the original token is the legit thing you wanted in the first place? It’s only after you have identified it that the existence of the blockchain becomes relevant in that it can track ownership without central authority.

Are there any practical (non-theoretical) uses for NFTs that couldn’t be done ~~otherwise~~ better without them though?

Edited to make it easier for NFTs to show their worth.

insert word jumble about unrealistic scenarios made up in my basement while stoned

https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/nft-use-cases/

It is just a tool, it’s what you do with it that gives its worth. Monkey pictures… Well that’s not worth anything

These are the same promises the emergence of the blockchain gave us. We’re now nearly a decade later, and the most useful application has been get-rich-quick schemes. Yet, all these listed applications are still not in use, and/or better than their non-blockchain counterparts.

Hell, if you know why electronic voting is not, and will never be a good idea, you definitely wouldn’t want them as an NFT.

How you can really know electronic voting is a bad idea - all the people who would be the ones to be hired and paid a ton to build and implement it, cryptographers and infosec experts, are the same people who loudly oppose it.

There are so many different problems;

Assuming you manage to build the perfect system, can you actually explain it to people? If you put a prospective voter in front of the real deal, a secure electronic voting machine, and put a fake replica next to it, will ANYBODY EVER succeed in telling them apart? Or will you be forced to continuously audit the hardware from production to shipment to use, and somehow still respect voters’ privacy as they use the machine?

And how can you be confident your implementation is secure? You can to prove the algorithms are correct, that the implementation is correct, that the implementation behaves as end users (voters) expect, and that even the hardware is flawless (both in terms of logic and protection against manipulation).

How do you ensure people only vote once, yet also protect their privacy, but ALSO prove to them their vote was really counted? Individual keypairs? How do you distribute and protect them? Physical ID cards? What if they get stolen (in significant enough numbers)? What if a significant fraction of the population won’t use the new system, do you still run old school voting and combine the results?

How do you give somebody a receipt they can understand without enabling coercion to try to force people to vote a certain way?

Yeah, that about sums it up.

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Basically anything that is currently traded on any digital or quasi-digital exchange but relies ultimately on a paper/manual backend.

Can you give a real life example of that being applied?

There is a lot of talk, for example, in the sustainability space where things like emissions allowances, carbon offsets, etc. are traded the old fashioned way where a digital ledger using NFTs would be both instantaneous and transparent/easily auditable.

But the most obvious example is security exchanges, e.g. stocks, bonds, etc. (which would be a massive threat to the existing financial institutions) because it could allow for instantaneous settlement and fully transparent markets.

HUGE HOWEVER, not all NFT systems would be equally useful for that kind of thing. What we saw with FTX, for example, was a blockchain exchange for tokenized securities where the blockchain aspects served no real useful purpose - it was a centralized, controlled, opaque use case. The distributed ledger model (which I think casual observers of blockchain assume all blockchain systems are) can correct for those failures. I personally think part of what made the FTX story so big was a combination of moves by major financial market players to get out in front of tokenization of securities by created the existing system again but with a blockchain coat of paint on top that then failed under its own scam at lightning speed which then gave the ammo to a whole “blockchain a scam, NFT an even bigger scam” narrative. They are just software utilities that can be used effectively or not just like any others.

Whenever I see someone identify a jpeg as an NFT, or put SBF’s face on a news story about it, I think about how successful the astroturfing of these narratives has been.

So… Just theoretical applications so far?

There are tons of people (actual serious people, not like SBF) working in this space and building these things now, so they are definitely more than theoretical, but they are not at the mass adoption stage.

And no offense, but this response has echoes of people saying federation would never work. But it’s just a different utility to accomplish similar goals to centralized forums. And when the old-fashioned, centralized alternatives really start to self-destruct because of their inherent flaws, the merits of the decentralized version become more obvious.

I’m actually pretty shocked that Lemmy/the Fediverse beats the same tired old drums about NFTs (ape jpegs being the most obvious), since they are red herring arguments. A tokenized jpeg has no value because a jpeg has no value. A tokenized security has the value of the underlying security. The token is just there to eliminate the need for accountants since the open ledger shows its work and the entire chain of custody.

But the same could be said for almost anything, for instance a car’s engine is non-theoretical but could be otherwise done with a horse instead. I will still prefer the more advanced technology, but of course you do you

You’re right. I’ve edited my question to make it easier for NFTs to qualify. After all, cars do the same as horses, but a whole lot better.

So what is a practical application of NFTs that, now that it’s implemented, makes someone’s life so much better?

No, automobiles and mass transit were a massive innovation that drastically changed everyone’s way of life. Look at the current state of global logistics. You can essentially order any fruit from home and have it fresh at your doorstep at any time of year. You can’t do that without engines.

This still works because cars ruined Western society in the guise of “advancement”, so that’s cool

NFTs have never once not been very blatant fraud.

NFT aren’t monkey pictures.

I know what they are. They’re a “solution” to a problem that doesn’t exist and very probably never will exist.

They have never once been used for anything even neutral. Every single case has been outright malicious.

It’s called a database.

I reckon the meeting about the tokens went something like “okay, how can we monetise this?”, “Okay hear me out here… monkeys!.. digital monkeys!”

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A key feature of NFTs has completely broken / Web3 was supposed to make sure the original artist always got paid. Not so much anymore.(www.theverge.com)

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