I am not interested in collectibles, I am talking about something much more interesting and practical.
But to entirely dismiss the category because you are only privy to slow & expensive implementations or trivial use cases is like saying no one will fly across the Atlantic or be able to transport heavy goods because the Wright Flyer can barely do 30mph.
There is a fundamental technology here that goes beyond trivial collectibles. If you need examples just ask rather than throw the baby out with the bath water.
The press release was the first one that came up in my search that explained things clearly enough for the uninitiated. There are many other articles elsewhere covering these things if you care to look.
This is just one clip but the point is, referring back to the OP, the idea that NFTs have failed, that they are useless, that it’s just a load of bullshit is just another way of saying you have a very narrow understanding of tokenisation in the main.
- The instantaneous transfer of value between two parties, without an intermediary.
- The ability to publicly and immediately prove ownership (chain of provenance) to a third party.
- Multi-signatories, the ability for one or more parties to have joint cryptographic ownership over the token. For a pre-defined number of those owners (majority, 2 of 5, all members etc) to be able revoke, change, transfer the token as required, again without an intermediary.
"How tokenisation could benefit investors
The benefits of tokenisation extend to large investors as well, providing increased liquidity and the potential for additional value through asset fractionalisation.
In this way, we can take a US$100 million private equity asset, tokenise it, and turn it into 100 million US$1 tokens. These tokens can then be listed on a regulated digital securities exchange to trade on a secondary market. By doing this, the minimum investment is now affordable to the smallest investor, while the secondary market creates liquidity."
I too am old. I hear you. But just because you could do those things back then doesn't prove your point. Businesses took the large part of the 90s, at the very least, to really get on board with those technologies. And it wasn't though lack of desire - a lot of other factors need to come together to make the web viable in the mainstream (broadband, browser standards, TLS, countless components). None of which happened overnight.
Reading all the comments here, the sentiment over NFTs is clearly reductionist ("just monkey JPGs") and based on a very limited understanding of the fundamental benefits of the technology. Most of the real world benefits are overshadowed by this kind of sentiment and shows a clear lack of knowledge and research from the wider community.
If you truly are technically literate, you'll know the mainstream view of any nascent technology is always very weak and sensationalist (the headline in the OP a good example). If you were well versed in NFTs and DLT technology you'll know there is new ground being broken here. Your last sentence tells me that you are not well informed on the subject. If you were, you would not be saying such things and understand the computer science behind the core concepts.
So yes, whilst the NFT space is largely full of scams and is apparently useless, that doesn't mean there isn't a viable technology at play which has major benefits in multiple industries.
Those original internet services didn't solve problems for the vast majority of business (or people) immediately! The technology was solid from the start, but the adoption curve was far, far slower than you suggest. By a long shot.
The difference with NFTs is the concept is sound - trusted, immutable transactions recorded on a public ledger without a third-party intermediary. The difficult part is making it work efficiently and securely. Until very recently NFTs have been slow and expensive (in cost and energy) to transact. The most visible use cases being trivial (proof of ownership of JPGs). But the answer to those technical limitations IS already here and getting better, speed and costs are not a problem if you stop referring to Bitcoin and Ethereum.
The problem is, most people dismiss the entire venture (tokenisation and the larger benefits of public DLTs) because they are only looking at the mainstream projects and agreeing with lazy journalism to have their biases validated.
Indeed! On that note, if Douglas Adams were still alive he’d have cleared this entire situation up years ago. And it’s NOT that NFTs are themselves worthless…
Reading below it’s clearly a perception problem.
The fundamental concept of NFTs is profoundly useful. The fact a trivial use case (to represent ownership of JPGs) is all anyone here knows or talks about is the real problem.